Authors in the News: Daniel Hannon on Democracy as a Tool
In his recent column in The Telegraph, New Threats author Daniel Hannon strikes a very similar chord as fellow contributor Anne Applebaum did in her recent WP op-ed piece: that the West has been wrong to prop up tyrants just because they've shown some degree of support for the War on Terror and that this choice has had some dire consequences.
Hannon notes that by withdrawing our support for those regimes and allowing true democracy to rise in their stead, both the War on Terror and the war of ideas of against Islamic fundamentalism might actually get a good deal easier. Most interestingly, he notes that even if Islamic fundamentalists come to power via free and open popular elections (an outcome that some see as likely), those newly empowered leaders would quickly lose one of their most powerful recruiting tools: the mystique of being oppressed. He writes:
Give people responsibility, as Keith Joseph never tired of saying, and they will behave responsibly. A government that contained representatives of the Muslim Brotherhood would soon find itself wrestling with all the quotidian difficulties and compromises that attend on parliamentary politics. The Brotherhood depends on the mystique of repression, the purity of opposition. In office, it would soon accommodate itself to reality.
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