Reacting to John Kerry's speech (his most impressive yet) on national security, delivered September 20 in New York, George W. Bush had little to offer beyond boilerplate rhetoric and familiar distortions of the nature of the Iraqi threat and Kerry's voting record. On Tuesday, speaking before the United Nations General Assembly, he came up with something more compelling: a defense of his policies as part of a grand strategy of promoting freedom and democracy around the world.
He praised the Declaration of Independence and the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights, saying that "these rights are advancing across the world" despite opposition from "terrorists and their allies," who believe that "dictators should control every mind and tongue in the Middle East and beyond." Bush's policies, according to Bush, are designed to combat this and maintain the march of liberty. It's a nice idea -- the right idea, even, for securing America's safety and prosperity for the long term.
The only problem is that it isn't happening.
Just last week, Vladimir Putin, president of Russia, a state we once hoped to make into a democracy, used the terrorist attacks on a school in Beslan as a pretext for taking the next step in his campaign to eliminate all independent sources of authority and return Russia to the days of rule by the security services. While much of the world only woke up to this turn of events recently, it is, in fact, a process that's been steadily under way for years. During this time, Bush has stood by Putin, welcoming him as an ally in the war on terrorism and accepting his assertions that Russian policies with regard to Chechnya are of a piece with America's struggle against al-Qaeda.
China, with the world's largest population, is a land where recently we hoped to see market reforms and integration into the rules-based World Trade Organization lead to political reforms. Those hopes have been dashed. Instead, the Chinese regime has intensified its crackdown against Falun Gong practitioners and sought to undermine democracy in Hong Kong while Bush has done nothing.
In central Asia, the Bush administration has entered into new alliances with a variety of tyrannical regimes -- most notably Uzbekistan -- that use counterterrorism as a pretext for suppressing freedom of religion and cracking down on political dissent. At first it appeared that these unprincipled alliances might last only as long as necessary to prosecute the Afghan war, but with its recently announced plans to reconfigure America's military deployments around the world, it is now clear that the administration envisions abandoning democratic allies like Germany and South Korea in favor of permanent outposts in these benighted lands. Pakistan, another nearby dictatorial state, has been granted “major non-NATO ally” status, elevating President Pervez Musharraf's military regime into the highest ranks of friendship with America. On September 15, General Musharraf announced plans to back out of his commitment to abandon his military position and return the country to a veneer of civilian rule.
The point, however, is not -- or at least not only -- that Bush is a hypocrite. Advancing the cause of democracy somewhere would be preferable to doing it nowhere. The problem is that Bush isn't doing it anywhere. Whether through intellectual confusion or simple malice, the president has adopted a set of policies that are rolling freedom back across a wide swath of the earth, leaving misery in their wake and playing directly into the hands of al-Qaeda.
For all the seeming incomprehensibility of the violence wreaked by Osama bin Laden and his followers, al-Qaeda's activities are not random acts of malice or pointless slaughter. They are deliberate provocations, designed to sting the United States and its allies, yes, but more importantly designed to provoke a spiral of conflict that will end with a united Islamic world facing off against its perceived adversaries. Bush is all too willing to acquiesce in the efforts of secular tyrants to tie their local problems in with America's war on terrorism. In the end, this is precisely the response bin Laden would hope to see to the September 11 attacks. When we endorse Putin's assertion that his war in Chechnya or Chinese President Hu Jintao's claim that his war in Sinkiang is part of our war, the inevitable counter-response is for ordinary Chechens and Uighurs to endorse bin Laden's claim that their struggles are his as well.
Whether or not sincerely designed to spread freedom, the invasion of Iraq is accomplishing the reverse. Much as Bush may want "to help build an Iraq that is secure, democratic, federal, and free," it will be no such thing for the foreseeable future. A National Intelligence Estimate prepared by his own government has concluded that Iraq will see, at best, a tenuous security and, at worst, a brutal civil war. The elections planned for January are going to be farcical, marred by violence, fraud, and intimidation even outside the regions currently held by insurgent forces, as nationwide insecurity has prevented international organizations from laying the groundwork for a proper vote. In this, they will resemble the Afghan elections to be held shortly -- elections that could have gone much better had Bush not neglected his promises to the Afghan people in favor of prosecuting the pet goal of regime change in Baghdad.
Worse, in many ways, has been the impact of the Iraq War on the wider region. While neoconservative intellectuals hoped it would lead to the swift establishment of a democratic model for the rest of the region to follow, the instability has achieved the reverse, lending credibility to the assertions of local authoritarians that their iron rule is the only thing preventing chaos. Meanwhile, though local governments have certainly heard the president's call for greater freedom, they have also heard his demands that they offer tacit support to the grossly unpopular military campaign in Iraq.
As Williams College professor Marc Lynch told me in May, regimes "know that they can't openly go against the United States, but because it's unpopular, they find themselves clamping down."
Meanwhile, while freedom is eroded, Arab reformers find themselves discredited by association with an ever more loathed United States. As Fareed Zakaria wrote in Newsweek on September 13, "In every Arab country that I have been to in the last two years, the liberals, reformers and businessmen say, 'Please don't support us. American support today is the kiss of death.'"
Most dramatically, this dynamic was instrumental in helping Iranian hard-liners crush reformist elements in the government and dissidents on the streets, thus reversing several years of slow progress in one fell swoop. Bush -- joined by Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allawi -- has consistently prioritized clamping down on harsh media coverage in the Arab world over encouraging the growth of an independent press, thus winning himself many friends in Arab security services but few in the community of reform-minded intellectuals.
Near the end of his speech, Bush waxed eloquent, saying, "The defeat of terror, the protection of human rights, the spread of prosperity, the advance of democracy: These causes, these ideals, call us to great work in the world."
And he's right. But can this work best be done through a set of policies that have alienated us from the population of every actually existing democracy on earth and the population of the very region we're seeking to democratize? Is freedom best advanced by an international coalition that is increasingly composed of increasingly despotic regimes? Will a succession of wars that leave failed states and civil war in their wake really enhance the appeal of liberty? How does Bush propose to be a friend to Arab reformers when the thing they fear most is association with America?
Anyone who cares about the causes on whose behalf Bush argues would do well to think long and hard about those questions.
Matthew Yglesias is a Prospect staff writer.
