Charles Krauthammer has it right: Peace Through Democracy.

The president’s proposal for democratizing Palestine is a fundamental rejection of the Oslo conceit that you could impose upon Palestinian society a PLO thugocracy led by the inventors of modern terrorism and then be surprised that seven years later it exploded in violence.

After a decade of ignoring the Palestinian Authority’s corruption, its incitement to hatred, its militarization of Palestinian society, its glorification of violence, indeed, its creation in Palestine, as nowhere else on earth, of a deeply disturbed cult of death, the United States has declared that with this leadership there can be no peace.

The Bush proposal is grounded in the larger American idea that the spread of democracy is fundamental not only to the spread of American values but also to the achievement of peace. Ironically, the man who first insisted that this idea had to be applied to the Middle East is Natan Sharansky, hero of the gulag. Drawing on his experience in the struggle against Soviet tyranny, Sharansky has for years argued that there could be no progress in peacemaking until the Arabs democratized. This earned him the sneers of the Oslo sophisticates as just another right-winger trying to derail the Oslo “peace process” by making “impossible” demands on the Palestinians.

Sharansky was right. Had he been listened to earlier, we might have derailed the “war process” that was Oslo.

I agree that the only real way to achieve peace in the Middle East is by democratization. But the hitch is that all the surrounding Arab countries are also thugocracies, with a deep antipathy toward democracy and a vested interest in keeping things just like they are.

Here’s how the Arab News sees the Bush proposal, in an article written by (heh) “Charley Reese:” Bush: Sharon’s dummy.

The entire Arab world at last is willing to make peace with Israel, and Sharon and Bush are flatly turning their backs on the opportunity. Sharon is doing so because he has no intention of ever making peace with the Palestinians and says so frequently. Bush is doing it because he does whatever Sharon tells him to do. In doing that, Bush is sending a clear signal to the Arab world that he looks upon it with the same racist, colonialist attitude of Sharon. Arab suggestions and advice count for nothing. Bush seems to think he can always bully and/or bribe the Arab countries into going along with whatever Sharon decides to do.

That is an extremely dangerous assumption.

Among the many subjects Bush never bothered to study is general semantics, and its most important lesson is that today is not yesterday. The Middle East in 2002 is not the Middle East in 1948. The United States in 2002 is not the United States in 1991. The age of the Western stooge is coming to an end in the Arab world. A new generation of Arab leaders is in the wings. Mr. Bush is, vis-a-vis the Middle East, like the old segregationists in the 1960s who refused to recognize that American blacks had finally said, “Enough is enough.”

America’s (and Israel’s) military superiority rests entirely on its high-technology Air Force. It is only a matter of time before the Chinese or the Russians make an air-defense breakthrough that will erase that superiority. And once we have to go man to man, tank to tank, without domination of the sky and ground by air power, Americans will learn that we are not the superpower our politicians claim we are. The day will come when we will not be able to bomb defenseless people with impunity, and on that day, Americans will wish they had relied more on diplomacy than on force

Is that a threat?

In case you had any lingering doubt about how the Saudis feel, the ever-despicable M. Kahil sketches it out for you (the full-sized image is broken):