As the politically clueless, morally blind and culturally stupid rev up for a march on Saturday to call for the end to the Iraq War (I’m not kidding) the Iraqi Parliament is working its way through the process of forming a government.
A poll released today reveals that 75% of Iraqi university students view democracy positively and 58% believe Iraq will be a democratic state within 5 years.
Mr Bush, after meeting King Abdullah of Jordan in Washington yesterday, shifted from a ritual denunciation of Hizbullah to a hope that it might focus on politics. He said pointedly that Hizbullah's proscription in the US was based on activities in the past.
What the world is saying about democracy in the middle east.
Listen to the conversations in the cafes on the edge of the creek that runs through this Persian Gulf city, and it is hard to believe that the George W. Bush being praised by Arab diners is the same George W. Bush who has been widely excoriated in these parts ever since he took office.
In countries where President George Bush and his policies are deeply unpopular, online commentators are starting to think the unthinkable.
It is indeed a revolution. And it is following the tradition of such events - revolution results when long simmering causes turn into mass protest movements, triggered by one or more dramatic events: a war or a high-profile assassination. Walid Jumblatt, the Lebanese Druze Muslim patriarch and leader of the opposition to the Syrian presence in Lebanon, is clear about what he thinks that spark is - the elections in Iraq which followed the US-led invasion of that country. 'When I saw the Iraqi people voting ... eight million of them, it was the start of a new Arab world,' he told the Washington Post .
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?
We need to face up to the fact that the Iraq invasion has intensified pressure for democracy in the Middle East
Three years ago - April 6 2002, if you want to rummage through the old Spectators in the attic - I wrote: "The stability junkies in the EU, UN and elsewhere have, as usual, missed the point. The Middle East is too stable. So, if you had to pick only one regime to topple, why not Iraq? Once you've got rid of the ruling gang, it's the West's best shot at incubating a reasonably non-insane polity. That's why the unravelling of the Middle East has to start not in the West Bank but in Baghdad."
The question is, How much of the country do Talabani and the Kurds want to reshape? The Kurds are holding out for at least six Cabinet posts, including head of the crucial Oil Ministry. They also say they are owed money from the U.N.'s oil-for-food program. A U.N. spokesman told TIME that $3.7 billion in Kurdish money was handed to the Coalition Provisional Authority. So far the Kurds have collected about $1.4 billion of that. They also want assurances that the Kurdish-dominated north will retain the autonomy it has enjoyed since the end of the first Gulf War, when the U.S. established a no-fly zone to protect the Kurds, and that the new Iraqi constitution will not impose Islamic law, as some prominent Shi'ite clerics have demanded.
The London-based newspaper Al Quds al-Arabi, which has for some time been a surrogate voice for "insurgent" talk in the Arab diaspora, polled its readers after the Iraqi elections and had the grace to print the result. About 90 percent had been favorably impressed by the sight of Iraqi and Kurdish voters waiting their turn to have a say in their own future. This is a somewhat more accurate use of the demotic thermometer than the promiscuous one to which we have let ourselves become accustomed. Meanwhile, the streets of, say, Beirut have been filled with demonstrators who are entirely fed up with having their lives and opinions taken for granted by parasitic oligarchies.
"I thought this country was hungry for food but they were hungry for television" Iraqi sociologist
"Enough!" That's one of the simple slogans you see scrawled on the walls around Rafiq Hariri's grave site here. And it sums up the movement for political change that has suddenly coalesced in Lebanon and is slowly gathering force elsewhere in the Arab world.
President George Bush last night delivered a coded but pointed criticism of Vladimir Putin, questioning the Russian leader's commitment to democratic values.
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