With Islamist parties having apparently triumphed in the December 15 elections in Iraq and with the Hamas Islamist terrorist faction poised to make a strong showing in elections scheduled for January 26 in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, one can expect the doubters of democracy to start drum-beating again. Arabs are unfit or “not ready” for democracy, their argument goes. If allowed to vote, the Arabs will elect rulers who are even more anti-American than the current autocrats, the critics say.

The anti-democracy argument is even being bruited in defense of Syria’s Bashar Assad. A former Israeli general who is now a Labor Party member of Israel’s parliament, Ephraim Sneh, told our Benny Avni this week that while Mr. Assad “may not represent our greatest dreams…whoever replaces him might be much worse.” Defenders of Hosni Mubarak’s regime in Egypt argue that a free election there might bring the Muslim Brotherhood to power. Maybe the Bush doctrine of bringing democracy to the Middle East isn’t such a bright idea, the critics say.

What these setbacks call for is not the abandonment of the project of liberating or democratizing the Middle East but rather some tactical adjustments. These columns have long warned, along with Michael Ledeen and others, that failing to move aggressively to promote democracy in Syria and Iran could cripple the effort in Iraq. One of the leaders of the movement for freedom and democracy in the Middle East, Natan Sharansky, argues in his book “The Case for Democracy” that elections should be the last step in democratization – taking place only after the establishment of conditions such as a free press and the rule of law. In respect of the Palestinian Authority, the choices need not be only between Hamas and the gang of former aides to Yasser Arafat. America could help promote a third faction of non-corrupt, non-violent, pro-American leaders.

Most important to note is the fact that it is not the elections that are spawning the Islamism, but the prior failed repressive regimes. From the Shah in Iran that led to the 1979 revolution to Mubarak’s regime in Egypt that spawned the Muslim Brotherhood to the Saudi and Soviet regimes that spawned Al Qaeda to the Baathist regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq that has spawned some of the Islamist parties there, Islamic extremism often breeds like a fever in the swamp of failed state-dominated economies and restriction of political and economic freedoms.

Where the Islamists do take power, as in Iran, the revolutionary energy tends to seep away as the public realizes the Islamist rulers are as corrupt and repressive as their predecessors. Veterans of slavery sometimes hanker after its simplicity, as the Bible tells us the children of Israel wandering in the desert hankered after the onions of Egypt. So it’s not surprising to see some support for Islamic dictatorships of one kind or another among survivors of nationalist dictatorships. But eventually a generation arises that makes it to the promised land.