In doing some reading re: the goings on in Egypt and a few other countries I've begun to wonder if it's even remotely possible all of these popular uprisings are the result of something sinister (attempts to instill unrest so Islamic gov'ts can be installed) or the result of a true desire by these people to have democratic representation.

I came across THIS article from the CATO Institute written in 2003. It's no secret one of Bush's stated goals in Iraq was to install a democratic form of government in that country...and if successful that might cause a spread of representative government around the region. Most people at the time followed the conventional wisdom that held that wasn't possible (myself included).

Instead, as the president declared, the success of freedom rests upon the willingness of free peoples to sacrifice. But the people of the Middle East, not the people of the United States, must make these sacrifices. Indeed, heavy-handed attempts to force democracy upon the region by military conquest will ultimately prove counter-productive toward those ends, as the events in Iraq are showing us every day.
But now we've seen this thing as it's started to play out in Egypt...with what is starting to look like positive results (is that just naive optimism?). We have similar stirrings in Bahrain, Yemen and a few other mid-Eastern and North African Muslim countries. Hell...there's even opposition protests gaining strength in Iran.

So...why is that? Is this the beginning of something good or something bad? It could be the start of something quite interesting in the middle-East.