NYT ED assumes w/o Bush Saddam still in Power-"Mideast Climate Change

[papau]

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/01/opinion/01tue1.html

Mideast Climate Change

It's not even spring yet, but a long-frozen political order seems to be cracking all over the Middle East. Cautious hopes for something new and better are stirring along the Tigris and the Nile, the elegant boulevards of Beirut, and the impoverished towns of the Gaza Strip. It is far too soon for any certainties about ultimate outcomes. In Iraq, a brutal insurgency still competes for headlines with post-election democratic maneuvering. Yesterday a suicide bomber plowed into a crowd of Iraqi police and Army recruits, killing at least 122 people - the largest death toll in a single such bombing since the American invasion nearly two years ago. And the Palestinian terrorists who blew up a Tel Aviv nightclub last Friday underscored the continuing fragility of what has now been almost two months of steady political and diplomatic progress between Israelis and Palestinians.

Still, this has so far been a year of heartening surprises - each one remarkable in itself, and taken together truly astonishing. The Bush administration is entitled to claim a healthy share of the credit for many of these advances. It boldly proclaimed the cause of Middle East democracy at a time when few in the West thought it had any realistic chance. And for all the negative consequences that flowed from the American invasion of Iraq, there could have been no democratic elections there this January if Saddam Hussein had still been in power. Washington's challenge now lies in finding ways to nurture and encourage these still fragile trends without smothering them in a triumphalist embrace.

Lebanon's political reawakening took a significant new turn yesterday when popular protests brought down the pro-Syrian government of Prime Minister Omar Karami. Syria's occupation of Lebanon, nearly three decades long, started tottering after the Feb. 14 assassination of the country's leading independent politician, the former prime minister Rafik Hariri.
<snip>
Last weekend's surprise announcement of plans to hold at least nominally competitive presidential elections in Egypt could prove even more historic, although many of the specific details seem likely to be disappointing. Egypt is the Arab world's most populous country and one of its most politically influential. In more than five millenniums of recorded history, it has never seen a truly free and competitive election.
<snip>


Over the past two decades, as democracies replaced police states across Central and Eastern Europe and Latin America, and a new economic dynamism lifted hundreds of millions of eastern and southern Asia out of poverty and into the middle class, the Middle East stagnated in a perverse time warp that reduced its brightest people to hopelessness or barely contained rage. The wonder is less that a new political restlessness is finally visible, but that it took so long to break through the ice.

[Aviation Pro]

1. That's correct....

Without Bush:

Saddam Hussein would be nominally in power with no influence at all.

1500 American service members would still be alive.

Osama bin Laden would have been caught (assuming, of course, a different administration still ignoring the warnings prior to 911).

We would be running a budget surplus that could have been plowed into more visionary measures - such as education, science, and health benefits.

We would be on far better footing to compete against the rising economic super-powers of China, India, Russia and the EU.

Sorry, Times, no props from me.

[TexasLawyer]

3. AND

more than 100,000 Iraqi civilians would still be alive,

and Fallujah would not have been flattened,

and a civil war in Iraq would not have been primed,

and there would be sigificantly less Depleted Uranium dust killing future Iraqi generations,

and the US would still have some true friends and allies in the world,
...

and on and on....

[Kolesar]

2. It boldly proclaimed the cause of Middle East democracy at a time when...

"It boldly proclaimed the cause of Middle East democracy at a time when few in the West thought it had any realistic chance. "

NY Times is rewriting history for the benefit of the Bush administration. "Democracy" was not Bush's reason for invading Iraq. It was defending America.

[JaneDoughnut]

4. Nor can we call it democracy yet

And if Iraq does develop into a healthy democracy, the lion's share of the credit will go to the Iraqi people, not Bush Co.

[applegrove]

5. Hussein had offered elections just before the war. bin Laden was

offered to the US too. They should have taken him from the Taliban (who offered) and then invaded Afghanistan. Saddam Hussein was always an obvious sociopath and should never have been propped up by the USA in the 1980s. Iran had a burgeoning democracy in the 1950s. USA replaced it with the Shaw (that went well). What have we learnt...

You don't make deals with sociopaths. You promote a democracy even if it means your particular Oil Industry Cabal will not see a bigger percentage of the profits than the poor in that country.

[Martin Eden]

6. Bush has set some things in motion

But are those "things", in the long term, going to result in the free market democracies the neocons profess to be fostering?

Democracy may have been given a boost, but so have radical Islam and anti-Americanism. If the existing autocratic regimes are eventually toppled, who will take their place? Islamic revolutionaries comprise the oppositional power structure -- not Western-leaning moderates.

If Democracy "succeeds" in Iraq, we are likely to see a Shiite government with closer ties to "Axis of Evil" Teheran than to Washington. Furthermore, can we really expect Mideast nations to develop and adhere to the democratic institutions and rule of law necessary to prevent those in power from re-establishing iron-fisted rule?

We may trading the devils we know for a Pandora's boxful of troubles and tyranny -- at a cost in blood and treasure that is already too high.

[oppositionmember]

7. This has Tom Friedman's fingerprints

all over it. Wishful thinking just because there is a lull in the destruction and a pause in the downward plunge...