Once the story about weapons of mass destruction proved hollow, Bush touted the invasion and occupation of Iraq as a first step in a flowering of democracy in the Middle East. Five years later, Iraq is not much more democratic than the autocracies that surround it. “Iraq,” The Times’ John Burns, who spent five years in Iraq,
wrote, “could scarcely have been less prepared than it was to embrace democracy, dependent as that is, everywhere, on a minimum of popular consent and trust. The harsh reality is that many Iraqis, at least by the time of the two elections held in 2005, had little zest for democracy, at least as Westerners understand it.”
It isn’t just in Iraq that the promise of democracy wilted before the Bush administration’s renewed enthusiasm for autocracy. The United States’ strongest allies in the Middle East—Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, Jordan, Egypt, Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco—are all authoritarian, one-party regimes that severely limit civil liberties and commit chronic human rights abuses.
