John Quiggin offers in a footnote to a post on the end of "the Arab exception" another reason why the crowing from supporters of the Iraq War eager to take credit for popular upheavals in the Middle East is absurd:
There was a shadow debate on this topic under the Bush Administration, which issued a lot of pro-democracy rhetoric as part of its case for . In practice, however, the Bushies continued to rely on friendly dictatorships in the Arab world (and beyond, in Pakistan and the former Soviet Union) as leading allies in the Global War on Terror. For these allies, token gestures towards democracy were encouraged, provided there was no possibility that they would actually give rise to governments responsive to popular opinion. The reasoning behind the Iraq war embodied yet another version of the exception, namely the idea that democracy would never arise from the ‘Arab street’. Instead, democracy had to be exported by armed US missionaries, with the happy side-effect of ensuring that the grateful beneficiaries would elect a pro-US government.
Supporters of the war in Iraq have, subtly and not so subtly intimated that anti-Arab racism is at the root of opposition to invading Iraq, not long-since validated concerns about the wisdom of trying to "export" democracy at the barrel of a gun, the nonexistent links between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda, and the absence of WMD and therefore an imminent threat justifying an invasion. But the belief that the only way that Arab nations would evolve into democracies was through armed intervention from enlightened Westerners is its own kind of noxious paternalism.
