by Todd Daigneault

Created on: March 24, 2008   Last Updated: August 19, 2008

Achieving democracy in the Middle East is a huge and almost insurmountable task. The Americans have tried it with blitzkrieg-type overthrows of the governments in Iraq and Afghanistan, establishing elected governments and parliaments that were suppose to be accountable to the people. Five years plus of war and democracy only exists on paper in these countries. Insurgents control large tracts of these countries, as the leaders of Iraq and Afghanistan remain isolated and under extremely heavy protection, effectively directly controlling small parts of these countries, while the rest of it is run on paper.

Insurgents fight on with a seemingly inexhaustible supply of fighters, weapons and materials; their attacks becoming increasingly more sophisticated as the US drowns in a sea of debt and many thousands of casualties in two neverending wars. The elected governments in Iraq and Afghanistan retain little or no control over their people...and their countries-as insurgent attacks rage on-including a recent attack on the so-called 'green zone' of Baghdad, ironically where most of these democractic instituions are.

Even in democractic Middle Eastern countries like Israel and Egypt, both countries are forced to maintain, at times, martial-law type powers to deal with terrorists and threats to their own countries, external and internal. The key to achieving democracy in the Middle East is, in part, to find a true solution to the long-running Middle East conflict. After decades of bloody war and terrorism, a true solution would start by ending the state of war...and all of the terrible connotations that go with it that has left the region destabilized for decades, but with the seedlings of the beginnings of democracy just waiting to be sprouted into something very beautiful and substantive.

A substantial easing of tensions would allow the seeds of democracy to flourish out of the bitter ashes of hatred and long-term conflict in a soil that is sadly rich from all of the death of the past number of decades. Democracy is longed by so many in a region that if the level of war and terrorist casualties were comparable to North America, it would be like the equivalent of hundreds of thousands of North American citizens being killed by war and terrorism since 1948, on top of the war casualties from Korea, Vietnam and the other wars. There is a terrible analogy of just the Israeli body count from the Yom Kippur war being comparable to the US losses in Viet-Nam, in ratio comparisons to the US. The seedlings of democracy just needs the right amount of tending to sprout and flourish into beautiful gardens and vineyards of plenty for all to come to and eat from in peace and harmony.

Military occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan will only cause these ugly weeds of hatred to grow further and more grotesque. The West cannot obviously leave these countries so quickly, for the terrorists and insurgents there could easily transform these countries into new 'launching-points' for hatred and violence across the Middle East, destabilizing other countries, and perhaps the entire region itself. But these countries could still turn into shining examples of democracy and freedom, not out of invasions that dramatically force change of government and long-term military occupation. But in nurturing the seedlings of democracy by encouraging peaceful transition following their tribal, religous, secular and modern ways of the democractic and non-democractic countries, not necessarily just out of our Madison Ave, "American Idol" culture and ways.

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