{"id":469,"date":"2006-04-22T18:32:00","date_gmt":"2006-04-22T18:32:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/2006\/04\/22\/469\/"},"modified":"2006-04-22T18:32:00","modified_gmt":"2006-04-22T18:32:00","slug":"469","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/?p=469","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"

Book Review . . . Sort Of.<\/span> One of the assistant prosecutors at my office was nice enough to loan me a copy of Natan Sharansky<\/span>‘s 2004 book THE CASE FOR DEMOCRACY. I had previously read something about Sharansky, how his book was a favorite of President Bush and his friends. So I’ve taken a look at it; but I can’t say that I’ve read it cover-to-cover, nor that I intend to. It’s not exactly a comprehensive overview of what democratic government is, where it came from (ancient Greece, among other places), where it has been tried, and what the results have been throughout the course of human history. Sharansky is a Russian Jew who experienced the Soviet Union and its gulags in all of their ugliness (he was a political prisoner). He then moved to Israel and got involved in politics there. Thus he tends to focus on the bad old days in Soviet Russia and the continuing trauma in the Middle East since the 1970s. His bottom lines are that the old Soviet Union sorely needed democracy; that democracy is one of Israel’s biggest strengths; and that democracy is what the Arabs need in order to get their act together. Democracy is the more-or-less cure-all for each of the world’s many political problems and injustices.<\/p>\n

Although I didn’t go thru the book with a fine tooth comb, I don’t recall Sharansky saying anything about how Russia and the other former Soviet republics have fared since they embraced democracy in the early 1990s. In some places (Lithuania, Estonia), democracy has clearly been beneficial, supporting a stable and responsible government. In other places, including Russia herself, the results have been mixed. The generally open form of government practiced under Boris Yeltsin turned out to be something close to a disaster; and since then the Russians have since elected a guy (Putin) who is cutting back on democracy and returning to some of the old Soviet habits. The Ukraine is up for grabs in spite of democracy, Kyrgystan and Turkmenistan have moved back to autocracy, and some of the other southern states might yet vote in Sharia (Islamic law), with its rough justice and restrictions on women’s freedom. (The fundamentalist Iranian government, which sustains itself through democracy, is reportedly working to promote this in the former Soviet republics along its border). <\/p>\n

But Sharansky does admit that democracy shouldn’t be rushed. On page 74 he says that “elections are never the beginning of the democratic process. Only when the basic institutions that protect a free society are firmly in place \u2013 such as a free press, rule of law, independent courts, political parties \u2013 can free elections be held . . . After defeating Hitler, the US and other allied occupation forces wisely decided not to hold federal elections in Germany for four years. Had elections been held in 1945 or 46, the results probably would have undermined efforts to build German democracy, something those who hope to help build democratic societies in Afghanistan and Iraq would be wise to keep in mind.” <\/p>\n

President Bush openly cites Mr. Sharansky’s book as the basis for his “democracy on the march” philosophy; but GWB has ignored the warning on page 74. When political parties are run by clerics and the courts are overseen by religious judges and the rule of law comes from the ancient interpretation of a spiritual text, one has to wonder if shotgun democracy is such a good thing. And one can pause at the irony of our nation’s insistence upon quick elections in Iraq; we were trying to promote the ideals of the Enlightenment, but our method was hijacked by an ancient force coming from a blood-feud world. <\/p>\n

Sharansky’s comparison between post-war Germany and post-war Iraq is on the money. But restoring the economy in Iraq and bringing its society back into the developed world would probably have required even longer than the four or five years that it took to get Germany to the point where elections made sense. Rushing the elections in Iraq, along with not sending enough troops to secure the place and not having a well planned, adequately funded program to rebuild the infrastructure and the economy there, is going to earn Mr. Bush a place in history alongside U.S. Grant (who flubbed the Reconstruction after the Civil War, setting the stage for continuing racial strife) and Woodrow Wilson (who couldn’t put Europe back together after WW1, setting the stage for WW2).<\/p>\n

Too bad that Mr. Bush didn’t take more seriously the books that he (supposedly) based his policies on.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Book Review . . . Sort Of. One of the assistant prosecutors at my office was nice enough to loan me a copy of Natan Sharansky‘s 2004 book THE CASE FOR DEMOCRACY. I had previously read something about Sharansky, how his book was a favorite of President Bush and his friends. So I’ve taken a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/469"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=469"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/469\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=469"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=469"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=469"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}