From today's
Buffalo News
www.buffalonews.com :
While Washingtonians believed that it was desirable that democracy spread throughout the world, the best way for America to contribute to this goal, they believed, was to perfect its own democracy, serving as a model or example for others to emulate. What was out of the question was to attempt to "export democracy on the tip of the bayonet," as the saying went. Adams famously articulated this philosophy when he counseled Americans to "go not abroad in search of monsters to destroy."
...
In my view, however, the Bush doctrine merits much more severe criticism: It is quite simply the most dangerous pronouncement by an American president in living memory. If the president genuinely believes what he is saying, he is not so much idealistic as naive and detached from reality. On the other hand, if he doesn't believe his rhetoric, he is being cynical and hypocritical.
Amen to that. Don't hold back on the criticism. Dr. Slater continues, and rips the doctrine to shreds.
I found this part most interesting because he systematically takes apart the "Bush doctrine." This view is definitely out of the mainstream, but it deserves to be more widely heard.
The Bush doctrine is based on three interrelated premises or propositions, all either simplistic or demonstrably false:
- Terrorism is produced by tyranny, therefore the solution to terrorism is the spread of democracy.
The problem with this argument is that there have been plenty of tyrannies that, in their own interests, successfully repressed terrorist movements. For example, in 1982 Hafez Assad of Syria ruthlessly destroyed the Muslim fundamentalist movement in his country, killing as many as 30,000 people.
Conversely, precisely because they allow more freedom than dictatorships, democracies are often more vulnerable to terrorism. For example, in 1992 the Algerian people freely voted into office a particularly vicious terrorist movement. It didn't take power, however, because a military coup and subsequent dictatorship prevented it - much to U.S. relief.
- The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands.
On the contrary, throughout history as well as today, most people in the world have been ruled by autocracies. Yet for more than two centuries, American democracy and freedom have generally prospered and developed. Take Latin America, for example. During the 1970s, most Latin American countries, including our closest neighbors in Central America and the Caribbean, were ruled by repressive military dictatorships - many of them actively supported by the United States because they were reliably anti-communist - whereas today most of them have become democracies. Has there been any discernible difference, let alone improvement, in American democracy during this period?
- America's vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one.
A comforting thought, but hardly accurate. Our deepest values, in the abstract, may indeed be those of democracy and freedom, but not if free elections bring into power fanatical Muslim fundamentalists, for in that case our vital national interests - including basic homeland security - may depend on their repression.
Thus, the Bush administration - and rightly so - cooperates with China and the increasingly autocratic government of Vladimir Putin in Russia, strongly supports autocratic governments in Jordan and Egypt and works closely with the nondemocratic Saudi and Pakistani regimes, which in the last few years have apparently begun to suppress fundamentalist terrorist movements.
In an obvious reaction to criticism of the inaugural message, Bush sought in his State of the Union address to refute the charges of hypocrisy by briefly and perfunctorily calling on Saudi Arabia and Egypt to "demonstrate (their) leadership in the region by expanding the role of (their) people in determining their future."
Nonetheless, Bush's foreign policy record makes it evident that when he calls for increased freedom and democracy, in practice he doesn't mean it to apply to autocracies who generally support his foreign policy objectives and methods - especially when autocratic leaders, like Hosni Mubarak of Egypt and King Fahd of Saudi Arabia, are considerably more pro-Western than their countrymen.