Martin Kramer questions the proponents of Arab democracy. From his recent Address to the 2002 Weinberg Founders Conference:
Now an American policy devoted to promoting democracy could strip the existing order of some of its legitimacy. In places where that legitimacy is particularly thin, such a policy could even precipitate regime change. I give America that much credit. But the question is, what comes next?
And here we come back to the law of unintended consequences: if something can go wrong, it will. As the United States and Israel have just pursued a utopian peace process to its unintended consequence, it seems to me very appropriate to ask this: does anyone think that our tools of social engineering are any more precise when it comes to the democracy process? Are we so certain of the outcome that we can confidently take a jackhammer not only to the political structures of our enemies, but of our allies as well?
To the promoters of democracy, I say, promise one thing: that the existing order will not be replaced by civil war as in Bosnia or Algeria or Lebanon. For bad as the Arab world is, it could get worse, and in fact it has been worse at various times and places. Almost everywhere, beneath the coercive order enforced by the regimes, there are precisely the same ethnic tensions that produced war in Bosnia, the same inter-faith hatreds that gave us war in Lebanon, or the same struggle for Islam that ended in civil war in Algeria. Can the doctors of democracy promise, first of all, to do no harm?
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