The crude, full-on racist rendition of this is: Arabs aren’t capable of democracy. They are too backward, too corrupt, too immersed in blood-drenched tribal loyalties and too imbued with theocratic inclinations to be capable of establishing the mature, rational institutions on which true democracy depends. The most that we can hope for is that the present chaotic interlude will end with another (hopefully fairly benign) tyranny replacing the current one, with which we will be able to do business. Oddly, the proponents of this patronising, colonialist view of the Middle East are often the very people who accused the American and British governments of being neo-imperialists (or “economic imperialists”) when they were acting on the doctrine of liberal interventionism… Maybe the people who argue this way are just infuriated by the apparent vindication of the neo-con case. (Gosh, the most unlikely countries actually do hunger for freedom.) But you have to wonder, really, whether they are in favour of democracy at all, at least for the Middle East: whether they aren’t, in fact, simply bare-faced, cynical exploiters of the Arab world who want to keep its peoples under convenient control at any cost for the sake of Western investment (and that precious oil).... Indeed, we have so far accepted the universality of the right to basic freedoms that they are built into what we call “international law”, which seeks to protect the persecuted and the oppressed. The founding principles of the UN and the protocols of the post-war global conventions implicitly assert that democratic values are the ideal to which all nations should strive. To embrace freedom is to join the modern world. So now we must decide: will we give active help to those Arab peoples who want to engage in that long, uneasy process, or are we content to consign them to the Middle Ages? Full comment here