Written by Natan Sharansky and Ron Dermer, The Case for Democracy applies the lessons of the Cold War to the current middle eastern based conflicts. Although filled with insightful observations and an outstanding history lesson, the book glosses over a number of tricky implementation details with regards to future policy suggestions. The authors are also eerily quiet on the US' current Middle Eastern strategy; one can easily imagine that they are critical of it, but don't want to discourage one of the few leaders with "moral clarity".
Much of the first half of the book is dedicated to convincing the skeptical reader that democracies are inherently more stable and better neighbors than non-democracies. I'm not convinced that isn't trivially obvious to most people, and would have rather heard a discussion about the costs of spreading democracy. In the end they make a pretty compelling case that democracy is good, but never tackle the issue that sometimes the cost of encouraging democracy might be greater than leaving things alone (or encouraging non-democratic reforms).
One historical lesson that the Western media needs to take to heart is that news, opinion polls, and elections from non-free countries cannot be reported as fact. Sharansky and Dermer define a free society in the following way:
A society is free if people have a right to express their views without fear of arrest, imprisonment, or physical harm.
To report (as CNN liked to do) that Saddam Hussein received 99% of the popular vote without calling the elections a sham in the same breath is to do your audience a tremendous disservice.
Israel, on the other hand, needs to learn that making concessions in exchange for nothing is not a winning strategy for peace. Sharansky and Dermer provide numerous examples of the various Israeli governments all trying to demonstrate "good faith" and then regretting it afterwards. They are also very critical of Israel for effectively installing Arafat as the Palestinian dictator rather than encouraging a democratic movement. In this regard I think that Sharansky and Dermer are mistaken; if Israel had replaced Arafat after he made it clear that he was not going to encourage any kind of peace (or installed a non-terrorist as dictator), things may have gone a lot better. But to continue making concessions was a case of throwing good money after bad.
The book's central premise is that all people want to be free, regardless of whether that involves discarding core tenets of their ancient culture. Sharansky and Dermer invoke the WWII examples of Japan, Germany and Italy as nations that were largely be believed to be un-democratizable, and yet have become upstanding world citizens. However, they make another mistep here by failing to address the difference between the total devastation that those nations endured and the current Middle East conflicts where great pains are taken to minimize collateral damage and avoid confrontation with the power that is pulling the strings of the "resistance" movements.
Using the Helsinki Agreements as a model for the way forward, Sharansky and Dermer believe that the most effective method of combating terrorist supporting nations is to tie their internal support for basic human rights to trade and technology transfers. The book describes how those agreements and support from the United States forced the USSR to choose between maintaining its power through fear and falling even farther behind economically and technologically. Sharansky and Dermer argue that the same tools would work against all non-democratic regimes.
It is a very attractive idea, but the reader is left wondering whether it applies now as well as it did to the USSR during the Cold War, which had no greater power to which it could appeal to for help. It doesn't seem likely that Palestine, Iraq, or Afghanistan could be pressured in this way as long as Iran has a free hand. And Russia could easily (and probably would) undermine efforts to press for change in Iran.
