Analysis: Democracy goes global with Bush (Good Editorial on Bush!)

UPI ^ | 3/7/05 | Robin Shepherd

[areafiftyone]

BRATISLAVA, Slovakia, March 7 (UPI) -- We could well be living through the second great wave of democratization in living memory. And this time it may be going global.

Last week's display of "people power" in Lebanon, which brought down the country's pro-Syrian government, comes just weeks after mass street protests in Ukraine brought pro-democracy campaigners to power against seemingly overwhelming odds. That revolution, in its turn, self-consciously modeled itself on previous peaceful revolutions in Georgia, Serbia and Slovakia.

Globalized images through 24-hour-a-day television news channels like CNN and BBC World are transmitting democratic best practice across the world. Those images are being accompanied by the relentless rhetoric of a U.S. president who has made the spread of democracy the centerpiece of his second term agenda. Triumphalism on the Right is back. But can the administration really take credit for what is now going on? And is freedom really on the march, as the White House says it is?

Personally, I always thought the Bush administration was far ahead of the pack in its understanding of political dynamics in the Middle East. I also thought a U.S.-led agenda for global democracy was the best overarching strategy to combat the root causes of the "grievances" that led to 9/11. I even thought it might succeed.

But Lebanon's Druze opposition leader Walid Jumblatt, a man whose hatred of the Bush administration once extended to lamenting the fact that Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz had not been murdered in a terrorist attack, is perhaps better placed than I to comment. On Feb. 23, he told David Ignatius in The Washington Post: "This process of change has started because of the American invasion of Iraq. ... I was cynical about Iraq. But when I saw the Iraqi people voting three weeks ago, 8 million of them, it was the start of a new Arab world. ... The Berlin Wall has fallen. We can see it."

And then there was another equally unlikely convert to the neocon foreign policy agenda -- Nasser al-Kidwa, the Palestinian foreign minister. Speaking on CNN last week, he said, "I would say the situation in the region, the U.S. agenda in the whole region to ensure all the democratization ... strongly suggests that we might be heading into a different situation."

Enter Hosni Mubarak, once president for all eternity of Egypt, promising multi-candidate presidential elections by the end of the year. The list goes on. As Jordanian Foreign Minister Hani al-Mulki put it succinctly, "I think the train has just left the station."

It seems well nigh incontrovertible that the two key events in the region sparking such changes -- the Iraqi elections and the Palestinian elections -- were indeed the direct result of a policy agenda that is specific to the Bush administration. Elections in Iraq, of course, could not have taken place without the invasion. That much is beyond all doubt. What is less obvious is that the kind of elections that took place in the Palestinian territories were also made possible by the Bush-led policy of isolating Yasser Arafat and publicly condemning all that he stood for. The White House could not, of course, have foretold his death last year. But once Arafat was gone, U.S. policy had so narrowed the range of options available to any future leadership that a shift toward genuine democracy and genuine engagement in the peace process inevitably became the most compelling direction to go in. In London last week, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas was booed by a crowd of Islamic extremists concerned that, in their terms, he was selling out. In other words, they're worried that he's for real. They never worried for one moment that Yasser Arafat was for real. He wasn't, and George Bush knew it.

Now, I would be the first to say that there is a long, long way to go. If the point of reference is the first wave of democratization, which came after the fall of communism in 1989, then events in that region over the last decade and a half should alert us to just how bumpy the road is going to be. There were, of course, tremendous successes: the Czech Republic, Poland, Hungary and the five other former communist countries that joined the European Union last year. But there were also some disastrous failures: Yugoslavia, the whole of Soviet Central Asia, Chechnya and so on. There is no immutable law that says that casting off one form of tyranny will not lead to another, or even that it won't lead to war.

For optimists about democracy, however, recent events in the region now offer renewed hope. The move to democracy in Ukraine may yet inaugurate a wave of new revolutions, this time against post-communism, which could sweep away nasty little dictatorships like that of Alexander Lukashenko's Belarus and even reverse the trend toward authoritarianism in Vladimir Putin's Russia. Nonetheless, no honest observer could deny that the complexities of democratization in the former communist world have been vast or that there is still much to be done. It will not be easier in the Middle East.

Then again, to quote Shakespeare's King Lear, "Nothing will come of nothing." It has to start somewhere. For a president dubbed by his opponents as the stupidest man ever to have sat in the White House, Bush has shown a remarkable ability to push things in the right direction. This should serve as a warning to those whose response to everything related to George Bush is reflex hostility and visceral hatred. Many sections of the European and American Left made the same mistake with Ronald Reagan. They were not especially welcome at parties following the fall of the Berlin Wall in Eastern Europe, having opposed the policies of a man who helped make it all happen. If freedom really is on the march in the Arab world today -- and the least we can say is that the first steps have now been taken -- the risk is that this will be the second great democracy party at which such people will be left moping on the sidelines, wondering, once again, how they got it all so wrong.

Robin Shepherd is an adjunct fellow of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. His columns appear weekly.

[frankiep]

for later reading

[jcb8199]

I think W. may be blessed--Arafat kicking off like he did, when he did, was perfect timing, not to mention the resounding success of Iraqi Freedom.

[AFPhys]

President Bush's strategy has been well developed for a long time, and his employing one of the foremost experts on the downfall of the Soviet Union as his National Security advisor and now as SecState proves his farsightedness.


President Bush saw this coming, and has been working for it for a very long time. Even his isolation of Arafat from day one has been part and parcel of his leadership.

Witness: President Bush has been expounding upon this same theme since 9/11, and to a lesser extent even before that time.

The most detailed look at the Bush Liberty Doctrine was first given on June 1, 2002 http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/06/20020601-3.html
President Bush Delivers Graduation Speech at West Point

Not long after that, in "The National Security Strategy of the United States of America", http://www.whitehouse.gov/nsc/nss.html , the administration laid out the whole deal, with reasoning and detail. Many only saw "preemption" in this, but they were simply being myopic, intentionally or not. The first paragraph of that is:

"The great struggles of the twentieth century between liberty and totalitarianism ended with a decisive victory for the forces of freedom—and a single sustainable model for national success: freedom, democracy, and free enterprise. In the twenty-first century, only nations that share a commitment to protecting basic human rights and guaranteeing political and economic freedom will be able to unleash the potential of their people and assure their future prosperity. People everywhere want to be able to speak freely; choose who will govern them; worship as they please; educate their children—male and female; own property; and enjoy the benefits of their labor. These values of freedom are right and true for every person, in every society—and the duty of protecting these values against their enemies is the common calling of freedom-loving people across the globe and across the ages."

I highly recommend that all FReepers, all who wish to catch up on what has been going on behind the scenes and why, all who still can't understand the reason our Declaration of Independence, the Magna Carta, and our Bill of Rights are so powerful, and all who simply wish to educate themselves as to the most probable direction of the Twenty-First century take a look at these documents - more than once.


Bush's Liberty Doctrine is to this century what the Monroe Doctrine was to the 19th. President Bush's administration has invited us all to understand what is happening, if we wish to understand. This team and president are far more intelligent and farseeing than most others in the whole world. Present events demonstrate the truth in these documents, and his strategery.
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