George Jonas: The West's Fatal Addiction to Democracy

The author's columns appear every Wednesday and Saturday on the Op Ed page of National Post.

"We don’t yet have definitive evidence to suggest that the Pakistani military and intelligence establishment was actively housing and protecting [Osama] bin Laden in the garrison town of Abbottabad," wrote my colleague Jonathan Kay the other day. True, but what if we did? Let me suggest that if Sherlock Holmes himself shoved the evidence under our noses, whatever the current world record is for looking the other way, we’d break it.

There are certain things we don’t want to know. If we did, we couldn’t go on practicing the ostrich routine that has served us so well over the years. Being oblivious to whatever strikes us as inconvenient works reliably up to a point, but now that a Pakistani court sentenced Shakil Afridi, the Pakistani doctor who played a role in the U.S. hit-team locating bin Laden, to 33 years in prison, it seems to me it is a point we have passed.

We’ll have to start taking notice.

The worst legacy of George W. Bush’s presidency may turn out to be something for which his opponents never blamed him. Being a democracy-fetishist, like most Americans, Bush forced General Pervez Musharraf to audition for a speaking part in a psychodrama called "elections" that Western liberals believe is therapeutically efficacious against every conceivable malady in the body politic, including falling off a cliff...