The proponents for an invasion of Iraq have argued that a “regime change” will be the first step in bringing democracy to the Middle East and South Asia. But the recent sweep of elections in Morocco, Bahrain, Turkey and Pakistan raises the question of whether democracy, albeit in small increments, has already begun arriving to the region — and whether the U.S. is prepared for what it may bring.

Many of the recent elections were precedent-setting. Morocco held its first fully transparent vote last month. While many Arab nations block women from office, the country set aside thirty seats in the lower house expressly for women.

Bahrain, which sent its citizens to the polls for the first time in almost thirty years in October, likewise saw a small step forward for women’s inclusion: eight female candidates made it to the final round, though none ultimately won seats in parliament. The elections marked the first time that Bahraini women ran for office and voted in a parliamentary race.

Considering that the U.S. midterm elections last week inspired an under forty per cent participation rate, the high turnout rate in all four countries was a hopeful sign.

And this despite considerable adversity. The leadership of the Shiite party in Bahrain, for example, announced a boycott of the election in the days leading up to the vote. Though the Shiites are the majority population in the country, few heeded the call and fifty-three per cent of the country turned out.

In Morocco, the nation’s forty-five per cent illiteracy rate was a concern. But despite there being twenty-six political parties running for office, the ballots were successfully designed with an elaborate (and user-friendly) system of visual symbols. Few irregularities resulted.

The elections in the Indian-ruled portion of Kashmir were clouded by violence and even though forty-six political activists were killed in the days prior, voter turnout at the polls was forty per cent.

These were far from the first democratic votes held in the region. Turkey initiated its democracy in 1923 after the fall of the Ottoman Empire. Women hold political office in the country, as they also do in Iran. Elected parliaments exist in every Arab country except Saudi Arabia and a few other small Gulf states.

In countries like Iraq and Syria, of course, the parliaments are nothing but a rubber stamp for the regime, but in other countries, parliaments are developing modest checks on centralized power. In Kuwait, for instance, the parliament can block legislation and recall ministers.

Is democracy breaking out across the Middle East? Hardly. Repressive monarchies are still the reality in most of the Gulf states and electoral farces are not limited to Iraq (where a one hundred per cent turnout voted one hundred per cent for Saddam Hussein). In Uzbekistan, a close U.S. ally, President Islam Karimov, whose leadership of the nation dates back before its 1991 independence, has not only jailed religious leaders without trial and exiled virtually all opposition leaders, but he also engineered a referendum so as to extend his term to 2007.

Hosni Mubarak in Egypt conducts similar referenda, which have made him de facto president-for-life.

Still, a tide toward democracy is growing despite general interpretations of the biggest surprise of the recent elections: the success of Islamist parties.

In Pakistan, the religious party finished third overall, taking forty-five parliamentary seats. In prior years the most it had ever won was ten. Turkey witnessed a huge upsurge as its main religious party took 363 seats of the 550 total, sweeping out the secular majority. In Bahrain, the Islamists took almost half of the parliament, while in Morocco they tripled their numbers from last year. Indonesia is due to go to the polls next month and current surveys predict a strong showing for the Islamist party there as well.

These parties are, however, far from uniform. Politically they span the gamut, ranging from the more radical variety, such as those in Pakistan and Morocco, which openly support the implementation of sharia or Islamic law, to the more moderate ones such as that in Turkey, which has repeatedly reassured that it will respect the country’s secular traditions.

The reasons for their recent success also varies. In the case of Pakistan, the vote for the Islamists was as much an indicator of dissent against General Pevez Musharraf’s involvement with the U.S. war in Afghanistan as it was a sign of opposition to his gutting of the nation’s constitution and the increasing encroachment of the military in politics. In Turkey, the Islamists cashed in on popular frustration with high unemployment and IMF-imposed austerity plans.

But both the Turkish and Pakistani cases offer an important lesson about how not to handle elections: repressing parties you don’t like backfires.

In Turkey, the government disqualified the leading Islamist candidate from eligibility for the office of prime minister and far from disappearing, his popularity jumped. In Pakistan, Musharraf banned his two main opponents from running, only proving the point that he was wholly unconcerned with the will of the population. In both of these cases, the U.S. carefully looked the other way.

While the Bush administration could have made a clear, public statement condemning the repression, instead, when asked for comment in press conferences, State Department representatives said they had no comment. In the end, conservative, religious, and in the case of Pakistan, staunchly anti-U.S., forces reaped the rewards.

If the U.S. is serious about more than top-down regime change, and it really hopes to promote bottom-up democracy, it cannot afford to remain silently, or actively, complicit in repression conducted by its allies. The U.S. needs to learn the lesson of recent elections: Where exclusion is most likely to radicalize and popularize a group — be they secular, Islamists, anti-American, or otherwise — opening elections to their involvement is not only a prerequisite to any true democracy, it also demystifies them by eliminating their outsider status.

In a democracy, any political party wishing to siphon off the support of another will only be able to do so when there is a concerted effort to address the core concerns of voters. Elections provide the ultimate test. Either parties produce substantive improvements for their voting constituencies, or they take a walk. This is no less true for the recently arrived Islamists than it was for their predecessors.