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Sharansky conned Bush into invading Iraq. Bush met several
times with Sharansky and called his book one of the most important. It ill
behooves Sharansky now to act the innocent. Maybe it will wake Bush up to the perfidy with which he has
been misled, beginning with Cheney and Chalabi, and on to Sharansky. What an intellectually sordid affair Bush-Sharansky-Cheney
make. From:
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On
Behalf Of Karen Watters Cole 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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