Let's hear it for Democracy promotion

From the WaPo we get yet another story chronicling the "success" being achieved on the "democracy front" in Iraq. Yes, so successful that citizens of neighbouring dictatorships are saying: no thanks. Yeah, that's a ringing endorsement: if that's what democracy is, we'd rather our dictatorship.

Horror at the bloodshed accompanying the U.S. effort to bring democracy to Iraq has accomplished what human rights activists, analysts and others say Syrian President Bashar al-Assad had been unable to do by himself: silence public demands for democratic reforms here.

The idea of the government as a bulwark of stability and security has long been the watchword of Syrian bureaucrats and village elders. But since Iraq's descent into sectarian and ethnic war -- and after Israel's war with Hezbollah in Lebanon, on the other side of Syria -- even Syrian activists concede that the country's feeble rights movement is moribund.

Advocates of democracy are equated now with supporters of America, even "traitors," said Maan Abdul Salam, 36, a Damascus publisher who has coordinated conferences on women's rights and similar topics.

"Now, talking about democracy and freedom has become very difficult and sensitive," Salam said. "The people are not believing these thoughts anymore. When the U.S. came to Iraq, it came in the name of democracy and freedom. But all we see are bodies, bodies, bodies."

Ordinary people in Syria are hunkering down, and probably rightly so, said Omar Amiralay, a well-known Syrian filmmaker whose documentaries are quietly critical of Assad's one-family rule.

"If democracy brings such chaos in the region, and especially the destruction of society, as it did in Iraq and in Lebanon, it's absolutely normal, and I think it's absolutely a wise position from the people to be afraid to imagine how it would be in Syria," Amiralay said. "I think that people at the end said, 'Well, it is better to keep this government. We know them, and we don't want to go to this civil war, and to live this apocalyptic image of change, with civil war and sectarianism and blood.' "

In 2003, a few people in Damascus were bold enough to raise their glasses in cafes to toast the American tanks then rolling into Baghdad to overthrow Saddam Hussein. They were dreaming of the changes that might happen next here, in the only remaining government led by the Baath Party, a prominent writer in the capital said, speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of being jailed a second time.

"The Americans came to Iraq to make it an example to the other countries to ask for change," the writer said. "But what happened was the opposite. Now everyone is saying we do not want to be like Iraq."