As it happens, the opposition party in Burma, the one getting shot, is called the National League for Democracy. Not the National League for Stability, but Democracy. ~Daniel Henninger

That’s a really profound observation.  Very good.  Henninger has the critics on the ropes now!  Of course, the government calls itself the State Peace and Development Council, and it is clearly interested in neither peace nor development.  I don’t assume that the opposition is quite as dishonest in its choice of names, but obviously any dissident movement that wants Washington’s attention and support will invoke the magic d-word.  Every corrupt oligarch around the globe who wants to overthrow his government knows that much.

Henninger says later:

Instead, it’s that the president’s critics felt compelled not only to refute Iraq but every jot of the Bush foreign policy, including its espousal of democracy and freedom. They have come very close to displacing the Bush Doctrine with the idea that promoting democracy in difficult places is, very simply, a mistake.

But it is a mistake.  It was a mistake when JFK promoted it, and it will be a mistake should Obama continue to promote it in the future.  In its substance, it is actually a bad idea.  The Near East’s woes brought on, or rather exacerbated by, democratisation have sobered up people who just two years ago were saying silly things about an Arab Spring.  The attempt is misguided, and in most cases it is also likely to cause still more suffering.  It is certainly a mistake as it concerns American interests in almost every case, at least when the elections reflect the opinions of the people in the country, and it is also very likely a mistake for most of the countries proposed as “beneficiaries” of this great gift.  These are not things for us to promote, but they are instead things that we should practice and offer as examples.  If they are to have any meaning and to have legitimacy in many of these countries it is imperative that their promotion be indigenous and has nothing to do with us. 

Here’s the real gem:

Nations with freely operating political parties are likely to be centripetal; their energies bend inward, fighting with each other. In places without real politics, they sit in cafes plotting how to kill innocent civilians 2,000 miles outside their borders.

Which is, of course, why we didn’t invade Iraq (and Panama) and never bombed Yugoslavia–we were too busy fighting one another over school vouchers and Social Security reform!  In places without so-called “real politics” (whatever that means–politics are just as “real” when they are authoritarian, as people in Burma know only too well), people are usually preoccupied with targeting the government that denies them those “real politics.”  Or did I miss the Karen bomb attacks in Beijing?  The overwhelming majority of people in such countries does not engage in far-flung terrorist conspiracies against distant countries.  Instead, they endure and occasionally rise up against their own governments to attempt to free themselves, which is the only sort of liberation that ever truly lasts.