For some on the right, this may be no big deal--just being realistic. They are wrong but it is hardly out of character. But I do find it odd that the left thinks this way too--how very not liberal to champion despotism just because our President opposes despotism in Moslem countries. Or to think Moslems incapable of or "not ready" for democracy.
I think the key is getting the elections to keep going as part of a respect for rule of law. Then, even if a party takes power which has positions you don't like, you know the process will give you another chance in some number of years. I don't worry so much about single elections in this light though I can be disappointed by specific short-term results.
And democracy promotion isn't really so idealistic and naive as it is the last choice. Far from being a "rush to vote" our policy has evolved after past failures to keep threats from the Moslem world from reaching us. Victor Hanson writes:
The Middle East's long-term health is, thus, critical to the security of the West. True, it is easy now to call the supporters of democracy in the Middle East naive -- given the savagery in Iraq, Lebanon and Afghanistan; the elected terrorists on the West Bank; and the deeply entrenched tribalism, fundamentalism and gender apartheid that thwarts liberal change so violently.
But a word of caution: We long tried almost everything else. Accepting dictators on their own terms did not bring stability, but constant war, oil embargoes and terrorism from the 1960s onward. Replying to two decades of terrorist attacks, from the Iranian hostage taking in 1979 to the attack on the USS Cole in 2000, with indictments and a few cruise missiles only emboldened the jihadists. And staging coups or propping up authoritarians in Iran or the Gulf simply radicalized the Middle East.
In truth, fostering democracy in Afghanistan and Iraq was not our first, but last choice. It was not a good option, only a bad one when the other alternatives had proven far worse. What the U.S. is trying to do in the Middle East is costly, easily made fun of and unappreciated. But constitutional government is one course that might someday free Middle Easterners from kidnappings, suicide bombers and dictators in sunglasses.
That's in our interest and theirs alike.
Really, just accepting continuous low level casualties perhaps punctuated by a really bad nuclear blast one day or destroying the Moslem world are the only choices we have left other than democratization. And while we can't do this everywhere all at once--as in Saudi Arabia where the stakes of oil are too high to mess with too much--we can push elsewhere to support the process and allow the people to have the final say on who governms them as we are trying to do in Venezuela.
We should do this in Egypt especially, where our financial leverage due to massive aid should be used to open up Egypt. It is a large country without oil that has traditionally challenged Iraq for leadership in the Arab owrld. Wouldn't it be good if the competition was between two democracies? In the short run, the extremists may gain clout, but there will still be non-extremists to resist them. The longer ballots are delayed the more likely bullets will bring those extremists to power fully where they will certainly not allow their hard bloody victory to be undone with ballots.
The base of the pyramid is where we need to be in Egypt.
