A time for revolution

History does not operate on one gear. At times, it pushes the pedal of dynamic change to the floor while at other times, history seems to take a leisurely Sunday drive. The nonviolent, democratic revolutions now occurring across the face of Earth have made clear our age is no Sunday drive. \nIn November, a terribly flawed election concocted by corrupt Russian-backed thugs brought Ukrainians out by the hundreds of thousands to the streets. Demonstrators camped out for weeks in the "Orange Revolution," one of the most stirring recent political acts in the world. Their leader, Viktor Yushchenko, won the re-run election and now leads his country to a more hopeful future.\nThe next month brought this passion for freedom to the Middle East. Palestinians voted overwhelmingly in support of the moderate Mahmoud Abbas, giving a hope both for peace in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as well as for democratic governance of the Palestinian people. Just last Saturday, Abbas undertook a massive shake-up of the security services of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, getting rid of the corrupt strongmen who served Yasser Arafat.\nPerhaps the strongest case for Arab democracy came in Iraq. Despite facing incredible danger, Iraqis voted in huge numbers in their January election. Walid Jumblatt, a long-time Middle Eastern politician, who is one of the primary leaders of the current opposition movement in Lebanon, explained the effect of the elections best in a Washington Post interview.\n"It's strange for me to say it, but this process of change has started because of the American invasion of Iraq," Jumblatt said. "I was cynical about Iraq. But when I saw the Iraqi people voting three weeks ago, 8 million of them, it was the start of a new Arab world ... The Syrian people, the Egyptian people, all say that something is changing. The Berlin Wall has fallen. We can see it."\nBruce Jackson of the Project for Transitional Democracies, a group that promotes democracy in Eastern Europe, made a similar comparison to the German capital's reunification when speaking about the Orange Revolution in a March 8 Senate testimony.\n"The triumph of Viktor Yushchenko and the Ukrainian people is without question the most significant event in the advance of democracy in Europe since the fall of the Berlin Wall," he said.\nThese two Berlin-Wall fallings likely combined to help ignite the massive popular response to the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. Syrian troops and intelligence agents have been withdrawing from Lebanon since the so-called "Cedar Revolution" showed that the people would no longer tolerate blatant imperialism. At the height of their movement, the opposition managed to turn out 1 million people -- more than a quarter of the population of the tiny country and the largest demonstration in its history. The vote ostensibly taking place next month will be the test for whether Lebanon will finally enter the community of democracies.\nOne could write several books on the various other movements for democracy in the last few months, taking place in countries as varied as the West African nation of Togo and the Central Asian nation of Kyrgyzstan. While it would be improper to not recognize the specific lessons and differences of each of these revolutions, this season has clearly taught the world that its people will no longer stand corrupt authoritarianism.\nIt is only a matter of time before the freedom-loving peoples of the world bring every last dictator to his knees. The timing of that day depends on how many of us in the already-free nations of the world embrace those revolutionaries and how fully we aid them in their task.