The Downside of Democracy?

Juan Cole does his best to give us the negative spin on democracy in the Middle East in an article entitled, get this, “The Downside of Democracy“. What’s next, “Oxygen: The Dark Side Conservatives Don’t Want You to Know About”? The doom and gloom left never ceases to amaze me.

I’ll give you the Coles Notes version of Cole’s article – democracy can be bad because the leaders the people choose may end up being radical and/or anti US. He does his best to draw comparisons to other elections with “mixed results” such as Pakistan and Lebanon. However you don’t need to be a professor in Middle Eastern Studies to know that we are sort of rewriting the book on Iraq here. That’s why most of the “experts” who have been making dire predictions of civil war, a humanitarian catastrophe, an inferno of burning oil fields and failed elections with low turnout, have been wrong. You also don’t have to be a professor in Political Studies or Journalism to know that we wouldn’t be hearing the incessant drone of bad news and dire predictions from the media and academic left that turn out to continually be wrong, if this wasn’t Bush’s baby.

I think the smart money is on Bush, not the academic left.