"Democracy" in the Middle East: switching terrorist teams.

The January 25 elections in Palestine brought a major upset, with Hamas (the Islamic Resistance Movement) winning 74 seats out of a total of 132 parliamentary seats up for grabs. Thus does Hamas, a radical Islamist military-politico-terrorist group, now replace Fatah, a radical Marxist military-politico-terrorist group, as the new ruling power of the Palestinian Authority.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, who has run the Palestinian Authority since the November 2004 death of PLO terrorist chief Yasir Arafat, announced that he would ask his Hamas rivals to form the next government. Meanwhile, amidst repeated violent street clashes between Hamas supporters and Fatah loyalists, the U.S. and European leaders threatened to cut off their share of the more than $1.6 billion in annual aid to the corrupt and bankrupt Palestinian Authority because of Hamas' long-standing vow to destroy Israel and its sponsorship of several dozen suicide bombings against Israel. U.S. taxpayers have been providing about $400 million per year in aid to the Palestinian Authority.

President George Bush has repeatedly insisted that it is a primary U.S. goal to use our military to bring "democracy" not only to Iraq, but to the entire Middle East and the whole world. Now democracy has spoken again with a very unpleasant voice. The Hamas victory in Palestine follows on the heels of similar electoral victories by anti-American radicals: Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Iran; Jalal Talabani in Iraq; the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt; Evo Morales in Bolivia; Lula de Silva in Brazil; Hugo Chavez in Venezuela; and Nestor Kirchner in Argentina. Far from having a moderating influence in the Middle East, the continued U.S. military occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan has driven many more Muslims into the arms of the most extreme Islamic elements.

However, aside from the fact that democracy cannot be forced on nations at the point of a gun, there is another overarching fact of which U.S. political leaders in both the Republican and Democrat Parties seem to wish to remain invincibly ignorant: the United States of America is not a democracy; it is a republic. America's Founding Fathers were virtually unanimous in denouncing democracy and in stressing the profound differences between a democracy and a republic. President Bush says we must promote democracy to end tyranny; our Founding Fathers warned that democracy was a sure road to tyranny. (See "A Republic, If You Can Keep It" in the November 6, 2000 issue of TNA.)