One of the dumber arguments conservatives who did not greet the popular uprisings in the Middle East with the fear that the Muslim Brotherhood would take over and establish a caliphate in Western Europe were making was the notion that they "proved Bush was right" about Islam and Democracy. Here's Jennifer Rubin's version:
But more seriously, had democracy failed in Iraq, had the country descended into chaos, and had Iraqis laboring for a secular, democratic Muslim country been killed and exiled, do we imagine this would have been good for the prospects of democracy elsewhere?
As Daniel Larison pointed out at the time, those things did happen, and according to a RAND study flagged by Matt Duss last year, "Iraq's instability has become a convenient scarecrow neighboring regimes can use to delay political reform by asserting that democratization inevitably leads to insecurity."
Now the original premise of the argument "Bush showed the Arabs they weren't savages after all," is inherently patronizing toward the people facing down authoritarian regimes all over the Middle East. The notion that invading Iraq was about confirming an abstract hypothesis about Islam and democracy rather than confronting an "imminent danger" of WMDs is ridiculous as well. But the idea that Iraqi democracy is a North Star activists all over the region are seeking to emulate crosses a new threshold of absurdity with the recent eruption of protests in Iraq, and the violence with which they're being put down:
The "day of rage", organised like others in the Middle East on social networking websites, spread across the country, with bloody consequences. Around a dozen people were killed in clashes between police and protesters in Mosul, Kirkuk, Fallujah and even near the usually peaceful Kurdish city of Sulimaniyah. A number of government buildings went up in flames, and various politicians stepped down, notably the governor of the oil-rich southern city of Basra.
Mr Maliki released a conciliatory statement promising to look into the demands of the people. Protesters said they would be back on the streets soon. When demonstations began in Tunisia, ministers said Iraq was immune to such unrest because it was already a democracy. They may have underestimated Iraqi anger about their government. As one old man in Tahrir Square said, "we did vote for them, but they're gangsters."
For some reason, the Iraqi people don't seem to have gotten the message that their government is a beacon of freedom that the rest of the region is aspiring to.
