Spread of Democracy

Throughout the last 20 years democracy has been spreading throughout the world; after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Easter Europe quickly moved from communism to democracy; Asia and Latin America have moved from the rule of unelected strongmen to much more democratic institutions; even sub-Saharan Africa has made moves away from despotism towards democracy. The only region of the world that has been left behind is the Arab Middle East(with the possible exception of the tiny Gulf states and Jordan, somewhat). There are many possible reasons for this apparent lack of progress. Undoubtedly, one of the primary reasons was the US reluctance to alter the status-quo there, fearing that the destabilization of that region could affect our oil supply. After 9/1, though, we have begun to realize that the stability of the Middle East has been an illusion. By refusing to pressure the leadership to reform, as the US did with every other region under the rubric of fighting communism, the forces of a new totalitarianism - Islamofascism - have grown unimpeded. Mark Steyn suggests that just as Latin America was transformed, so can the Middle East.

One can argue that things have slipped a little in the last three years: fiscal woes in Argentina; the grubby thug Chavez in Venezuela. But still, even by the most pessimistic reading, an area that 30 years ago was wall-to-wall dictatorships is now overwhelmingly democratic. Whatever the continent's fate, it won't include a return of the puffed-up bemedalled El-Presidentes-For-Life, like General Juan Velasco Alvarado of Peru, who abolished Christmas and banned Donald Duck.

That's what makes Latin America relevant to the Bush project in the Middle East. For much of the last century, the region was mired in the same dead-end victim complex as the Arab world. The celebrated Brazilian sociology professor Fernando Henrique Cardoso was a famous proponent of "Dependency Theory", which blamed the woes of everybody south of the Rio Grande on Uncle Sam, in much the same way that Arab regimes, invited to explain why they're sewers of corruption and brutality, bore on about the Great Satan and the Zionist Entity.
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If you think the democratization of Arabia is a long shot, so was the democratization of Latin America. But it happened. And the only thing to argue about is how much credit you want to give the Reagan Doctrine. You want to blame the US for acts of genocide against the Mayans by the Guatemalan military? As you wish. But that, in fact, is an example of what happens when Washington is absent. The Guatemalans reckoned they could handle the insurgency and buy arms on the international market, so they set to it, without any pesky foreigners around to complain about human-rights abuses (unlike, say, the Balkans, where the atrocities occur in plain sight of the UN peacekeepers).