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I always have
time for Michael Kinsley, even when I don’t agree with all his premises. Here Kinsley
opines on the democracy-spreading debate, or at least Bush’s convoluted version
of it, as did Natan Sharansky, in his OpEd piece in the LA Times. Sharansky
argued that Bush’s rush to elections (a political capital strategy for US
elections) handicapped the nation-building because “although
elections are part of the democratic process, they are never a substitute for
it.” There are
hints of isolationalism in this debate, but at least the debate has moved
beyond sufficient evidence vs false evidence for war, since the Bush Doctrine,
going to war to protect the nation, has been widely accepted as failed and the deliberate
manipulation of evidence believed if not acknowledged. We shall see if
democratic principles here at home are practiced and that deception is
addressed as it should be. Another
conservative Bush defector I forgot to add to the post yesterday (Another Bush
defector) is Bruce Bartlett, a former Reagan economics advisor, whose book Impostor: How George W.
Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy was published last month just as the
Abramoff scandal erupted onto mainstream media headlines. The
Pursuit of Democracy What Bush gets wrong about nation-building. The case for democracy is "self-evident," as
someone once put it. The case for the world's most powerful democracy to take
as its mission the spreading of democracy around the world is pretty
self-evident, too: What's good for us is good for others. Those others will be
grateful. A world full of democracies created or protected with our help ought
to be more peaceful and prosperous and favorably disposed toward us. That world
will be a better neighborhood for us than a world of snarling dictatorships. There is no valid case against democracy. You used to hear a
lot that democracy is not suitable for some classes of foreigners: simply
incompatible with the cultures of East Asia (because deference to authority is
too ingrained there), or the Arab Middle East (because everybody is a religious
fanatic), or Africa (because they're too "tribal," or too predisposed
to rule by a "big daddy," or something). But this line of argument
has gone out of fashion, pushed offstage by free and fair elections in some
surprising places. Even those who still harbor doubts about whether democracy
is possible in this place or that - and even those who think that any democracy
achieved in such places is likely to be a real mess - don't generally oppose
the attempt. As someone else once said, "Good government is no substitute
for self-government." But the case against spreading democracy - especially
through military force - as a mission of the U.S. government is also pretty
self-evident, and lately it's been getting more so. Government, even democratic
government, exists for the benefit of its own citizens, not that of foreigners.
American blood and treasure should not be spent on democracy for other people.
Or, short of that absolute, there are limits to the blood and treasure that the
United States should be expected to spend on democracy elsewhere, and the very nature of war makes that cost hard to predict and hard
to limit. Furthermore, the encouraging discovery that free elections
are possible in unexpected places has a discouraging corollary: If tolerance and pluralism and suchlike
Western values are not essential preconditions for democratic elections, they
are not the necessary result of elections either. By definition, democracy
produces a government that the people - or some plurality of the people - want,
at least at that moment. But it may not produce the kind of government that we
wish they would want, or - more to the point - that we want. The present debate over when to use American power in
defense of democracies other than our own is at least more wholesome than the
previous debate about using force to thwart or overthrow foreign democracies.
The argument against tolerating Communist governments elected fair and square
used to be that the election that brought them to office would likely be the
last. "I don't see why we need to stand
by and watch a country go Communist due to the irresponsibility of its own
people," as Henry Kissinger famously put it in reference to the
election of Salvador Allende in Chile. (And we didn't just stand by and watch.)
But today's concern about what we might call "nasty democracy"
(defined as election results we don't like) is in some ways more profound and
depressing. It is not that a regime will use democracy in the short run to
stifle it in the long run (thus emboldening us to destroy democracy in order to
save it). The
danger is that democracy will reveal the people's true and continuing
preference for a society with no place for all the other Western liberal values
that our founding document calls "self-evident" (equality, freedom to pursue happiness,
and so on). Even worse, these societies may decide to export their distaste for
Western values just as we try to export the values themselves - and they may not agonize, Western-style,
over the distinction between violent and nonviolent means of persuasion. Recent news has left us awash in examples: the triumph of
Hamas (religious fanatics dedicated in both theory and practice to the
destruction of Israel) in the Palestinian elections; the emergence of a
similarly attractive group, the Muslim Brotherhood, as an electoral force in
Egypt; and above all the result of the American-sponsored election in Iraq,
which seems to be just about the opposite of the lion-and-lamb tranquility that
democracy enthusiasts had hoped. The Bush administration denies a report in the
New York Times that it is actively trying to undermine the Palestinian election
result. And the evidence in the Times story did seem to describe a totally
justified withdrawal of support more than anything like an old-fashioned CIA
coup. But if these developments gave Bush any pause about his aggressive
democratization project, he gave no sign of it Tuesday during his surprise
drop-by in Afghanistan. From
Bush's description, that legendarily bloodthirsty land has been transformed
into something like Minnesota. It's a place where "men and women are respected"
and "young girls can go to school" and "people are able to
realize their dreams." We shall see. In his biography of Margaret Thatcher, the British
journalist Hugo Young used the term "inspirational certainty" to describe the strength that some
political leaders get from refusing to let anything give them pause or change
their minds. Thatcher had it, and so did Ronald Reagan. Bush would like to have
it. But on this particular issue, at least, he can't because he actually has
changed his mind. In the 2000 election, he opposed what was then called
nation-building - and he opposed it for all the self-evident reasons. Now he
supports it, for equally self-evident reasons. If the arguments for both sides
of some policy question are self-evident, the correct answer must not be. But
Bush avoids the trap of complication by taking his self-evident truths sequentially. Bush parries any challenge to explain his change of views
with the simple assertion that Sept. 11, 2001, changed everything. It's easy to
see how that day might have changed his opinion about the urgency of the war on
terrorism. But how exactly is it supposed to have changed his opinion about the
aggressive pursuit of democracy as a tactic in that war? Democracy now stands as the only remaining official
rationale for the Gulf War (which the administration insists is a battlefield
in the larger war against terrorism). This is grimly amusing, given that George
W. Bush's Gulf War is really a continuation of his father's, which was in
defense of two feudal monarchies and had nothing to do with democracy. We
don't want a President Hamlet, publicly rehearsing his doubts as he leads the
nation into battle. But the men and women risking their lives for democracy in
Iraq deserve at least a tiny sense that the president who sends them there has
taken the trouble to consider the evidence and arguments against his policy -
and that he knows why he rejects them. http://www.slate.com/id/2137276/?nav=ais Kinsley is the founding editor of Slate.
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