I would be more inclined to take this argument seriously if you hadn't followed it up by advocating the complete opposite of democracy in Turkey, making me wonder whether you are ready for democracy. What's that you wrote about redressing wrongs through legal means?

It's one thing to argue that countries which are currently dictatorships should develop in other ways before becoming democracies, though to be honest I'm not convinced that it's so easy to build such institutions in a dictatorship hostile to free speech or even free enterprise, like the Egyptian one. It's quite another to argue that countries which are currently democracies should go back to being dictatorships and then maybe later become "democracies" again, with "democracy" being interpreted as "the people can vote freely except when they can't".

True as far as it goes, but so far I've seen very little from Sisi that's reassuring, and I don't even know who would be supposed to be the dictator that could restore any kind of order to Iraq. Maliki certainly isn't up to the job.

Even if one accepts all your other arguments, and does look at things from a realpolitik perspective, I think it was still smart for the US to criticize his removal and at least pay lip service to the ultimate goal of democracy in the region.

With regard to Iran, the only country that followed the pattern you describe, I won't claim to be an expert on its history, but one does wonder what might have happened if the US hadn't been so close with the shah, and consequently had had its hands free to support the moderate elements of the coup against Khomeini's coup within the coup.

Revisionist nonsense. Not to deny the undeniable achievements of the secularists, however high the price, but Turkey never had a boom as impressive as the one under AKP leadership; the "national unity" you describe was a result of vicious repression against most kinds of minorities, often in ways that would be hilarious if they weren't so sad like the notorious "Mountain Turks"; and there is nothing "Arab-style" about Erdogan's rule, for starters because it's democratic and would promptly end if the people turned him out of office. And the reason that that doesn't happen is in fact excellent proof of why that paragraph of yours was absurd: because a large part of the CHP is too backwards, too paranoid and too incompetent for the voters to allow them back in power despite Erdogan's increasingly obvious flaws.

You might as well admit at once that you don't support democracy at all, or only when it brings your preferred candidates to power, and that otherwise you are a supporter of thuggery and "might makes right" (I'm sorely tempted to bring up Franco again). And as for Sisi, I suppose we'll see; whether ones likes him or not, it does look like his position is pretty solid, so if he really is worth anything he should have ample opportunity to prove it. Not holding my breath though; Nasser's regime (since you seem so fond of the state of things in the 1960s when secular dictators ruled the roost everywhere) sucked, and I haven't yet seen anything to indicate Sisi is even half the leader Nasser was.