Arabian revolutions and American democracy

Revolts shattering the foundation of Arabian world have undermined the theoretical grounds of American neoconservatism, which used to be a cornerstone of Bush-Cheney’s foreign-policy. Or should we rather say Cheney-Bush? Dogmatic compliance with that doctrine since 2000 till 2008 resembled the reverent attitude of Soviet leadership to the works of Marx, Engels and Lenin.

In 1979 Jeane Kirkpatrick published her famous essay called “Dictatorships & Double Standards” in Commentary, which editor-in-chief at the moment was Norman Podhoretz — one of the neo-con father-architects. This essay caught an eye of Ronald Reagan, who was impressed by the ideas of 53-year-old “Iron lady” and invited her to his elections staff and afterwards appointed her ambassador to the United Nations. Despite the common opinion, it was Kirkpatrick — not Margaret Thatcher — who was the first woman to be honored with such title. In this essay she denounced U.S. President Jimmy Carter and claimed that he had hustled the Shah of Iran and the leader of Nicaragua — who headed, putting it mildly, not the most democratic regimes ever — out of office. Both Iranian Shah Reza Pahlavi and Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza were far from democratic ideals, yet both were pro-American. The results of their overthrow were disastrous. Friendly authoritarians were gone; true totalitarians were taking over in both places. While authoritarian regimes of the right could mellow over time into democracies, totalitarians ones of the left would not. Anyway, it required "decades, if not centuries," Kirkpatrick observed, for "people to acquire the necessary disciplines and habits" to create a viable democracy.