NEWSWEEK  Is President Bush's plan to spread democracy turning into a fiasco? It doesn't have to. But it does need to change.
LINK: Newsweek Article  EXCERTPS:

For decades the Middle East has been a political desert. In Iraq, the reason that there are no countervailing liberal parties is that Saddam Hussein destroyed them. He could not completely crush mosque-based groups and, by the end of his reign, he actually used them to shore up his own legitimacy.

In much of the Muslim world Islam became the language of political opposition because it was the only language that could not be censored. This pattern, of dictators using religious groups to destroy the secular opposition, played itself out in virtually every Arab country, and often beyond. It was the method by which Pakistan's Gen. Zia ul-Haq maintained his own dictatorship in the 1980s, creating a far stronger fundamentalist movement than that country had ever known.

The broader reason for the rise of Islamic politics has been the failure of secular politics. Secularism exists in the Middle East. It is embodied by Saddam Hussein and Muammar Kaddafi and Hosni Mubarak and Yasir Arafat. Arabs believe that they have tried Western-style politics and it has brought them tyranny and stagnation. They feel that they got a bastardized version of the West and that perhaps the West was not the right model for them anyway.

Islamic fundamentalism plays deeply to these feelings. It evokes authenticity, pride, cultural assertiveness and defiance. These ideas have been powerful sources of national identity throughout history and remain so, especially in an age of globalized economics and American power. In face of the powerlessness, alienation and confusion that the modern world breeds, these groups say simply, "Islam is the solution."

Elections have not created political Islam in the Middle East. They have codified a reality that existed anyway. Hamas was already a major player to be reckoned with in Gaza. The Muslim Brotherhood is popular in Egypt, whether or not Hosni Mubarak holds real elections. In fact, the more they are suppressed, the greater their appeal. If politics is more open, these groups may or may not moderate themselves, but they will surely lose some of that mystical allure they now have. The martyrs will become mayors, which is quite a fall in status.

ABC NEWS LINK: Article EXCERPTS:

President Bush has unwittingly helped Islamists flex their political muscle and sow the seeds of a peaceful Islamic revolution, though not in the direction he envisioned. The secular political order imposed after World War I appears to be coming apart — under the strains of oppression and socioeconomic decline — but it is Islam, not liberal democracy, that is stepping into the breach.

A recent public opinion survey showed three out of every four Arab respondents believe that the main motives of U.S. policies in the Middle East are "oil, protecting Israel, dominating the region and weakening the Muslim world."

Ideologically, Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood are closer to the Iranian mullahs than to the modernist Turkish Islamists.

One thing is clear: Islamists will meet a fate similar to their secular precursors if they do not deliver the social goods, or if they entrap their people in costly military adventures against their real or imagined enemies. The electorate would disown them as surely as it is turning away from today's leaders.  The Muslim electorate is not itself Islamist in a radical or fundamentalist way; rather, it is disaffected and fed up with oppression, corruption and incompetence, and is "throwing the bums out".