Democracy Watch

Those first couple of baby steps to a functioning democracy can be so ugly sometimes. As I'm sure everyone knows the National Assembly of Iraq had a collective breakdown yesterday when they tried to select a Sunni speaker. Ghazi Yawar, the man tapped to be speaker, probably realized that he had exceeded the life expectancy of a Sunni in the new Iraqi gov't and opted to drop out. This mess could delay a permanent charter and full elections. The search continues...

In Lebanon the current gov't plans to quit and elections are promised as soon as all Syrian troops are gone. As the WaPost notes no mention was made of the status of 5,000 intelligence officers in the country. In news that should not even be considered new a member of Hamas has admitted to having been trained in Syria. Can we lay to rest the notion that secular pan-Arabist terrorists will not work with Islamist terrorists?

The Pakistani Ambassador has noticed a trend -

In the Middle East, in fact all over the world, to get your act together as far as your human rights, freedom and so on are concerned.

This was just before he defended Musharraf's claim to power for the sake of stability although he did confess that the democracy ripple is bound to affect Pakistan. He also blamed bin Laden for starting "a situation nobody in his right mind would want." Is he referring to bin Laden's situation or Musharraf's.

Finally in Turkey the PM Reccep Tayip is pissed because they are drawing funny caricatures of him. I swear I am not making this up. So now we have amendments to the criminal code to clamp down on dissent. The original offending cartoonist has drew a $3,700 the cartoonists who followed suit in protest could face up to $30,000 fines. On a more serious note the speech code also slams journalists, publishers, imans, pastors and rabbis.