Teach Them to Elect Good Men

So when did "progressives" decide that Arabs are unable to appreciate or handle freedom and democracy? They're seriously one step away from calling them "wogs" and putting on a pith helmet.

Iraq and the Arab Spring have shown us that Arabs do indeed want freedom and democracy. Syrians are only the latest example of people willing to fight and die for it.

Western critics of democracy in Arab countries confuse the clear aspiration for freedom that Arabs show with the long process of achieving democracy with all it assumes (rule of law in all its aspects). Are we to condemn Arabs to despotism because they have no direct experience with democracy and liberty and have few clues how to really achieve them when they get the chance?

That's where we come in. Arabs want something better than autocracy and poverty. They know there are better ways to achieve it. They have lived in autocracy and they have seen the bankruptcy of Islamism. They have seen Iraqis fight through the worst that autocracies and jihadis could throw at them and start to build something better. We in the West who live in real democracy must help them build real democracy. That means more than elections that validate a dictatorship or simply change the cast of looters through legal methods. They need rule of law.

But perhaps the explanation for the progressives' lack of respect for the aspirations of the Arab Spring is that they have proven they have real gaps in their knowledge of rule of law and democracy. This year in Wisconsin where the Left launched a full-scale assault on rule of law was not the proudest moment in American democracy.

Maybe in time, Iraqis, Tunisian, Egyptians, Libyans, and Syrians will show us how it is done.

Or maybe they'll fail, in whole or in part. It is up to them. But they clearly want more than what they have and what too many in the West think they deserve. Denying them that recognition denies them their humanity.