[Mb-civic] SHOULD READ: Bush's Self-Evident Certitude - Michael Kinsley - Washington Post Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

Bush's Self-Evident Certitude

By Michael Kinsley
Friday, March 3, 2006; A17

The case for democracy is "self-evident," as someone once put it. The 
case for the world's most powerful democracy to take as its mission the 
spreading of democracy around the world is pretty self-evident, too: 
What's good for us is good for others. Those others will be grateful. A 
world full of democracies created or protected with our help ought to be 
more peaceful and prosperous and favorably disposed toward us.

There is no valid case against democracy. You used to hear a lot that 
democracy is not suitable for some classes of foreigners: simply 
incompatible with the cultures of East Asia (because deference to 
authority is too ingrained there) or the Arab Middle East (because 
everybody is a religious fanatic) or Africa (because they're too 
"tribal," or too predisposed to rule by a "big daddy" . . . or 
something). But this line of argument has gone out of fashion, pushed 
offstage by free and fair elections in some surprising places.

Yet the case against spreading democracy -- especially through military 
force -- as a mission of the U.S. government is also pretty 
self-evident. American blood and treasure should not be spent on 
democracy for other people. Or, short of that absolute, there are limits 
to the blood and treasure the United States should be expected to spend 
on democracy elsewhere, and the nature of war makes that cost hard to 
predict and hard to limit. Furthermore, the encouraging discovery that 
free elections are possible in unexpected places has a discouraging 
corollary: If tolerance and pluralism and suchlike Western values are 
not essential preconditions for democratic elections, they are not the 
necessary result of elections either.

The present debate over when to use American power in defense of 
democracies other than our own is at least more wholesome than the 
previous debate about using force to thwart or overthrow foreign 
democracies. The argument against tolerating communist governments 
elected fair and square used to be that the election that brought them 
to office would probably be the last. "I don't see why we need to stand 
by and watch a country go Communist due to the irresponsibility of its 
own people," as Henry Kissinger put it. But today's concern about what 
we might call "nasty democracy" is in some ways more depressing. It is 
not that a regime will use democracy in the short run to stifle it in 
the long run. The danger is that democracy will reveal the people's true 
and continuing preference for a society with no place for all the other 
Western liberal values that our founding document calls "self-evident" 
(equality, freedom to pursue happiness and so on). Even worse, these 
societies may decide to export their distaste for Western values just as 
we try to export the values themselves -- and they may not agonize, 
Western-style, over the distinction between violent and nonviolent means 
of persuasion.

Recent news has left us awash in examples: the triumph of Hamas in the 
Palestinian elections; the emergence of a similarly attractive group, 
the Muslim Brotherhood, as an electoral force in Egypt; and above all 
the result of the American-sponsored election in Iraq, which seems to be 
just about the opposite of the lion-and-lamb tranquility that democracy 
enthusiasts had hoped for. But if these developments gave President Bush 
any pause about his aggressive democratization project, he showed no 
sign of it Wednesday during his surprise drop-by in Afghanistan. From 
Bush's description, that legendarily bloodthirsty land has been 
transformed into something like Minnesota. It's a place where "men and 
women are respected" and "young girls can go to school" and "people are 
able to realize their dreams." We shall see.

In his biography of Margaret Thatcher, the British journalist Hugo Young 
used the term "inspirational certainty" to describe the strength that 
some political leaders get from refusing to let anything change their 
minds. Thatcher had it, and so did Ronald Reagan. Bush would like to 
have it. But on this particular issue, at least, he can't because he 
actually has changed his mind. In the 2000 election he opposed what was 
then called nation-building -- and he opposed it for all the 
self-evident reasons. Now he supports it, for equally self-evident 
reasons. If the arguments for both sides of some policy question are 
self-evident, the correct answer must not be. But Bush avoids the trap 
of complication by taking his self-evident truths sequentially.

Bush parries any challenge to explain his change of views with the 
simple assertion that Sept. 11, 2001, changed everything. It's easy to 
see how that day might have changed his opinion about the urgency of the 
war on terrorism. But how, exactly, is it supposed to have changed his 
opinion about the aggressive pursuit of democracy as a tactic in that war?

We don't want a President Hamlet, publicly rehearsing his doubts as he 
leads the nation into battle. But the men and women risking their lives 
for democracy in Iraq deserve at least a tiny sense that the president 
who sends them there has considered the evidence against his policy and 
has some sense of why he rejects it.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/02/AR2006030201217.html
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