Excellent point! The day Iraq becomes pro-Israeli is the day I (a Muslim) get elected Pope. Although, in fairness to my critics, I also said the same thing when Kennedy announced that we would be going to the moon by the end of the 1960's
The big problem with the Bush Doctrine (2.0 as Sam calls it) is the presumption that democracy will automatically translate into pro-Western / American feelings. Democracy IMO is a good thing but not one that is guarenteed to make things safer for us. The idea that democracies don't enter wars except for self-defense belies that fact that many democracies, including us, have entered wars for reasons other than self-defense. At the same time the drive for nationalism and the widespread anti-US sentiment is just as likely to put anti-US and anti-Western parties into power. For instance Lebanon is governed under a complex power sharing arrangement that gives roughly equal power to the nominally Christian population. This is based upon a census from the 1950's and likely the Christian population these days isn't nearly as strong. A true one person one vote democracy in Lebanon is likely to give the Shiites much more power. Even without a change open and fair elections are very likely to put Hezbollah into power since even though they have a strong Shiite base they also draw some support from other sectors of Lebanese society. In another example in the late 80's and mid 90's when several Arab states allowed legitimately contested elections fundamentalists parties in Algeria, Jordan and Egypt were poised to gain many seats in their parliaments. It took the regimes in those countries either invalidating those elections, outlawing those parties or changing the rules of the elections to keep that from happening. If free elections had been allowed to procede our staunch allies in Jordan and Egypt would have been run by parties more akin to the Iranian and Taliban regimes. My view has always been that democracy is an evolutionary process that is easily hampered and corrupted through outside interference. If we want to see the Middle East become democratic the best thing to do is leave them alone rather than trying to either prop up dictatorships as we had or to try to cajole them through invasion and utopian rhetoric.
