alt Hacker NewsYes, there are a lot of bad options in the Middle East; Islamic theocracy has no monopoly on awfulness.
I think the broader point is that a democracy is unstable when the electorate just votes for their favourite warlord / cleric, who promptly ends / rigs any further elections.
In the Middle East, there appears to be a pattern of electorates voting for / staging a revolution in favour of Islamists, which either leads to a terrible Islamist regime, or leads to an elite coup, which of course destroys the democracy in the process. Worst case scenario all of this happens at once in different places, and you get a terrible civil war.
Democracy is great, but it requires an electorate that actually wants to sustain and retain a democracy. Those appear to be few and far in between.
> In the Middle East, there appears to be a pattern of electorates voting for / staging a revolution in favour of Islamists, which either leads to a terrible Islamist regime, or leads to an elite coup, which of course destroys the democracy in the process.
that pattern is hardly unique to middle east/islamists though. look at central/south america. guatemala, chile, brazil etc all had democracies overthrown by "elite" coups.
like almost every instance in the middle east, there is actually a common denominator between these coups... resistance to the US-led order magically seems to invite instability.