A couple of nice paragraphs from Thomas Friedman's column today. About the Middle East uprisings and crackdowns and whether liberal democracy is a real possibility.
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“There is a saying that inside every fat man is a thin man dying to get out,” notes Michael Mandelbaum, the foreign policy expert at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. “We also tend to believe that inside every autocracy is a democracy dying to get out, but that might not be true in the Middle East.”
[...]
To be sure, we have to remember how long it took America to build its own liberal political order and what freaks that has made us today. Almost four years ago, we elected a black man, whose name was Barack, whose grandfather was a Muslim, to lead us out of our worst economic crisis in a century. We’re now considering replacing him with a Mormon, and it all seems totally normal. But that normality took more than 200 years and a civil war to develop.
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Thomas L. Friedman at The New York Times_ _ _
Syria has been the main story in the headlines these days, as even the Assad regime has been rocked hard by a popular uprising. However, Assad has cracked down with a new level of brutality. Russia has protected Assad in the UN, holding back Western military assistance. This is one regime that everyone would like to see come down, more so than the Mubarak and Ghadaffi regimes, but the outcome is gravely in doubt.
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