Bush’s Lectures on Democracy Fall on Deaf Ears

[babylonsister]

http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/06/07/1725/

Bush’s Lectures on Democracy Fall on Deaf Ears
by Ian Traynor

snip//

Many fear that as a result of the policies of the Bush Administration, the forces for democratic change were now in retreat.

“Democracy promotion is in a bit of a crisis at the moment,” said Pavol Demes, a Slovak analyst involved in toppling dictators or authoritarian leaders in Slovakia, Serbia, and Ukraine over the past decade.

“The war on terrorism and the use of force has complicated everything. It’s all connected with the Bush policies. People link democracy promotion with the war in Iraq. Exporting democracy has become highly ideological and controversial.”

snip//

While the White House tried to talk up the promise of democratic breakthroughs, expectations are being scaled down among campaigners on the front line of regime change. Following a 15-year period from 1989 to 2004 that saw communism collapse, hybrid authoritarian regimes crumble and people power triumph, there was a pervasive sense that the tide has turned.

“That period seems to have ended. Now we’re looking at democracy as a contested proposition,” said Bruce Jackson, head of the Washington-based Project on Transitional Democracies.

In the era of the US prisons in Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib in Baghdad, American lectures on democracy have little purchase. Instead, a dynamic counter-revolution in Russia, Central Asia, the Middle East and Latin America appears to be under way.

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[malaise]

1. Duh! n/t

[xxqqqzme]

2. like a pimp lecturing against slave labor.