A Nobel for Democracy

Blamed if we don’t admire the Norwegian Nobel Committee’s decision in respect of this year’s peace prize. We were favoring the award of the prize to G.I. Joe, a long-time cause of this newspaper, but the prize went instead to the Tunisian National Dialogue Quartet for what the Norwegians called its “decisive contribution to the building of a pluralistic democracy in Tunisia in the wake of the Jasmine Revolution of 2011.”It’s a relief in and of itself that the prize didn’t go to Secretary of State Kerry and, as our editor put it the other day at the New York Post, his “diplomatic doppelganger,” Mohammad Javad Zarif of Iran. It seemed to us that the partners in appeasement could fairly taste the Prix Nobel, to use the language Mr. Kerry is often ribbed for favoring. We’d like to think the Norwegians came to their senses with each post-pact threat of the ayatollahs to destroy Israel.In any event, let us not look a gift horse in the mouth. On top of pre-empting Mr. Kerry, after all, giving the prize to the Quartet has its own logic, particularly in this age when both the left and the right seem to be abandoning the dream of Arab and Iranian democracy. Just the other day, Peter Beinart fetched up with a column saying he agreed with Donald Trump that Iraq would be better off had it been left under the boot of Saddam.Despite the human rights alliance of Saddam, Beinart & Trump, we have never turned against the quest the Congress of the United States, the Security Council of the United Nations, and President Bush undertook in Iraq. We like to think we’re under no illusions about the difficulties of Arab democracy; when President Mubarak was toppled at Egypt, we recalled Ariel Sharon’s warning. But the difficulties don’t negate the ideal.Tunisia’s Quartet isn’t, by our lights, perfect. But it has helped keep the dream of Arab democracy alive, and that is no small thing. One of the things we like about the Quartet is that it has a constituent of Free Labor, as did, say, the government in Poland, where Solidarity played a leading role in cracking communistic rule. The Quartet in Tunisia played a supportive role in enabling the writing of a Constitution that is, we are told by a friend who has spent time formally observing the transition at Tunisia, easily the best in the Arab world. There will be threats against Tunisia for years, but the Nobel will help burnish its example.

A Nobel for Democracy

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