Don't blame democracy

Clifford May:

Democracy is getting a bum rap. President Bush's insistence on promoting democracy abroad, critics chide, has now brought Hamas, a Militant Islamist terrorist organization, to power in the West Bank and Gaza. If this is democracy, they say, who needs it?

But what has taken root in the Palestinian territories isn't democracy. Or, more precisely, it isn't liberal democracy -- which presupposes freedom of speech and the press, the rule of law, an independent judiciary and guarantees of rights for minorities and women.

If elections were all it required to qualify as a democracy, the Soviet Union would have been one, since Soviet citizens regularly went to the polls to elect whichever candidates the Communist Party chose.

In Iran, too, people cast ballots. But Militant Islamist mullahs decide who runs and who wins. And in the West Bank and Gaza, while elections have been held occasionally since the 1993 Oslo Accords first awarded power to Yassir Arafat's political machine, democratic values have not been seriously encouraged and democratic institutions have not been constructed.

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There is much more.