Liberty vs. democracy

"Many mistakenly believe democracy means liberty, but a quick review of world democracies show that is not true. Almost all democracies restrict economic liberties more than necessary. Many have corrupt court and civil service systems, inhibit women's rights, constrain press freedom and do not protect minority rights and views. Iran, though a very restrictive theocracy, calls itself a democracy and holds elections.
The American Founding Fathers were concerned with liberty, so they set up a Republic to protect individual liberties from the passions of the majority at the moment. They worried about the excesses of democracy."

The premiss of this article is that we should be promoting liberty in the world, without so much emphesis on democracy. I think the author is working on the false idea that our government is interested in promoting freedom of choice for the worlds' population. He assumes that we care about the individuals and their relationship with their respective states. He also implies that non-democracies may be better at protecting civil liberties, and experience less corruption in government, than democracies. If you choose to read the article, this is what you find at the very begining:

Would you prefer to live in a country that has:
(1) The rule of law with an honest civil service, strong protection of private property and minority rights, free trade, free markets, very low taxes, and full freedom of the speech, press and religion, but not a democracy?
(2) Democracy and a corrupt court and civil service, many restrictions on economic freedom, including very high taxes, with limited rights for minority religions, peoples and speech?

You almost get the impression that the author would like to see our own democracy changed to something like choice number (1), though he's talking about our "nation building" in Iraq. The problem is that he doesn't give any good current examples of this non-democratic mythical paradise, aside from Hong Kong, which certainly isn't an autonomous state, but merely a city within a very restrictive communist dictatorship that allows its' freedoms only for the sake of the cash it generates. Using Hong Kong as an example is ridiculous.

As far as his idea that we're mistakenly pushing democracy in Iraq and the world, to promote liberty for individuals, is denying the fact that we don't really care if a country has a democracy or not, as long as its' government caters to our every whim. Saudi Arabia, one of our big allies in that region is by no means a democracy, and we only provide occassional lip-service for them to establish liberty-inducing reforms. As long as they behave politically by supporting our agenda, we don't care how they treat their own people. Other examples are in abundence to prove we don't care about individual liberty today, only our own corporate empire.

He gives as examples, our influence on post-war Germany and Japan, as what we should be doing today, but fails to mention that both those societies, had previously established a culture of strict obedience to the state, and suppressed any form of dissent to the point that after conquest, they dutifully obeyed their conquerors. They had already abolished the idea of individual liberty by weeding out dissenters, so imposing a new government was relatively easy. German culture was already similar to ours, and so was Japan, who had for decades before the war, modeled much of itself after the European powers. We also didn't have to worry about those countries having diverse ethnic and/or religious regions within those countries that had only been held together by brute force, such as the former Yugoslavia, and Iraq.

All in all, I don't think the author can support his notion that our intention is to establish individual freedoms in other countries, or that non-democracies are inherently better.

But that's just my opinion.