The "Arab Street" would rather be free

Yahoo! News - Syrian Troops Begin Pullback in Lebanon

Further evidence of freedom breaking out in the Middle East, and it just does the heart good to see that the vaunted "Arab street" seems to prefer democracy to thuggish dictatorship. But my biggest reaction to the continued march of freedom in the Muslim world is to hope that its citizens notice that terrorism has not caused it. The Iraqis, Afghanis, Egyptians, Saudis, Palestenians, and Lebanese have not been freed or made progress toward freedom because of Hamas or Islamic jihad.

Some misguided teen blowing up students at a Tel Aviv nightclub didn't improve the state of Palestinian government and prospects for peace - elections and participation did (that and a big friggin' wall, but that's another post).

Tens of thousands of peaceful Lebanese demonstrators did what a hundred terrorists never could. They stood and spoke with one voice that they were sick and tired of being sick and tired. In a matter of days the Lebanese are more free than they have been in some time.

Egyptians will have multiple candidates to choose from in the first free presidential elections there since the early 80's, and no one had to kill a bus full of school children to do it.

Saudis will at least get to vote for local municipal government officials instead of having the day to day details of their lives run by the King's assistant's third cousin, and Bin Laden had nothing to do with it (and is probably not too happy about it).

The thing is, Muslims aren't as dumb as some might think. They have a heritage of scholarship going back hundreds of years (I read about the thirteenth century islamic thinker Averroes in a book about mathematics just today - see, conservatives can read, too). The folks in the street and in the palaces and statehouses can look around and see that the sky is blue.

The folks in the steet will look around and make one of two observations:

1 - hey, those people across the border don't have to put up with this garbage. Let's do something about our country - long live the revolution!

2 - hey, those people across the border don't have to put up with this garbage. Honey, pack the minivan, were moving to Iraq!

Either way, the crazy thugs will diminish and the freedom lovers will prosper. Freedom will give birth to greater economic growth and opportunity as it always does in the long run. Maybe one day we'll buy DVD players with instructions we can't read that are in arabic and not japanese.

Unless we demonstrate that we can't be counted on to back them up when they need it. There will be a backlash in some quarters against all this that might even be severe as one more historical monster takes its last gasping breath. We have to stick and not run when that happens. Fortunately that's one characteristic of the adminstration that's not changing for some time. Dubya seems to be committed to the course of "expanding democracy in the Middle East" (Peggy Noonan is probably not calling that pie-in-the-sky now I bet).

The character of America is being seen world-wide, from helping muslim tsunami victims in Indonesia to NOT taking all the oil and running in Iraq. The "Arab Street" has seen the results and seems like it prefers democracy to autocratic thuggery. Our character will enable us to stay the course, and I'm betting that theirs will too.