Middle Eastern Spring: Revolution is in the Air

Charles Krauthammer nails it again in his column today. In "The Road to Damascus," he analyzes the potential for democracy to take hold in the Middle East.

"Revolutions do not stand still. They either move forward or die. We are at the dawn of a glorious, delicate, revolutionary moment in the Middle East. It was triggered by the invasion of Iraq, the overthrow of Saddam Hussein and televised images of 8 million Iraqis voting in a free election. Which led to the obvious question throughout the Middle East: Why the Iraqis and not us?

...Revolution is in the air. What to do? We are already hearing voices for restraint about liberating Lebanon. Flynt Leverett, your usual Middle East expert, took to the New York Times to oppose the immediate end of Syria's occupation of Lebanon. Instead, we should be trying to "engage and empower" the tyranny in Damascus.

These people never learn. Here we are on the threshold of what Arabs in the region are calling the fall of their own Berlin Wall and our "realists" want us to go back to making deals with dictators. It would be not just a blunder but a tragedy. It would betray our principles. And it would betray the people in Lebanon who have been encouraged by those principles....

This could all be reversed, of course. Liberal revolutions were suppressed in Europe in 1848, Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968 and Tiananmen Square in 1989. Determined and ruthless regimes can extinguish revolutions. Which is why the worst thing we can do is "engage and empower" tyrants.

This is no time to listen to the voices of tremulousness, indecision, compromise and fear. If we had listened to them two years ago, we would still be doing oil for food, no-fly zones and worthless embargoes. It is our principles that brought us to this moment by way of Afghanistan and Iraq. They need to guide us now -- through Beirut to Damascus."
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Could it be that Bush was right? Is it possible that the man characterized by the Left as the reckless, dimwitted cowboy will be responsible for the liberation of millions of oppressed people throughout the troubled region?

The self-proclaimed enlightened liberals' bigoted belief that some people are not capable of handling democracy is being dispelled. The Bush doctrine, his "vision thing" if you will, appears to have laid the cornerstone of the foundation for democracy for not only Afghanistan and Iraq, but for the Middle East. As Krauthammer points out, revolutions have been extinguished before. Nonetheless, it is now reasonable to consider democracy, and therefore peace, in the Middle East to be attainable.

"There is only one force of history that can break the reign of hatred and resentment, and expose the pretensions of tyrants, and reward the hopes of the decent and tolerant, and that is the force of human freedom." --George W. Bush