Jennifer Rubin pushes back against her critics:
Recall that it was the left that said that democracy was alien to the Middle East. Bush was right; they were wrong.
Larison dutifully counters:
No, Bush’s critics understood, usually better than his supporters, that Iran had some measure of constitutional and representative government before the Pahlavis, and Turkey has been gradually developing as a democratic republic since WWII. Opponents of the disastrous war and the “freedom agenda” said that democratic and representative government was alien to almost all Arab countries. Lebanon was and remains the exception. That was true. Maliki’s semi-dictatorship in Baghdad does little to change that assessment.