anthriel wrote:My mom says the problem is that we are trying to stuff our way of life down their throats, and they will never have democracies there. Do you guys think that is fair?
Given that the Arab Spring was more or less homegrown, I wouldn't say that's fair at all. However, the US isn't necessarily going to like the outcomes of some of the elections...and if we, as a nation, truly stand for spreading freedom and democracy and so on, we're going to have to live with that. That last bit is not something we have historically been particularly good at (Chile, anyone?). But if we honestly want democracy to spread, we have to change our ways.
BTW, I had a long conversation with S about this last night. There was a time, in the 90's, when hte US government backed Milosevic. Milosevic was not particularly popular among Serbs - he led them into a massive economic crisis and stole a couple elections to stay in power and he did lovely things like shut down independent media outlets when they said things he didn't like and fire university faculty when they struck him as disloyal (S was finished with school when that happened, but he went to see one of his former professors very coolly give his lecture out on the lawn because he'd been locked out of his classroom). But the foreign backing of his government made it almost impossible for the opposition to make any headway. This lasted for only a few years, but in S's own words, "You can't imagine how much we hated America for that."
In the Mideast, we backed up dictators and despots for
decades. Mubarak held power in Egypt for 40 years. And we backed (and still back, in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia and some other places) these governments because they either sold us oil or because they gave us a military advantage or, in the case of Egypt, buffered Israel. Israel's the other big scapegoat in that part of the world. You really think anyone's going to forgive us for these crimes quickly or easily?
I'm not saying we should apologize. We haven't and we won't and I'm not sure it would make the slightest bit of difference if we did. But we need to start being honest. Eventually, and it'll take decades, trust will get established. And one of the things we need to do, to be honest, is openly answer this question: do we stand for democracy or not? Then we need to act on that answer and part of that is simply accepting the results of a free and fair election WHETHER WE LIKE IT OR NOT.