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The West Should Bet on Freedom in Egypt
(Washington Post) Natan Sharansky - Nothing is instantaneous in politics. To think of elections as a panacea, let alone a sure road to real democracy, is to evince a failure of historical imagination. The proper role of the free world is not to encourage or to stop elections. Its role should be to formulate, and to stick by, a policy of incremental change based on creating the institutions that will lead ineluctably to pressure for more and more representative forms of government. The free world should place its bet on freedom and work toward a civil society defined by that value. The writer, a human rights activist and political prisoner in the former Soviet Union, is chairman of the Executive of the Jewish Agency for Israel.