Laura Rosen in MoJo, here
"...While pro-democracy advocates fault the resistance of the bureaucracy, they acknowledge that there were other geopolitical factors that hurt their cause as well. One was the January 2006 election of Hamas in the Palestinian territories—an election the Bush administration pushed hard for—which confronted the administration with the grim prospect that democratic elections in some Middle East states would bring not liberal democrats but militant Islamists to power. "The election of Hamas had a chilling effect," Carpenter says. "What's more, when governments in the region saw that we were prepared to go that far—to have elections in which Hamas would come to power—they themselves put on the brakes." In July 2006, a pro-democracy success story in Lebanon that began with the Cedar Revolution and the withdrawal of Syrian forces the previous year devolved into a devastating 34-day war between Israel and Lebanon after Hezbollah kidnapped Israeli soldiers..."
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