Kandahar said:
OK, but democracy isn't the only alternative to stability. Why not encourage more pro-American regimes? Islamic radicalism isn't a product of the status quo, it's a product of certain leadership. Saddam Hussein, Muommar Qadaffi, Hosni Mubarak, Bashar Assad, Yasser Arafat, and Pervez Musharraf were able to keep their Islamist radicals at bay (with varying degrees of success).
Find one in the Middle East. Our pro-American regimes of the past in the Middle East have turned out to be simple dictators. I will defend America to my last drop of living blood, but I will look reality in the face. The Middle East is decayed and people like Bin Laden, Hussein, Qudaffi, Mubarak, Arafat, Musharraf, and Ahmadinejad are symptoms.
The Cold War deformed American strategic thought and our applied values beyond recognition. From the amoral defender of Europe's rotten empires, we descended to an immoral propping up of every soulless dictator who preferred our payments to those offered by Moscow. We utterly rejected our professed values, consistently struggling against genuine national liberation movements because we saw the hand of Moscow wherever a poor man reached out for food or asked for dignity. At our worst in the Middle East, we unreservedly supported--or enthroned--medieval despots who suppressed popular liberalization efforts, thus driving moderate dissidents into the arms of fanatics. From our diplomatic personnel held hostage in Iran a generation ago, to the 11 September 2001 terrorist attack on the United States, we have suffered for our support of repressive, "stable" regimes that radicalized their own impoverished citizens. In the interests of stability, we looked the other way while secret police tortured and shabby armies massacred their own people, from Iran to Guatemala. (The ousting of Saddam was an act in defiance against that "Old Europe" mentality of maintining stability above all else.)
Were we only to apply our own professed ideals where it is rational and possible to do so, we would, indeed, find our way to a better, safer world in time. But we must stop trying to arrest the decomposition of empire's legacy. We are in a period of unprecedented and inevitable global change, and we must learn to accommodate and to help shape local changes constructively. But we cannot prevent the future from arriving.
Democracy is a highly evolved mechanism for maintaining the society we have achieved, but it is not a tool for creating a society worth maintaining. Without good and respected laws, a commitment to essential human rights, and the willingness to honor differences of birth and confession, democracy is just a con game for bullies. Democracy as we know it also may require a certain level of popular affluence. But democracy alone will not bring affluence. Weak, new governments, or those transforming themselves, need training wheels on the bicycle of state, and we try to insist instead that every government should jump on a Harley (their are lessons to be learned from that most endangered state, Pakistan, that should be applied to Iraq). Far from building trust, democracy may shatter the remaining social bonds of weak or brutalized societies, dividing survivors into ethnic or religious factions. The over-hasty imposition of democracy can lead directly to a degeneration in the respect for human rights. Where citizens have not learned to value their collective interests, democracy intensifies ethnic and religious polarization. Democracy must be earned and learned. It cannot be decreed from without.