Monday’s Washington Post featured an article titled “‘Democratic’ Frenzy in the Arab World,” which claims that U.S. aggression in the region is already reaping desirable political changes. A bit premature, I’d say, and maybe fundamentally misguided. As mentioned on this page long before 3/11, Morocco, home to most of the suspects in the Madrid bombings, is a democratizing country. It may rank low on lists compiled by Euro busybodies, but it’s a helluva lot further along than Iraq is.
Obviously, a handful of guys committing a terrorist act does not automatically damn their country of origin or its political system. But it should cast a little doubt on a) the certainty that democracy is a cure-all for anti-U.S. hostility, and b) that only the most despotic countries produce such hostility.