Preaching democracy in the Middle East takes practice

The United States' plan to defeat terrorism is to spread democracy across the Middle East. But what happens when the terrorists win the elections?

Hamas won such elections in the Israeli Occupied Territories last year. It would become evident that democracy, and Western credibility in the Middle East, would soon take another hit.

Instead of doing the democratic thing by accepting the winner of the elections and dealing with them, the US did exactly what many in the Middle East expected them to do. The US and its allies cut off aid to the Palestinian Authority (PA), Israel stopped dispersing tax monies they collected from other Palestinians on behalf of the Hamas run government and terrorists everywhere got a new kind of ammunition in the public relations war.

Why anyone would be surprised then that chaos would ensue when aid to the PA was cut is unclear. Top that, more recently, by paying members of Hamas' main political party rival Fatah and it is not hard to see why the West Bank and Gaza are now split, and clashes between Hamas and Fatah gunmen are common and escalating.

Divide and conquer has been a tried and true tactic since the times of the Greek and Roman Empires. So it is not surprising that the Western hegemonic powers would try to undercut a democratically elected group. But these actions by Israel and the West have unforeseen negative consequences.

The message being sent is one that the Middle East has seen before. After the fall of the Ottoman Empire the Middle East was divided up into territories between the Western Powers. It was colonialism and the Middle East got used and abused for their natural resources.

When one of the countries got out of line, like when Mossideque the P.M. of Iran tried to nationalize the rich Iranian oil fields owned by British Petroleum, the CIA engineered a coup against him and installed the Shah to do their bidding. In 1979 the US got what is often referred to as "blowback" from that event when the Ayatollah Khomeini overthrew the Shah's son in the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

Islamic countries can do democracy. It may not be the kind of Jeffersonian democracy we in the West are used to, but it can work. When Hamas won these recent elections it was not so much that Fatah was unpopular for its policies, it was because they were incredibly corrupt.

Hamas on the other hand had learned what Mayor Daily's father knew when he ran Chicago in the 1960's. The most important person in the political organization is the precinct captain. That person who is on the ground, who knows everyone in the neighborhood, knows everyone's needs and takes care of those needs. That and a little fear and you have an unstoppable political machine.

When Hezbollah Allah and Israel went toe-to-toe firing missiles at each other last year, Hezbollah Allah stood in the aftermath on piles of rubble passing out money. Even though it could be argued on military terms that Israel won, in the public relations war, they lost.

If the US wants to profess that democracy is the answer to terrorism then they have to accept the will of the people, even if it is not what they want or expect. Only then will the US have any credibility at all.