August 20, 2007
by publius
There are many things to take away from
Peter Baker’s article on the rise and fall of Bush’s democracy promotion “vision” following his re-election. Frankly, I’m skeptical that Bush was the strong causal force behind “democracy promotion” that the article portrays. However, assuming Bush really was driving this policy, the article is frankly terrifying. It’s the blackest of black comedies, played out on a Shakespearian scale.
The part of the article that caught my eye was the description of Bush’s Road to Damascus moment. After the election but before the second inauguration, Bush was “leafing through galleys” of “The Case for Democracy” by Natan Sharansky. Here’s how Baker describes it:
Bush did not wait long after reelection in November 2004 to begin mapping his second term. Relaxing from the burdens of the campaign, he leafed through galleys of a book given to him by Tom A. Bernstein, a friend and former partner in the Texas Rangers. The book, "The Case for Democracy," was a manifesto by Natan Sharansky, the Soviet refusenik, Israeli politician and favorite of neoconservatives.
Bush found it so riveting, he asked aides to invite Sharansky to visit. The next day, nine days after the election, the author was ushered into the Oval Office. . . . Within weeks, according to several aides, Bush called his chief speechwriter, Michael J. Gerson, to discuss using his second inaugural address to "plant a flag" for democracy around the world. Bush had made democracy in the Middle East a cornerstone of his response to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, but now he wanted to broaden the goal.
Under this view, our Wilsonian-in-Chief had a revelation and willed the democracy promotion agenda on to his administration and its policy. That’s the part I don’t really buy though. I’m sure Bush got excited by his book and all, but I doubt his reading it is doing all that much work. In my opinion, Bush’s “democracy promotion” was not so much a forward-looking policy goal than a self-serving label applied retroactively to actions already taken.
I’m sure when Bush and his team go to bed at night, they don’t like thinking of themselves as people who have created a failed state, institutionalized torture, started on war on the basis of (at best) the biggest intelligence failure in American history, and inspired unprecedented global hatred. Tough pills, all. You can rest better if you dress all this up as serving some higher purpose. Enter democracy promotion, stage right.
Democracy promotion provided a conceptually-coherent moral justification for the actions the administration had done – and was going to do anyway (indeed, everything is conceptually coherent at high enough levels of abstraction). That seems more plausible than the story of Bush catching fire like Paul on the road to Damascus and marching out to save the world.
But, if I’m wrong about that and Bush’s revelation really was the basis of our national foreign policy, it’s deeply troubling and even terrifying. The notion that our foreign policy actually changed because a guy who hates books read a book he liked reaches black comic levels of absurdity. It sounds like something out of high school –
Local Sophomore Reads Book About Tibet and Makes T-Shirts and Love Beads. Foreign policy shouldn’t turn on an ignorant man’s revelation after reading one book. I mean, good God, it sounds like something out of Emma, with Bush playing the role of the hapless Harriet Smith - except of course, here, human lives (rather than Mr. Elton) hung in the balance.
The broader lesson is that it’s important to elect someone who actually knows something about foreign policy. The fate of the world should not depend on Bush’s holiday reading list.
From
Laura Rozen:
August 19, 2007
The WP's Peter Baker missed a few important insights in its piece on why Bush's democracy vision has stalled. The two biggest: Bush's vision of overturning tyranny and bringing democracy to Iraq has been dashed in massive sectarian bloodshed, loss of life, turmoil, insurgency, uncertainty and heartbreak and a massive devotion of US resources that might have gone to promoting grand things lots of places, and secondly, that in many targeted countries, promoting democracy would mean
allowing Islamist groups, some designated as terrorist groups by the Bush administration, to prevail. The piece left out so many big examples of the contradictions -- Musharraf/Pakistan, Saudi Arabia whose corrupt royal family is so close to the White House and Cheney's office, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt -- of where Bush has decided he isn't quite sure he really wants democratic realities to be realized, and he just may prefer the tyrant, as Cheney openly does in Kazakhstan and Saudi Arabia. While the piece would seem to promote a few voices blaming the stalling of Bush's grand vision on the bureaucrats in the U.S. government, it also tried to save itself from total ingratiation with the White House by naming responsible the office of the vice president's "little-girl crush on strongmen." But how did it miss how corrupted and stalled and conflicted is the vision at the very top of the U.S. government -- with the president himself -- and the realities the president has found himself confronting? Bush is now using all the Sunni tyrants, the autocrats, royals and propped up, hardly a two of them democratically elected, to counter Iran, for instance. Bush have a hard time with the policy? Congress may be interested to know due to the $30 billion in military aid to those states it's being asked to approve by the Bush White House.
