Dictators 1, America 0

That's the argument that the writer of this article presents on America's push in democratizing the middle-east and how it's failing because of the dictators. He uses the failure of last week's US sponserd international conference on democracy in the middle east to reach an agreement to prove his point. Who made it fail? You get 3 guesses, but it starts with an E, ends with a T, and has a GYP inside. Ohh yeah baby, feel proud. The Forum for the Future, a joint US-European initiative launched at the 2004 G8 summit hosted by President Bush, is part of the Bush administration's plans for promoting democracy in the Islamic world. But the authoritarian governments that receive massive amounts of aid from the US do not want democracy, especially if democratisation involves encouraging nongovernmental organisations and civil society. As Egypt, which accounts for more than half the Arab world's population and is the second-largest recipient of US aid, demonstrated at the Bahrain meeting of the Forum for the Future last week, Muslim dictators want to control the democratisation process and would love to get more American money in the name of building democracy. Officially, of course, Egypt neither objected to democracy nor to fostering civil society. It spoke in the name of national sovereignty and its officials emphasised that peace in the Middle East must precede full democracy. From North Africa to Pakistan, such arguments have always been the grounds for potentates to thwart real change in the way their countries are governed. Slogans of "Palestine before democracy" or "Kashmir before normalisation" enable America's authoritarian allies to carry on business as usual. And you know what's the worse part? Those slogans actually do work on people. It reminds me of that god-aweful speech Amr Moussa gave before that further proved his Hack qualities in my eyes and forced me to call him on it, and which got praise from the noddingheads on Cairo's cafes. Just thinking of how stupid those people are just gives me migranes, you know?