Why not a "democratic" Kuwait or Saudi Arabia or UAE ...?

....instead of a "democratic" Iraq?? One of the rationales we hear often is how the rest of the Middle East may go "democratic" if we can get Iraq to go "democratic". Why did they choose Iraq? Seems it would have been much easier to establish a "democracy" in those countries where we already have influence, such as Saudi Arabia, the UAE, or Kuwait? Since we already have a presence in each of those countries, we would not even have to invade? Why did we choose the most difficult path to democracy in the Middle East?

Go figure. All we seem to be doing at this point is bankrupting the country. The end of empire.

And, before all is said and done, that may be how it's arranged to turn out, but you just can't invade a country and install a dictatorship.

It's considered bad form.

First, you have to instigate a Civil War, decimate the population, THEN install the dictatorship.

anyone, including us. It interferes with their goals. It's just another lie that they tell to get dumb people to support them.

What ridiculous reasoning--most of the rest of the ME are havens for dictators ans despots. They have power and wealth beyond most of our imaginations because they are D and D. They are not going to willingly give up power. People who support this idea of a democracy stabilizing the ME must think the dictators will come to some sort of epiphany and say, 'yes, that is exactly what my people have been missing-I have to get some of that democracy for my country.' Ain't going to happen. Nobody willing gives up wealth or power

Convenience in the form of Hussein with his massive human rights violations, provocations, gamesmanship and history of UN condemnations providing some degree of legal cover, no matter how tenuous. Reward versus risk made Iraq quite attractive to the WHIG in theory, things went went terribly wrong in the execution of their wonderful plan.

those countries will be western style democracy when hell freezes over

Bush follows the PNAC theory that radical Islamic terrorism can be stopped by eliminating the popular support it enjoys in Arab nations. Under the PNAC plans the best way to achieve this is to promote democratic reform in the Middle East through a combination of methods, the most important being the Iraqi invasion (the other parts being the Freedom Doctrine/Greater Middle East Initiative). The idea was that Iraq would quickly go democratic and surrounding nations would be forced to reform as their populations demanded Iraqi style freedoms. The US would be seen as a hero for bringing democracy to the Middle-East, and people controlling their own lives in free states would not turn to radical Islam and violence.

The idea turned out to be partly true, three and a half years on and Iraq is a successful democracy that has managed to bring its three ethnic groups into the political process. Unfortunately that is all it has been successful at, as much of the country has collapsed into chaos. While there were a few early examples of the predicted wave of democratic reform, they have almost all fizzled out as Iraq's plight has more or less eliminated the desire of other nations to follow in its footsteps.

Iraq was the target because it was a traditional US enemy (after being a something of a traditional US friend) and because of the mistaken assumption that it possessed weapons of mass destruction. Both of these things made selling an Iraq invasion easier then any other Arab nation.

Banned weapons were a convenient excuse that turned out to be a serious misstep for Bush. In the final months before the war began the administration had lessened its talk about chemical and biological weapons and started to focus more on democracy, but they never managed to sell people fully on this angle, and when no weapons were found it seriously damaged US (not to mention UK) credibility. In fact, a good portion of the global intelligence community came off looking bad when WMD turned out to be nonexistent. The only person I can think of who came off looking good is Scott Ritter...

Anyway, the war is about democratization as a means of stopping terror and increasing US influence in the gulf. Cruise around the PNAC website for a while and read some of their archives, most of the ideological concepts for this war have been spelled out since the late 1990's.

"three and a half years on and Iraq is a successful democracy "

You are being sarcastic, yes? I bloody hope so!

it's just not a successful government. As far as holding elections and getting people interested in the political process goes it is doing a reasonably good job. They have a constitution, hold regular elections with high voter turnout, the government is fairly representative and there is a myriad of political parties to chose from. The Iraqi state has done much to disprove the ridiculous and racist idea that Arabs can't handle democracy.

Outside of the basic elements of democratic rule the government has failed at more or less everything. Iraq is plagued by rampant violence and the state is either to corrupt, incompetent or overwhelmed to solve this crisis. Likely its a combination of the three.

Saddam's government wrecked Iraq, the Coalition government reordered the wreck, and now the new government is watching Iraq wreck itself further. I'm still holding out hope it will somehow manage to turn out alright.




Oh yeah, the Saudis got to elect their own garbage men. That wouldn't have happened if it wasn't for the Iraqi inspired wave of democratic reform...

LOL!

:7 :7 :7

:D

I was not raised in the US so not exactly sure, but
my guess is it was a long struggle. My native country
of India struggled with the British colonialists for
many decades under the leadership of Gandhi before winning
independence in 1947 and has been the world's largest
democracy since then.

Why Iraq instead of Saudi, Kuwait or Egypt? For one reason
none of them were openly paying off terrorists families
exploding themselves in Israel. And all those dictatorships
are friendly to us. Iraq has also more educated people than
Saudi Arabia. So the Bushies figured it would be the best
candidate. If Iraq does morph into a stable democracy, it is
very likely that other middle-east countries could fall like
dominoes.

Anyways if a country like India with no previous history of
democracy ever can morph into one, every other country has hope.
Very rarely two democracies have gone to war with each other.
So there is hope for the world to live in peace as democracies.

privatize the world? I remember hearing someone say..that every inch of property on the globe should be privately owned.

Don't worry, this is one conservative presidential wannabe we have nothing to be concerned about:7

Iraq, Iran & Venezuela's oil fields.

Here there are some people with real Democratic values in a struggle for their survival - there is far more fertile ground here.

A John Kerry Boston Globe op-ed offers some real ideas here - and identifies some problems, including:

"Yet today, the forces of radicalism are doing a far better job than the moderates in making the most basic connections with restive populations. In Lebanon, Iran has seized the opportunity to win over the population by channeling some $500 million in reconstruction funds through Hezbollah -- over twice as much as we have. In fact, Iran is doing more in rebuilding Lebanon than Washington is doing in rebuilding New Orleans."

If we want to support a nascient democracy in the Middle - here is one where we could make a difference. This op-ed does a great job explaining the situation.

http://blog.johnkerry.com/

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) - Hand-selected voters cast the third and final round of votes on Wednesday to choose members of a government advisory panel in this tiny oil-rich country's first-ever elections.

Wednesday's voting was held at Al-Sharjah, Ajman, and Umm AL-Quwain, the remaining three of seven sheikdoms that form United Arab Emirates. The state news agency, WAM, reported good turnout without saying giving figures. Seven men won the remaining seats, the agency said.

Emirate officials and some columnists hailed the election as a first step towards democracy and praised the victory of one woman along with 12 men in the first two rounds held Saturday and Monday in the other sheikdoms... http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/story/0,,-6294821,00.html


It is just the first steps... Emiratis are creating democracy on their own terms.