INDCJournal: Signs of Regional Change

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December 19, 2005

Signs of Regional Change

Posted by Bill

Jackson Diehl reviews the to-date results of the Wolfowitz proposition:

Though Iraq has now held the freest election in Arab history, conventional wisdom in Washington and the Middle East still dismisses the Bush administration's hope that its military intervention will catalyze democratic change around the region. A recent survey by Brookings Institution scholar Shibley Telhami found that 58 percent of Arabs outside Iraq said the war had produced less rather than more democracy. In the United States, a Pew poll released last month showed that only 34 percent of Americans believed Middle East democratization would happen.
That's one of the perverse effects of the war: Amid all the noise of suicide bombings, talk of a quagmire for U.S. troops and a sectarian conflict that could lead to Iraq's disintegration, most people haven't noticed that in the rest of the Arab Middle East, the political momentum of the past year has been . . . distinctly democratic.

Read the rest.

Posted by Bill at December 19, 2005 02:09 PM | TrackBack (0)

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Comments

Huh?
""There's enough going in the right direction . . . that I am one of those who believes that the intervention in Iraq will be good for democracy in the region in the middle term," is the way Mark Malloch Brown, the witty chief of staff to U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan, puts it. "I'm just not sure it will be good for democracy in Iraq.""

Because democracy was going so well in Iraq before our intervention.

Posted by: rbj at December 19, 2005 03:31 PM

yeah, I found that statement to be rather silly.

Posted by: Bill from INDC at December 19, 2005 03:41 PM

58 percent of Arabs outside Iraq said the war had produced less rather than more democracy

How can there be less than none in the Middle East prior to the war in Iraq?

Posted by: babs at December 20, 2005 12:03 PM

Huh?
>""There's enough going in the right direction . . . that I am one of those who believes that the intervention in Iraq will be good for democracy in the region in the middle term," is the way Mark Malloch Brown, the witty chief of staff to U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan, puts it. "I'm just not sure it will be good for democracy in Iraq.""
I do not agree. Go to http://www.apartments.waw.pl

Posted by: apartments warsaw at October 13, 2006 07:51 AM