Newsweek Article

I came across this very interesting Newsweek article today. It discusses the situation in Gaza and the West Bank.
But what I found more interesting was The US's confidence that Democracy should work for all countries, no matter their cultural background or, more importantly, their lack of desire to be a democracy.
The US fails to understand that not every country needs to be, or even should be, a democracy. Perhaps the US, which has failed miserably to impose its ideals in other countries, should simply stick to governing the US and let other countries worry about their own problems. The US is currently stuck in Iraq with no "exit strategy" because Iraq is not a place that should be a democracy and it is a place that is currently failing as a democracy. Iraq and the Palestinian Authority are clear examples of what happens when a government tries to impose its ideals on a country that does not share the same ideals. It is, in the end, the US's fault, for example, that Hamas ended up in power in Gaza because it was the US that insisted elections be held, despite Abbas' attempts to delay the 2006 elections:

The Israelis didn't want Palestinian elections back in January 2006. Even Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, had been worried about them and kept asking for delays. As early as the spring of 2005, Abbas had warned American officials that he did not have the popular support to disarm Hamas, the Islamist party that turned suicide terror bombings into a standard tactic in Israel and which both Abbas and the Israelis saw was growing in power. But Bush administration officials insisted, confident of the curative powers of democracy. Later, after Hamas stunned the world by winning control of the Palestinian Parliament, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice claimed: "Nobody saw it coming."

The line could describe much of what has resulted from George W. Bush's efforts to transform the world—or at least one part of it, the Middle East.

How could you not have seen it coming?! Did you really expect to impose your ideals on other cultures and expect those cultures would simply say, "Oh, yes, US! You obviously know best so we'll just do everything you tell us to do..."?!
Then:

The next American president will have to grapple with a Middle East that is messier and quite possibly angrier than before 9/11. But also, in a larger sense, he or she will have to confront anew a harsh lesson in the limits of power. America can only be, at best, a guiding hand behind an international system that is disposed to democracy and open markets. Bush is himself coming to acknowledge this, especially by maintaining a multilateral front with the Europeans to deal with the nuclear threat from Iran. Rice, in her NEWSWEEK interview, acknowledged that the administration had scaled down its hopes for "transformational" policy. "We're laying the foundations for someone else to succeed in the future, and I think that's fine." But right now, success looks very far away indeed.

Gee, thanks Condi! You left the Mid East a mess, the Arabs pretty much hate everyone now, and all you end up doing is saying, "oh, yeah, we're laying the foundation and the next president can clean up our mess." And you "think that's fine?!" Say it like it is!! You screwed up and you don't have any idea how to fix it. So, you just lay the responsibility on someone else!
This is typical Republican Modus Operandi: Screw up the country, the world, and then say "oh, we're laying the foundation for someone else to succeed in the future..." Just lovely. How about from now on we just skip the step of having Republicans in office and try to make the world a better place, since all the Republicans seem able to do is screw it worse and worse every time they're in power, thus making the mess harder and harder for a competent administration to clean it up and put things right.