| > On the other hand, if you let democracy That's your problem right there. Many of these countries are either under direct occupation of the US or its allies, or having a puppet government which answers to them and not to the population in any significant sense (e.g. Jordan, Bahrain when it's not occupied by KSA). So when you write "you let", the subject is the foreign occupier. The most important thing which should happen is for "you" not to be able to "let" or "not let" people manage their lives one way or the other. > get a foothold in many of the muslim-majority states, the winner of a democratic process will very likely be what the west perceives as a religious fundamentalist group On the contrary. This happens when, in that country, you have fundamentalist forces which have been trained, equipped and sometimes even ferried in by the US (e.g. via the CIA) or its allies. Examples: Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya. There is also the effects of decades of trying to suppress left-wing forces in various places in the world, which leaves a vacuum which fundametalist Islamist forces may fill, as in the case of Iran. When that's not the case, you get something like Egypt, Tunisia, Yemen in the 1960s, Egypt in the 1950s, Iraq in the 1950s, Palestine in the 1930s etc. Bottom line: When the US (and other Imperialist powers) don't intervene and manipulate things, the results are not what you're worried about. > every single value that the west holds dear (including democracy itself). Assuming "The West" means the EU states and the US, then I don't see how they hold democracy dear. They routinely prefer their national ruling classes' interests over democracy. We have even seen a recent example of this within Europe itself, where nobody opposed the Spanish Monarchy's suppression of Catalonian democracy. |