Morocco’s Fragile Democracy Tests U.S. Prescription for World describes itself as “the first in a series of articles exploring America’s dominant place in the world and the limits to it.” The series’ basic premise is that democracy often puts tremendously illiberal parties in power:
Democracy has had a good run in the past decade and a half. It put down roots, albeit often shallow, across much of the former Soviet Union. It swept apartheid from South Africa, communism from Eastern Europe, dictatorships from South America and political machines from Taiwan, Indonesia and South Korea. Yet democracy has sometimes empowered the intolerant. The big winner in a December election in Serbia, for instance, was an ultranationalist party allied with ex-President Slobodan Milosevic, now on trial in The Hague for war crimes.The perils are especially keen in Muslim lands, where fervent Islamists are often the only organized alternative to entrenched and frequently corrupt elites. In Iraq, the U.S. wrestles with the influence of clerics from the Shiite Muslim majority, including some radicals who want a rigid theocracy. Others don’t push for this but insist on direct elections likely to be dominated by sectarian passions. And here in Morocco, after the suicide attacks, King Mohammed VI, in a somber television address, pinpointed the cause in those “who take advantage of democracy … to sow seeds of ostracism, fanaticism and discord.”