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| Elections Signal the Desire for Islam |
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The coloured revolutions of Eastern Europe were the benchmark for all that was good about the introduction of democratic change. In Eastern Europe the changeover had brought administrations that were supportive of American values and interests. The supposition was that the same would occur in the Muslim world. President Bush mentioned the drive to infuse democracy in the Muslim world on numerous occasions. In his State of the Union address he mentioned "Dictatorships shelter terrorists, and feed resentment and radicalism, and seek weapons of mass destruction. Democracies replace resentment with hope, respect the rights of their citizens and their neighbours, and join the fight against terror. Every step toward freedom in the world makes our country safer--so we will act boldly in freedom's cause."
So the charge was Terror and the resolution put forward was democracy. It was the tool that would be wielded to eradicate any support for terror among the Muslim masses. I think here an elucidation of the bare facts is called for. In Robert Pape’s book, ‘Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism’, he concludes that although the motivation of the groups behind bombings is to fight against military occupation and for self-determination the targets of suicide bombers are democracies. William Eubank and Leonard Weinberg in their book “The Roots of Terrorism” expressed in a recent study that both the victims and the perpetrators are citizens of democracies. Another indication is from the "Patterns of Global Terrorism" report which states that between 2000-2003 there were 203 international terrorist attacks in India, and none in China.
There was also a general conviction amongst neoconservatives that the relic dictators of the Middle East had served their time and were starting to be seen as part of the problem not the solution, in an age where expectations of change and democratisation were growing. Many of the neocons argued that their presence was giving rise to fundamentalist elements within their borders. After all, had not Bin Laden talked about the need for removing corrupt rulers? Hence the neoconservatives believed there was a case of killing two birds with one stone; the imposition of democratic rule and the removal of one of the primary causes of the Jihadists’ indictments of the West.
But who was to take charge after the “democratically” induced change? During the decades of autocratic rule, credible secular opposition in the Middle East has been decimated, hounded and cajoled into submission by dictators who enjoyed the patronage of the West and had a licence to ensure compliance by callous and brutal means. These means were also exercised on the Islamic opposition, mind you, with greater depravity. The survival of a credible Islamist opposition while other opposition forces were crumbling around them speaks volumes of the sea change in the attitudes and feelings, not of the Islamist political parties alone but in the public at large. The events of 9-11 and the subsequent wars on Afghanistan and Iraq helped to accelerate this change, so after decades of submission and draconian rule the dominant feelings and affiliations in the populace support the demand for some form of Islamic governance.
Nearly two-thirds of candidates elected to the new Iraqi parliament in December 2005 won on platforms that explicitly called for a greater role for Islam in politics. In Egypt's parliamentary elections in December 2005, the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood won 88 seats, 20 percent of the 444 elected seats. The group had fielded only about 150 candidates as part of a tacit agreement with the government that allowed Brotherhood candidates to campaign openly, winning 60 percent of the seats it contested. In January of this year Hamas won a stunning victory with 56 percent of the seats. And the trend is not even recent, going back to 2002 in Morocco, the new Justice and Development Party, took 42 of the 325 seats in the parliamentary elections of 2002.
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