Democracy in the Middle East

• U.S. Official Urges Egypt on Democracy AP - Thu Sep 29, 3:33 PM ET

  CAIRO, Egypt - A top State Department official said Thursday the Bush administration's commitment to expanding democracy in the Arab world is "absolute and very firm" because U.S. national security is at stake.

Wow. Clearly we're not using any pretexts for our imperialism anymore. The United States is operating under principles of doublethink as never before. First, we claim that the invasion of Iraq is justified because of Weapons of Mass Destruction. Then, when we are unable to determine that such WMDs ever existed, we change our statement to "What? We didn't go to Iraq for the WMD, we went to oust an evil man." Now, apparently, we are simply "protecting our national security." The question, however, is where does national security end, and where does the respect for foreign sovereignty begin?

Take, for example, Iraq. If Washington believes that the Iraqi people have a right to their own choices, why weren't they asked if they wanted American style democracy in the first place? If this administration truly valued concepts of liberty, equality, and fraternity, then it would be forced to allow the Iraqi people to institute whatever form of government the majority of persons desired, whether it was representative democracy, a constitutional monarchy, or a benevolent dictatorship. We live in the so-called "Information Age," and we certainly have means to discover the wishes of the majority of a population. Why, then, do we institute a government in our own imagine, when it may be misrepresentative of the wishes of the people?

It is 19th century Imperialism reborn. The concept of imperialism is that a mother country either directly or indirectly imposes its will upon a sovereign state. In the instances of direct control, the territory in question would be subject to the laws, government, and rulership of the mother country; obviously, when an industrialized Western country tries to impose its own legal and judicial system, for example, upon an undeveloped Eastern country, the results are catastrophic. If you don't believe me, look at the attempts of the British to institute Commonwealth laws in India while it was a territory of the empire. Or the French in Vietnam. Or countless other territorial histories.

Indirect control occurs when the mother country allows the territory to maintain its own laws, and generally does not interfere with the day-to-day running of the colony, other than to tax the colony, and to install its own choice of ruler in the colony's existant government.

The question this administration has to ask itself, is 1) Will we continue the process of imperialism, which has been continually reproached throughout American history? and 2) Will it be a crushing direct rule, or a manipulative indirect rule?