On NPR this morning, they were covering reactions to President Obama’s recent trip to the Middle East. Most accounts consider it a disappointing visit. But I wondered at this effort to fit the square peg of Democracy into the round hole of thousands of years of theocracy and sectarian struggle.
Things are especially bad in the Middle East, it seems to me, if you’re a female. I read things like this:
Three hundred women in Kabul protested a new law
making it illegal for a woman to refuse her husband’s
sexual advances for more than four days in a row unless
she is ill or menstruating. “Get out of here, you whores!”
yelled counterdemonstrators.
and marvel at how different Ava’s life is going to be (and is now) compared to most of her Middle East counterparts. If there were even the serious belief among anyone in “The West” that people in these cultures desired some other form of government, how’s it possible to estimate how long such a transition would take? Is there any logic in attempting to promote this change from outside those countries? I wonder what the Middle East will look like by the time Ava graduates from high school in 14 years. What could possibly happen in such a relatively short period?
This is not a political blog.