US democracy push makes Middle East liberals cringe - Bush is like a bull in a China shop

[NNN0LHI]

http://www.khaleejtimes.ae/DisplayArticleNew.asp?col=§ion=middleeast&xfile=data/middleeast/2007/October/middleeast_October51.xml

US democracy push makes Middle East liberals cringe
(Reuters)

4 October 2007

BEIRUT - The United States sees itself as a beacon for democratic values, but Iranian and Arab reformers say its policies in the Middle East too frequently belie its ideals, making US support for their cause a damaging liability.

Repressive governments in the region, whether close allies or sworn foes of the United States, often exploit anti-American sentiment to accuse homegrown liberals of being stooges peddling a US-Israeli agenda. Islamist movements do the same.

Accordingly, rights activists strive to distance themselves from US actions in the Arab and Muslim world.

“Far from helping the development of democracy, US policy over the past 50 years has consistently been to the detriment of the proponents of freedom and democracy in Iran,” Iranian dissident Akbar Ganji, who spent six years in jail, wrote in an open letter to U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon last month.

Ganji’s letter was mainly an appeal for the United Nations to condemn “intolerable” human rights violations in Iran.

But he prefaced it by saying US President George W. Bush’s approval of funds to promote democracy in his country had “made it easy for the Iranian regime to describe its opponents as mercenaries of the US and to crush them with impunity”.

Even speaking about a possible military attack on Iran, he added, makes life tough for Iranian human rights campaigners.

Iran has been at bitter odds with the United States since the 1979 Islamic revolution, but liberals in Egypt, which gets about $2 billion a year in US aid, echo Ganji’s thoughts.

“The United States under Bush has done great disservice to our struggle,” veteran Egyptian sociologist and human rights activist Saadeddin Ibrahim told Reuters in Beirut this week.

[Mythsaje]

1. The Neo-cons have (either out of arrogant stupidity or conscious cupidity)

set real democracy back nearly fifty years throughout most of the world.

We should be leading by example, not trying to convert by the sword.

Fokking morons.