Wojtek, I don't disagree with you that institutional arrangements make a difference, but we are talking about the Middle East here, where the main distinction is between countries that have any sort of legal mechanisms that allow people to express their political preferences at all, without resorting to arms, and countries that have no such things. There have been shortcomings in the elections in Iran (e.g., the Guardian Council's disqualification of candidates) and Palestine (e.g., Tel Aviv and Washington's interferences), but the fact of the matter is that the Iranian and Palestinian peoples have had means to express their political preferences, unlike the Iraqi people under the pre-war Iraqi government, which often claimed things like this: "Iraqi officials say President Saddam Hussein has won 100% backing in a referendum on whether he should rule for another seven years. There were 11,445,638 eligible voters -- and every one of them voted for the president, according to Izzat Ibrahim, Vice-Chairman of Iraq's Revolutionary Command Council" ("Saddam 'Wins 100% of Vote,'" 16 October 2002, <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/2331951.stm>). As soon as the Ba'ath Party fell, the Iraqis expressed their preferences for illiberalism, through elections, which brought Shi'i Islamists into the government; through street mobilizations, which has repeatedly shown the popularity of Moktada al-Sadr, an illiberal Shi'i cleric, among the poor; and through armed struggles against the occupier and sectarian violence (which has risen dramatically this year, especially since the bombing of a Shi'i mosque in Samarra).
Even in Israel and Turkey, among the most secularized areas of the Middle East, democracy has not led to political liberalism: in Israel, politicians who are not committed to Zionism, according to which good life in Israel = a Jewish majority, cannot hope to get elected any time soon; and in Turkey, gradual democratization has led to the rise of the Justice and Development Party, a populist party with Islamist roots, rather than a rise of secular leftist parties (e.g., Democratic Society Party, etc.) or a resurgence of the Republican People's Party (Turkey would move more in a populist Islamist direction but for its military, which has repeatedly intervened in Turkish political life -- through coups, the National Security Council, etc. -- to block all forces opposed to its positions on secularism, the Kurds and other minorities, alliance with Washington, and so on).
> The bottom line here is that in a very rudimentary sense, liberalism is a
> necessary condition of democracy, as democracy that suppresses individual
> freedoms is a contradiction in terms, or perhaps a meaningless propaganda
> slogan. Yet, this tautology does not tell us much how political systems
> actually work. The devil is in institutional details.
In the Middle East, individual freedoms in some aspects of life can be only guaranteed by severe limits to or outright negation of individual freedoms in other aspects of life -- such as freedom of speech -- as well as by absence of democracy, for the time being.
The populace express their preference for a combination of liberalism and democracy -- liberal democracy -- only in high-income countries of the world.
The rest of the world tend to prefer illiberal democracy, and if you don't like that, you have to live with dictatorship -- which makes space for some personal freedoms at the expense of political freedoms -- that suppresses democracy. -- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/> <http://mrzine.org> <http://monthlyreview.org/>