The highly respected economist Warren Coats, who has spent years working with post-Soviet economies, recently sent around an interesting article about his trip to the Middle East, expounding on some observations about democracy, which I thought some of my readers would find valuable. Coats is the Senior Monetary Policy Advisor to the Central Bank of Iraq for the IMF and to Afghanistan for BearingPoint/USAID. He retired from the International Monetary Fund in 2003 and holds a Ph.D in Economics from the University of Chicago. Democracy—the consent of the Governed By Warren Coats Democracy must be earned Democracy seems to have been trivialized in recent years as “voting.” When the voters in the West Bank and Gaze elected Hamas to govern them, in what has universally been characterized as the cleanest election ever held in the Muslim Middle East, the United States rejected the result. In fact, the Palestinian vote seemed more to punish Arafat’s Fatah for its incompetence and corruption than to endorse Hamas’ stated policies toward Israel. This is in the best tradition of democracy. So much for democracy.