The U.S. government may be in serious trouble if and when Pakistan's military dictator falls. Same the hideously corrupted Saudi royal family, so personally close with Bush and Cheney. They don't seem to have too much use for democracy when it comes to their friends, the corrupt autocrats. It's hard to understand how the piece skipped such big glaring points and contradictions, as if Bush's pure longing for democracy in the world had not been sabotaged by nothing so much as conflicts of interest going to the very top, and U.S. national security interests defined by the very top. How would we know if Bush were really serious about democracy? If he told Riyadh to stuff it. That's never going to happen, so we can rest assured that Bush is quite content to live with the art of the possible, with a very high degree of realism, and any griping about the bureaucrats is something journalists should know better than to accept as more than a wink-nod excuse for the president's own decisions to compromise his vision of promoting democracy.
Update: Comments reader DT: "I agree that Peter Baker could have said more about Pakistan and Saudi, about Islamist groups (Hamas in the piece might be taken as representative of the species), perhaps about wink-nod (but Bush really seems to _believe_ that stuff, including Sharansky -- he just can't grasp the contradictions), and Iraq. I may have missed a few things. Baker still accomplishes a lot, and on page one. He gets Cheney nicely. The influence of Sharansky is news to me. The damage to 'color revolutions' by American support is made clear. Iraq is an obvious failure, perhaps so obvious Baker didn't spend much time on it (he does mention it). So overall, I'm very glad this piece got published. Maybe I'm in a minority -- this could well be -- but I did not take it as ingratiating to the White House, which turns out to look pretty incompetent and compromised (e.g. the mention of Bush's neglect of the deposed Thai at the UN, plus the general ham-fistedness of the Bush staff ('Gerson, Bartlett, Karl Rove, Peter Wehner'). I don't think this is pleasant breakfast reading for 43. But I'm willing to accept that the article is a rorschach test for all of us. Myself, I'm glad to have it, and hope Fred Hiatt reads it for breakfast."
Correspondent D: "I think Bush doesn't know the difference between democracy and legitimation. He wants the latter with as little as of the former as necessary to establish the latter, and he conceives it as something strictly electoral, sentimental and abstract. ... Bush turns over control of the bureaucracy to the vice president and then denounces the bureaucracy because he can't control it. It's like he read Sharansky and suddenly believed he was president. Meanwhile, those who run the empire on a daily basis roll their eyes and go back to work. ... Baker probably saw a way to ingratiate himself and get back in the door. The people are so tiresome."
It’s ignorant shit like this—on WaPo’s page A01, no less—that’s got our country sliding down the greasy slope toward monarchy. The lead from loyal subject
Peter Baker:
By the time He arrived in Prague in June for a democracy conference, Bush was frustrated. He had committed his presidency to working toward the goal of “ending tyranny in our world,” yet the march of freedom seemed stalled. Just as aggravating was the sense that His own government was not committed to his vision.
Gawd, Peter, get up off your knees, wouldja? The government is not “his” government. It’s our government. Do you understand? Is there any hope that you understand?
And I plowed through Baker’s whole chin-drooling hagiographic authoritarian-loving screed looking for a single mention of the… the what? The screamingly funny? The entirely typical? …. the forehead-banging-ly ironic fact that while Bush speechifies about ending tyranny abroad he’s
systematically installing tyranny here at home . See
Federalist 47, Peter Baker, you very well-insured and extremely well-paid fluffmeister of hackitude.
Jesus, I better go do something else, or I might get
angry.
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