Axis of Evil gives way to six tyrannies, only one of which is Muslim

I had missed this stunner. In her confirmation hearings before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on January 19, Condoleezza Rice identified six “outposts of tyranny” where the U.S. must help bring freedom. And guess what? Only one of them is a Muslim country. They are: Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Zimbabwe, Burma, and Belarus. So it was hardly an accident that the president neglected saying anything about terrorism in his inaugural address the next day announcing the aim of removing tyranny from the earth. It is clear that Bush’s campaign for freedom is now only tangentially related to the purpose of defeating Islamist terrorism and defending America and its allies.

This doesn’t mean that I would necessarily oppose the exertion of U.S. influence against a brutal regime such as that in Burma. But what we’re talking about here is an open-ended, global campaign that has been essentially detached from the supposedly urgent idea that initially justified it: that Islamic extremism is bred by Islamic tyranny, and therefore the only way to make ourselves safe from terrorism is to convert Muslim countries to some form of representative, liberal government. Just as Bush went beyond the unfinished task of defeating terrorists and announced the goal of democratizing all Muslim countries, he has now gone beyond the barely-started work of democratizing all Muslim countries and has announced the goal of democratizing the whole world. This is not mission creep. This is mission gallop.

Yet none of this has put a crimp in the adoring support Bush receives from his “conservative” base (in addition to the L-dotters’ giddy, worshipful response to Rice’s radical expansion of the war on terror here, a somewhat higher-placed person in the conservative universe responded to this story by saying, “Three cheers for Condi”). I think that if Bush announced next week that freedom on the planet earth is not an important enough object for us, and that he plans to send a fleet of armed space vessels to the Alpha Centauri solar system to free it from tyranny, his fans (who were once known as the citizens of a constitutional republic) would be equally excited and ecstatic about that.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at February 06, 2005 12:26 AM | Send