Democracy. In Afghanistan, it means the country’s president can insist on an end to US airstrikes and the airstrikes continue. In Iraq it means a thinly veiled theocracy too corrupt and sectarian to accomplish anything except making US dollars and the middle class disappear. And in the huge country of nuclear Pakistan, home to Osama Bin Laden, Ayman Zawahiri and AQ Khan, it now means something akin to martial law.

Update: it gets worse.

Meanwhile, back in the USA, it means companies illegally wiretap us, we can be detained without habeus corpus, availability of legal counsel, and subjected to interrogation techniques formerly known as torture, while Congress abandons its biggest check on executive power abuse by taking impeachment off the table. It also means threats to launch World War III for reasons a former President can’t quite believe:

Carter told CNN, “Every year at the Carter Center, we bring in about 35 nations from around the world, all of whom know how to make atomic weapons. … Argentina and Brazil and Egypt and Saudi Arabia … it’s no longer a secret. And so just to say that if someone has the knowledge of doing it, that we’re going to go to war with them — I really believe that the president must have been misquoted.”

Carter suggested there were two things we ought to be doing to prevent Iran actually building a bomb. “One of them is to talk directly to them, to have diplomatic relations with Iran, to let them know about the seriousness of it. … And the second is to quit making threatening statements from the highest levels in government that we might launch an attack on Iran. That would make any country want to build up their military capability.”

“Cool it off and talk to them,” was how Carter’s summarized the situation, and though he acknowledged that Vice President Cheney has been pressing for war, he said that since speaking recently with Secretary of State Rice he did not think confrontation was inevitable and believed that “cooler heads will prevail.”

Has democracy reversed terrorism or has terrorism reversed democracy? Wherever our president has had a hand in things, it appears that fake democracies rise and global terrorism multiplies. And the four leading Republican candidates to replace the president maintain the US needs more of the same. The loss of civil and human rights, out of control war spending, soon to be $4/gallon gasoline and a culture of corruption among GOP lawmakers that has only been slowed by the appointment of Republican US prosecutors slow to pursue Republicans.

Call it what you want but this pro-democracy push looks like a Halloween mask covering up a very Fascist face.