In Defense of Democracy

Natan Sharansky (Natan Sharansky, a distinguished fellow at the Shalem Center in Israel, is a former Soviet dissident who spent nine years in a KGB prison. Later, he served as a member of the Israeli government.--author of "The Case for Democracy: The Power of Freedom to Overcome Tyranny and Terror): "although elections are part of the democratic process, they are never a substitute for it."

Rather than push for quick elections, the democratic world must use its considerable moral, political and economic leverage to help build free societies in the Middle East. We should tie trade privileges to economic freedoms, encourage foreign diplomats to meet openly with dissidents and link aid to the protection of dissents (as Bush did when he helped force the release of Egyptian democracy advocate Saad Eddin Ibrahim).

Any regime, elected or not, that works to build a free society should be seen as a partner, if not a friend. Likewise, any regime, elected or not, that chokes freedom should be seen as an adversary, if not an enemy. Obviously, any regime that supports terrorism is hostile to the most fundamental principles of a free society and should therefore be treated as an enemy.

and from an editorial in the Washington Post:

The second notion -- that it is foolish to press for democracy in unready societies -- also is less useful than it appears at first blush. Of course elections don't make for a democracy; the Soviet Union conducted them for years. And it's true that many of the countries that have developed democratically in the past two decades began with advantages that not everyone shares, such as (in parts of Central and Eastern Europe) memories of a democratic past between the world wars. But other nations progress without that head start. Everyone would acknowledge that it's difficult; that culture, history and ethnic politics matter; that totalitarian habits take decades to recover from. But it's hard to look around the world -- to democracies in South Korea, India, South Africa, El Salvador and Indonesia -- and come up with rules to predict where democracy can succeed and where it can't.

The unreadiness argument is often applied to countries where the election results, as in the Palestinian Authority, are not welcome in the West. The fallacy of this thinking is that it supposes that without elections Hamas and other fundamentalist movements could be suppressed or excluded from the political system. But radical Islamists and others hostile to Western interests cannot be wished away: They are powerful forces in the Middle East that, until their recent participation in elections, pursued their goals by terrorism.....

But without elections, or the prospect of elections -- without some measure of accountability to the people -- what will induce a dictator to allow civil society to grow? The "realists" need to answer that question, too.

And give President Bush credit for this Democracy Fund initiative, which is finally in place at the UN. (AP story here.)