A great point from M Simon here at Classical Values: the one country notably absent from the recent massive pro-democracy protests across the Mideast is... Iraq. Hmmm, why might that be? Oh right, they already have democracy. The protests in Iraq, by contrast, are Tea Party-like demonstrations against corruption, bad economic policies, and lack of transparency.
In fact, one can reasonably point to Iraq as the animating force for the pro-democracy movement. The violence in Iraq died down around 2008 and by 2009, we started seeing protests in Iran against the rigged elections there (they must have expecially galled Iranians, since millions of them travel to Najaf every year on Shia prilgrimage to a country that actually holds real elections).
As the years went on and Iraq continued having elections, protests, free press, and free speech and it became increasingly clear that the Iraqi democratic experiment was working, the natural empirical response of the people of the Mideast was to demand democracies of their own.
And so (much as happened in Iraq itself) when most had given up hope of success, the neocon dream of an Iraqi Model that would foster a wave of democratic reform across the Mideast has suddenly, dramatically taken wing.
Should this pro-democracy movement continue gaining strength and transforming the Mideast, it will become increasingly undeniable that our actions in Iraq constituted not just a strategic masterstroke but also a humanitarian boon of historic proportions.
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