The Next Crusade in the Holy Land

[A Black Falcon]

It took America 500 years to work from the first bits of democracy (the Magna Carta) to its own experiment in republican democracy... and the Middle East hasn't even started on that road, for the most part. You can't have functioning democracy when the people don't want a truly democratic government... or if you do, you get a democracy with very dangerous implications -- just look at Iran (putting aside the question of if President Ahmadinejad was actually elected or if it was rigged, a question we do not know the answer to). He at least has strong support and he well might have actually won the election... now he has little real power, the clerics have the actual power, but even so, just look at the kinds of things he says... even more radical and religiously inspired than Bush's statements, and that's saying something.

Anyway... it's a problem. Democracy in the Middle East? Sure... but don't expect those elections to elect people the West would accept! Not while the Middle Eastern people have not developed the respect for democratic values that England, and as a result America, slowly developed over the late middle ages and beyond (that cumulated in the American Revolution, a revolution more than anything else about the principle of wanting to be represented in your parliament, probably... (you could say "it was an argument about taxes", but that doesn't explain how the Americans still revolted even when the taxes were reduced to a minimal, irrelevant level. You need to look deeper at that point.).