The democracy-promotion scam

August 20, 2007

I’ve never fully understood how anyone paying attention to current events could seriously believe the Bush White House is committed to an assertive policy of democracy promotion. Last month, David Brooks called it Bush’s “Big Idea,” on which the president cannot, and will not, give up.

This has always been rather silly. Bringing God’s gift of freedom to the world has always been a sloppy, post-hoc rationalization — the White House has never taken democracy promotion seriously, neither before the Iraqi invasion (when the plan was to give Iraq over to Chalabi) nor after it.

With that in mind, Peter Baker makes the case in a lengthy front-page WaPo piece today on just how hollow the president’s democracy-promotion plan really is.

By the time he arrived in Prague in June for a democracy conference, President 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.

As he sat down with opposition leaders from authoritarian societies around the world, he gave voice to his exasperation. “You’re not the only dissident,” Bush told Saad Eddin Ibrahim, a leader in the resistance to Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. “I too am a dissident in Washington. Bureaucracy in the United States does not help change. It seems that Mubarak succeeded in brainwashing them.”

If he needed more evidence, he would soon get it. In his speech that day, Bush vowed to order U.S. ambassadors in unfree nations to meet with dissidents and boasted that he had created a fund to help embattled human rights defenders. But the State Department did not send out the cable directing ambassadors to sit down with dissidents until two months later. And to this day, not a nickel has been transferred to the fund he touted.

Of course not. The president’s stated policy collapses under the weight of its own contradictions.

First, for all their talk about democracy, the Bush gang is indifferent when democracies are overthrown.

When tanks rolled through Bangkok in a military coup overthrowing Thailand’s elected prime minister, Bush was at the United Nations delivering a speech on democracy. But Bush mustered no outrage on behalf of the ousted Thai leader and left town without seeing him, even though he was also at the United Nations. The National Security Council pushed for a stronger response, but the State Department and the office of the vice president resisted. “OVP has this little-girl crush on strongmen,” said an official on the losing side. […]

[A few months earlier], Vice President Cheney went to Lithuania to deliver the toughest U.S. indictment of Putin’s leadership. But the next day, Cheney flew to oil-rich Kazakhstan and embraced its autocratic leader, Nursultan Nazarbayev, with not a word of criticism. The juxtaposition made the talk of democracy look phony and provided ammunition to the Kremlin.

Second, the White House loves democratically-held elections — right up until they see the results.

Israeli leaders, including Tzipi Livni, now the foreign minister, had implored Bush advisers to not let the vote proceed. Hamas, deemed a terrorist group by the United States, could easily win, they warned. Even Sharansky, the president’s apostle, urged the Americans to postpone the vote, arguing that democracy is about building institutions and civil society, not just holding elections.

But Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas told the Americans that his Fatah party needed the vote for credibility and it had to include his opposition. Rice and Hadley heeded his wishes. “We didn’t think that postponing the elections would have solved any problems,” said Philip D. Zelikow, who was Rice’s counselor at the time and attended the meeting. “You would have been conceding Fatah’s illegitimacy.”

It was, they thought, a test of Bush’s democracy agenda. What was more important, the principle or the outcome? The elections went forward and Hamas won big. Now Bush was stuck with an avowed enemy of Israel governing the Palestinian territories. And critics saw it as proof that the president’s democracy agenda was dangerously naïve. “They were saying, ‘We told you so,’ ” recalled Thomas Carothers, director of the democracy project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

And third, some of the president’s best friends are dictators. From Laura Rozen:

The [WaPo] 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. […]

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 when it suits him.

Now, there’s a reasonable case to be made that stability-over-democracy is a realistic, pragmatic approach to the Middle East. If that means supporting oppressive regimes, and considering them allies, one could make the case that it’s worth it, at least in the short term.

The problem, as I see it, is that this isn’t the administration’s argument at all. The Bush gang continues to maintain the facade that their top strategic goal is to bring liberal democracies to the Middle East, stand up to oppressive regimes wherever they are found, and embrace countries like Egypt, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia as our allies and partners.

So, can we stop pretending the president is guided by a deeply held commitment to democracy promotion? It’s a scam.

That’s cause the funding is thru the Committee for Independent Action or C.I.A.

  • if the president is so intent upon promoting democracy in the world, perhaps he could start by bringing democracy to the united states.

