Natan Sharansky’s thesis on the innate human desire for freedom and the imperative of spreading democracy and human rights is appealing.

More significantly, it’s been embraced by President Bush. Arguments against it, by post-humanitarian/post-democratic leftists, as well as by such paleo-conservatives as Pat Buchanan, have been generally churlish and unpersuasive.

But Middle East scholar Martin Kramer has more serious and cogent doubts that are at least worth considering.

Kramer asks: “Is it possible that one part of the world, one unique nexus of history and culture, is an exception to the rule that leads peoples to democracy? If you answered ‘yes’ in Middle Eastern studies over the past thirty years, you were denounced as a heretic, or even worse, as an orientalist. The worst orientalist thought crime was the belief in Islamic or Muslim exceptionalism. Now that same belief has become a thought crime in the neoconservative doctrine.”

It’s worth reading and it’s here.