Here is a crude summary:
1. Osama bin Laden may unwittingly have contributed to the process of democratization unfolding in the Middle East.
2. This is because 9/11 altered the course of US foreign policy.
3. And what is happening in the region has 'something to do with' that change in policy.
4. But it's not a result of the invasion of Iraq, nor does it justify it.
What it's a crude summary of is an article by Timothy Garton Ash in today's Guardian. But crude though it may be, I don't believe it is significantly inaccurate in the way it sums up Garton Ash's presentation of the causal chain. I find it odd how Bin Laden has had a democratizing effect, and had that effect through the Bush administration's foreign policy, but just not through the war which got rid of Saddam Hussein.
The oddity is covered by the nicely general 'something to do with', which gives Garton Ash leave to disentangle the democratization efforts of the US in the region from its military intervention in Iraq:
Washington has groped its way, by a process of trial and error, to a strategic position which it is entirely possible for democrats in both Europe and the Arab world to engage with. A key part of that groping was the realisation in Iraq that, while the United States could win any war on its own, it could not win the subsequent peace; and that democracy would not come overnight, out of the barrel of a gun.You see, before they thought democracy would appear just like that, out of the barrel of a gun, and without any internal initiative, any self-detemining participation, from Iraqis themselves. Now they have come by a more mature and gradualist understanding of the process, to which we can all sign up.
Only thing is, one of the preconditions of that gradualism is the entirely new absence of a murderous dictatorship standing in its way. Garton Ash fails to tell us how it was to have been eliminated. He merely tells us that he prefers peaceful change - as don't we all? To repeat a point from yesterday: hand-waving.