  • Theoretical Quantum Politics states that:

    The promotion of the idyllic goal, “ending tyranny in our world,” when promoted by a tyrant, becomes an oxymoron—and the tyrant will, undoubtedly, always be frustrated. But such sheerly-simplistic logic will, in equal proportion to the frustration, always be beyond the reach of that tyrant.

    Thus, yet another brick is laid in Bush’s “Great Wall of Legacy….”

  • You forgot Fourth,

    “If Bush really sought to promote democracy, even in Iraq, he had an odd way of showing it. The State Department, key to the diplomacy needed to craft a new democracy, was almost entirely pushed aside by Cheney, Rumsfeld and the Defense Department in planning for the invasion of Iraq. Few civilian experts were on had to guide the various ministries, none of the critical infrastructure needs were addressed in the immediate aftermath of the fall of Saddam, and virtually no planning had been done on transitioning a military mission into nation building. Moreover, rogue actions like Abu Grahib set a poor example for the type of restraint that would be necessary to move Iraq towards exemplar status.”

    and Fifth,

    “Finally, Bush has certainly sent mixed signals about democracy promotion through his own domestic initiatives. Even while preaching the virtue of democratic reforms abroad, Bush and his allies have taken severely deevolutionary steps at home. The rights of the accused have been sharply curtailed, judges have been threatened, Congress has been ignored, extra-constitutional signing statements have been used to evade legislative mandates and limitations, and the integrity of elections has been diminished through, among other means, the firing of US Attorneys who failed to intervene politically in close elections.”

  • Bush has demonstrated how precious his own Democracy here at home is to him. A base to perform in secret his dictatorial principles. Signing statements is democracy at his finest. He definitely believes in government “for” the people.

  • Bush does believe in exporting Democracy. And the sooner he exports it all out of the US the happier he’ll be.

  • “You’re not the only dissident,” Bush told Saad Eddin Ibrahim, a leader in the resistance to Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. “I too am a dissident in Washington.”

    Clearly BushWhacker thinks dissident = intensely unpopular.

    But the poor drunken draft dodger can’t see a connection between his relentless lying, fumbling and bullying and the fact no one can stand him.

    Oh no, he is the un-appreciated hero of the piece, fighting against the tyranical masses of … bureaucrats.

    I’d just finished reading this article when I came here and though I was first tempted to laugh I think it shows just how crazy this man is. Can you say delusions of grandeur boys and girls?

  • The Palestinians get Hamas
    The Lebanese get Hezbolla
    The Iraqis get a Shia dominated regime (much to Saudi Arabia’s delight, I’m sure)
    Venezuela gets Hugo Chavez
    The U.S. gets Al Gore…oops!

    Oh, yeah, Bush loves Democracy.

    Not

  • This story is a good example of the unfortunate American political/philosophical/intellectual condition. The proportion of our population that understands, desires and uses democracy is so small that we must endure the entire eight (possibly more) years of the Tiny Texas Tyrant’s destruction of a historically innovative and equitable form of government.

    If you described what the fool has done — and how citizens, lawmakers and the press have allowed him to do it — to an average, reasonably educated American of 1962, you would not be believed.

    For that person of 1962 (1972, 1982, 1992), such a scenario could be believed only in the context of the Soviet Union or other menace laying nuclear siege to the country.

  • “You’re not the only dissident,” Bush told Saad Eddin Ibrahim, a leader in the resistance to Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. “I too am a dissident in Washington.”

    I think he meant “pissant.”

  • I always had a hard time believe this “democracy promotion” yammering when it came out of Bush/Cheney’s mouth. They don’t seems to believe in Democracy for their own country, why would they care about it elsewhere?

  • George W. Bush is a simple-minded, unimaginative windbag whose “big ideas” are fed to him by sycophantic staffers, who have no difficulty convincing him that these brainwaves originate in his own shrunken cranium. Believe me, the day an original thought crosses his mind, it should bring a good book or a PSP – because it will have a lonely journey.

    How, pray, is the small-p president supposed to promote a quality he plainly does not understand? He would have just as much success promoting chocolate-making, idiomatic Tagalog or the history of needlepoint; all subjects with which he is at least as conversant as democracy.

  • Not entirelly OT… Is WaPo positioning itself to take the place of WSJ, with solidly neo-con editorial board and decent journos? This is not the first article in the recent past, where the reporting has been quite solid.

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