I keep hearing this talk of democracy sweeping the middle east. Now I don't mean to be a cynic but since the spread of democracy has become the retroactive justification for the war in Iraq and since we know that we live in a time when the White House is perfectly comfortable with feeding pre-canned news stories to our compliant media, one would be somewhat naive to take this at face value. Despite the disdain Bush supporters hold for the sciences, I can't ignore my training long enough to forgo an insistence on being guiding by some sort of data. So let us try to compose a data set to support the thesis that "freedom is on the march" in the middle east.
First, of course, there are the ink-stained fingers of the Shiite and Kurdish Iraqis who went to the polls under dangerous circumstances. An objective reading of this event would be rather sobering. The Kurdish participation represents a long repressed nationalistic impulse that would have been expressed given any opportunity. The Shia participation was the direct result of a fatwa issued by Sistani. Indeed the elections themselves were only held at his insistence but then, who cares? They did happen didn't they?
The second data point? The election for a new leader of the Palastinian authority. Is this somehow revolutionary? Arafat died. Arafat was elected. When he died, they elected another guy? This is revolutionary?
The third data point? The opposition to Syria's presence in Lebanon, massively funded by the CIA with the billions we've been pouring into Iraq have flexed their muscles there and opened up that can of worms. Let freedom ring.
The fourth data point. Repressive regimes like Egypt and Saudi Arabia have agreed to cosmetic reforms to take the heat off of themselves.
And the whole thing has been wrapped up into pre-packaged puff pieces for the media to retroactively justify the slaughter in Iraq. We report. You decide.