Will the promotion of democracy in the Middle East destabalize the region and destroy us?

Martin Kramer on why democracy should not be pushed in the Middle East:

In urging democracy on the Middle East, its advocates generally argue that the spread of democracy will make the Middle East and the world more secure. The theory goes like this: dictators and authoritarian rulers need an external enemy to justify their grip on power. This makes them unreliable allies and bellicose neighbors. To preserve power, they not only threaten their own people, they directly or indirectly threaten us. As long as this region isn't free, we'll be insecure. My teacher and mentor Bernard Lewis has put it starkly: "We free them or they destroy us."

As he goes on:

But the Middle East is also home to another kind of authoritarian rule. In this kind of system, the regime doesn't rely only on fear, or even primarily on fear. Such regimes don't require an external enemy or perpetual war. To the contrary: the ruler builds a consensus around the status quo, by sharing a bit of power, balancing interests, upholding law, and averting war. These aren't free societies--you can't stand in the town square and say what you want without fear of being arrested. But these aren't "fear societies" and they aren't "republics of fear."

Now in the Middle East, Saddam-style dictatorship, with mass graves and invasions of neighbors, is the exception, not the rule. So is Taliban-style puritanism, based on terrorism at home and abroad. The same is true of the genocidal regime in the Sudan, and the potentially genocidal regime in Iran. Democracy competes not against them, but against this consensual authoritarianism. And the reason democracy is losing that competition is that consensual authoritarianism produces security for its peoples, and exports security to its neighbors and the world.

We musn't be blind to these facts: these regimes cooperate with the world in combatting terrorism and containing an aggressive Iran, they have peace treaties with Israel or float peace initiatives, they don't threaten or intervene in the internal affairs of other countries, and they don't seek weapons of mass destruction. None of them has gone to war in the last thirty-plus years.

The problematic states in the Middle East, he goes on to argue, are, as he writes:

[The] states that have multi-polar or pluralistic systems: Iran, Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon and what some call Palestine. These systems aren't democracies, but in terms of formal practices like elections, they've actually gone the longer distance. Yet they don't provide security for their peoples, and they export insecurity, in the form of terrorism, refugees, radical Islam, and nuclear threats. What's discouraging is that this isn't true in only some of the cases, or only half of them. It's true, for now, in all if them.

As he concludes:

The pro-democracy forces need to show how they'll make their peoples not only freer, but more secure--and how they'll make the rest of us safer.