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I have a very good friend who comes from Syria.
She is educated, a lawyer, a Christian, and very very western. She lives half of the year in Toronto and half of the year in Damascus.
When discussing Afganistan once she told me that she wished that they would put the king back in power. I said that that would be the last thing they needed - another autocrat.
She said, no, you don't understand that the middle east doesn't work well with democracies like the west. All they have ever known is strongmen type leaders and all you can hope for is that he is a "good king".
Assad in Syria is very much like that. The archtypal "strongman". We in the west think that he is a brutal dictator, but the truth of the matter is that he, and the King of Jordan, and (gasp) even Saddam keep their countries working by suppressing any sort of uprising.
We tend to glamourize uprisings as a noble expression of the people, but in many cases they are extremists who want to merely set themselves up in power.
In Syria my friend told me that there was once a hard line muslim uprising (Assad is quite secular) and it was brutally put down.
Whether we like it or not, this is not as bad as the alternative.
As much as I dislike Bush, I think his idea of "Democracy in Iraq" was a noble idea. He and allot of people (wrongly) figured that if you just got rid of the strongman, that people would embrace democracy as we have in the west and live happily ever after.
Nice pipe dream, far from reality.
What you have is several different groups now striving to become pope of Iraq. Trying to fill the void and rewrite Iraq as they see fit.
I guess it comes down to the fact that you can not affect sociological changes at the end of an M-16. It takes hundreds of years and there must be a popular will amoung the people that that is indeed the way they will go.
When that happens, the people will naturally rise up and the old oppressive regime will be toppled.
We have seen it from the Magna Carta right on through to Soviet Georgia a few months ago.
Until the people rise up themselves, we are kidding ourselves thinking that we can hand them "democracy" on a silver platter and they will embrace.
Most Iraqis don't even know, or care, what democracy is.
They are too busy listening to the local Ayatollah.
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