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Jan 05, 2014 11:21 pm | Paul R. Pillar
The
multifaceted push by the George W. Bush to inject more democracy into
the Middle East—a set of policies sometimes grouped under the label of
the “Freedom Agenda”—has generated much debate about its effectiveness
that even several years of added perspective have not resolved. The
advent of the Arab spring three years ago led defenders of Bush's
policies to claim this phenomenon as a positive consequence of those
policies, while critics could still point to some glaring negative
consequences.An impediment to temperate discussion of this issue is how the biggest initiative not just of the Freedom of Agenda but of Bush's entire presidency—the attempt, known as the Iraq War, to inject democracy into the Middle East through the barrel of a gun—was such a blunder and debacle that it overshadows what Bush got right about the political ordering of the region. What he got right was more the diagnosis than the cure. The Middle East was—and still is, the Arab spring notwithstanding—more of a democratic desert than most other regions. And the paucity of channels in the Middle East for peacefully pursuing political objectives and acting on grievances can affect the United States, especially by providing a more fertile breeding ground for violent extremism.
read morehttp://nationalinterest.org/blog/paul-pillar/backhanded-democratization-the-middle-east-9669
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