fareed

Here’s a great map of the world colored in relative civil and political liberties.

And here is an article by Fareed Zakaria that I read in Newsweek this morning:

George W. Bush is not a man for second thoughts, but even he might have had some recently. Ever since 9/11, Bush has made the promotion of democracy in the Middle East the center-piece of his foreign policy, and doggedly pushed the issue. Over the last few months, however, this approach has borne strange fruit, culminating in Hamas’s victory in Gaza and the West Bank. Before that, we have watched it strengthen Hizbullah in Lebanon, which (like Hamas) is often described in the West as a terrorist organization. In Iraq, the policy has brought into office conservative religious parties with their own private militias. In Egypt, it has bolstered the Muslim Brotherhood, one of the oldest fundamentalist organizations in the Arab world, from which Al Qaeda descends. “Democracies replace resentment with hope, respect the rights of their citizens and their neighbors, and join the fight against terror,” Bush said last week in his State of the Union address. But is this true of the people coming to power in the Arab world today?

also, mad statistics