Was Paul Wolfowitz right about democracy in the Middle East?

[All Along The Watchtower]

Yes. Iraqis have a robust, if deeply messy and at times violent democratic political culture, in spite of everything. The strongman apologists were proven wrong, and that was even more obvious during the Arab Spring.

It has taken deliberate, organized, and ongoing anti-democratic actions by Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Turkey, Iran, Russia, among others along with the rise of jihadist groups in certain power vacuums and sectarianized conflicts (encouraged by anti-democratic state actors of course) to snuff out much of the democratic aspirations and even progress made in the Middle East within the past two decades. But saying the Arab Spring or Iraqi democracy “failed” is like saying Reconstruction in the American South failed—no it did not fail, it was ruthlessly snuffed out by political actors who had everything to lose.