Everyone is jumping over the fact that the US has brought Hamas to power through its love of exporting democracy- just as it’s democracy-building brought Communist economics to Ukraine, and has made Iraq a state ruled by Islamic law.

Three words you’ll never hear come out of the president’s mouth: “whoops, my bad!”

The question is, why this strategic disaster?

There seem to be two reasons. One, either the US was suckered into it by the innumerable yes-men it has empowered in all the think-tanks, NGOs and other institutions, whose job depends on their ability to tell their minders what they want to hear. Or two, they planned it all along, aware that more “democracy” in the Middle East would result in mass upheaval, the empowerment of Islamic parties, and more fuel for the fire of jihad- thus handily ensuring that the war on terror will go on for years, as Dick Cheney eagerly anticipated.

If the former, it seems that it involved a failure to select policies that matched the place of implementation. The most important is that the democratic “revolutions” in Serbia, Macedonia, Ukraine and Georgia are not, as the administration imagined, stellar examples of what will be in the Middle East. The stark difference of religion, culture and society between these predominantly Christian countries and those of the Middle East negate them as exemplars for “reform” in the latter region. Yet the misconception was based from the start on the perception that “democratic elections” naturally meant that the citizens would vote for America’s favorite candidate.

Yet, as the AP noted, “the success of religious-based candidates or parties [in the Middle East], many of whom are hostile to Mr. Bush and opposed to American ideas, is sobering.”

Of course it is not. For something to be “sobering” implies that it was to some degree unexpected. Of course, if you’re blind drunk and swerving hazardously on the road to democracy, as this administration is doing, it’s natural to expect a crash.

Perhaps the reality is a combination of the two. The ideologues in the administration, caught up in their own pretensions to universal values, blended harmoniously with the realists, who understood that democracy could bring them a lot of war- and the spoils that come with it. They’re not done by a long shot. And neither is “democracy.”