Can't Even Follow The Plot For A Few Paragraphs

"Democracy" as we understand it can't be reduced to just "people who win the elections get to do what they want," but the idea of people being able to vote was the key rhetorical frame of this supposed zeal for spreading Democracy.

President George W. Bush had pushed for Palestinian elections, in part as an outgrowth of his administration’s ideological zeal for spreading democracy in the Middle East through whatever means necessary. As Hamas’s victory became clear, Bush said the vote reflected Palestinians’ disenchantment with their prevailing leadership, who had been elected a decade prior in the wake of the signing of the Oslo accords. |

“There was a peaceful process as people went to the polls, and that’s positive,” Bush told reporters. “But what’s also positive is that it’s a wake-up call to the leadership. Obviously people were not happy with the status quo. The people are demanding honest government. The people want services.”

Within the Bush administration, there was anguish. A recognized terrorist organization that was refusing to disarm its armed wing or revise elements of its charter that sought the destruction of the state of Israel had secured democratic legitimacy. “Everyone blamed everyone else,” an official with the Department of Defense told Vanity Fair in 2008. “We sat there in the Pentagon and said, ‘Who the f--- recommended this?’ ”

As it turned out, Hamas never ended up steering the Palestinian democratic experiment. Western powers temporarily turned off the tap of aid to the Palestinian Authority; Israel clamped down on the Gaza Strip and detained dozens of Hamas officials, including elected legislators. The schism between Abbas and Fatah in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza exploded in a bloody set of battles that saw Hamas violently wrest full control of the Gaza Strip in 2007, allegedly after the Bush administration tried to foment an anti-Hamas putsch in the territory.

Their zeal for Democracy is the same as the MAGA zeal for Democracy - it's good when we like the results, otherwise it's illegitimate.

Over 15 years later can we stop pretending that the Bushies were trying to spread Democracy? Fucking hell.

Charitably, the writer is being ironic here. Good chance it's true! But readers shouldn't have to be that clever to get that the writer is winking at them, especially when it's in the Washigton Post where most of the "foreign policy" opinion ghouls *do* believe the freeance and peeance shit.