John posts an article showing some poll results about Middle Eastern attitudes toward western democracy.

An online poll was recently carried out by the Arabic website of Aljazeera satellite television, where well over 80 percent of voters said that they distrust ???????Western democracy”. The poll results simply restated the obvious. The query, of course, hardly meant to question ???????Western democracy??????? in its own right, but rather its imposition on the Arab world.

Like John notes, the statistics may or may not be off. I remember when the Democratic Underground built up a huge list of online polls for its users to offset, sometimes by up to 30% or so. John:

The article is worth reading if only to get an idea of where a lot of the resistence to American ideas about installing democracy in the Middle East is coming from. The fact that so many Arabs see it as a matter of power politics????????that the US is trying to cut the Arab world to make it fit the democracy suit????????is real. The thinking behind it is largely due to misunderstandings about what the US????????and the West, in general????????are about.

President Bush made some mentions of this in his inaugural speech that we wouldn’t instill our form of democratic government on Iraq. I think people will warm up about things, at least to a degree, once they see Iraqis choose their own Constitution and their own form of rule.