demonstrates the lengths to which President Bush’s convinced supporters will go to defend his unsustainable democratization strategy. Namely, they claim that whenever democracy in a Muslim country produces results that we do not like, it is because “true” democracy has not yet been tried. This kind of argument automatically excuses the Bush doctrine from any and all of its failures. Below is the entire
Ahabs Everywhere
In the Washington Post, Glenn Kessler sees Hamas’s win in Palestine not as an indictment of Palestinian political culture, but as a refutation of the Bush administration’s Mideast policies. His article is titled: “U.S. Policy Seen as Big Loser in Palestinian Vote”:
The election outcome signals a dramatic failure in the administration’s strategy for Middle East peace, according to analysts and some U.S. officials. [Ed.: Both the “analysts” and the “officials” are anonymous Democrats.] Since the United States cannot deal with an organization labeled a terrorist organization by the State Department, Hamas’s victory is likely to curtail U.S. aid, limit official U.S. contacts with the Palestinian government and stall efforts to create an independent Palestinian state.
More broadly, Hamas’s victory is seen as a setback in the administration’s campaign for greater democracy in the Middle East.
But democracy for the Palestinians is a policy of the U.S. government that long predates the Bush administration. Yasser Arafat was elected to head the Palestinian Authority in 1996 precisely because he was the world’s most famous terrorist. That Palestinians would vote for the most appalling candidates available is hardly a shock, and Kessler’s suggestion that the Bush administration could somehow have induced them to vote differently is unpersuasive, to say the least.
This is the part, though, that is really reprehensible; Kessler tries to argue that the administration’s support for democracy has generally been a failure throughout the region:
Elections in Iran, Iraq, Egypt and now the Palestinian territories have resulted in the defeat of secular and moderate parties and the rise of Islamic parties hostile to U.S. interests.
What a breathtaking bit of deception! The election in Iran was a sham, conducted by the mullahs and largely boycotted by reformist forces. The election didn’t cause the “rise of Islamic parties;” the mullahs have controlled Iran since 1979. Blaming Bush for the election returns there is like blaming him for the Iraqi referenda in which Saddam Hussein used to receive 99% of the vote. [True, the Iranian election had nothing to do with the Bush democratization strategy; but it DOES show that democracy in Muslim countries does not lead to moderation. Powerline gets around this problem by denying that the Iranian election was legitimate. What is this: the “actually existing democracy” gambit? For those unfamiliar with the reference, leftists typically defended Communism from its disasters and horrors by saying that the Communism that had failed was only “actually existing Communism,” not the real thing, which, they maintained, had never been tried. Thus there was no evidence that could ever prove that Communism was a flawed or evil thing. Many people on the left abandoned this excuse after 1991, but it never died completely and lately has been making a comeback. And now, using the same leftist reasoning, supporters of the Bush-doctrine are saying that the Muslim democratization that leads to Muslim extremism is only “actually existing democratization,” not the real thing.]
Egypt’s election was barely more open, and the Egyptian government is not above arresting its opponents. But how did the election results represent a “defeat of secular and moderate parties”? President Mubarak, as secular as they get in Egypt, was overwhelmingly re-elected, but the multi-party election—the first under his rule—was widely seen as a step on the road to democracy. [But to the extent that the election was open, the Muslim Brotherhood was the big winner. Powerline bizarrely attributes the Muslim Brotherhood’s advances in the election to the fact that the election was not truly open, then Powerline calls the election a success because Mubarak the secularist won. (But as Powerline itself half acknowledges, Mubarak only won because for the most part he kept the election closed, for example, by arresting his opponents.) From Powerline’s point of view, to the extent that the Egyptian election resulted in something “good,” it was a true election, and to the extent that it resulted in something “bad,” it was a fraudulent election. This is the kind of blatant double-talk that comes from people who have enlisted their minds in a political cause, or rather in a false political cause that cannot be defended honestly.]
And then there’s Iraq. Astonishingly, the Post is now trying to cast last year’s Iraqi elections as a defeat for the Bush administration! The Iraqi government is still being formed, but Kessler’s suggestion that the election will yield a regime “hostile to U.S. interests” is unfounded, if not downright absurd. [Leaving aside the fact that Iraq’s democracy has operated so far only under U.S. military protection, without which it would immediately fall, and therefore is not a democracy at all (since democracy means that a country is being ruled by its people, not that the country is under the protection of an external power), why is it absurd to say a Shi’ite Islamic regime will be hostile to U.S. interests?]
Here’s the real tally, insofar as it relates to the Bush administration: In Afghanistan and Iraq, fledgling but fully functioning democracies are taking root. [Can something be “fledgling” and “fully functioning” and still be in the process of “taking root,” all at the same time? This is the kind of slippery language the Bush supporters constantly use. They want to treat the democracy of Iraq as a fully achieved thing; but then, knowing that it is not fully achieved and has no immediate prospect of being fully achieved, they throw in weasel phrases indicating that Iraqi democracy is only a hope, a move toward something, not something that exists.] Lebanon, Egypt, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia have all made progress, in varying degrees, toward popular rule. After centuries of autocratic misrule in the region, that’s an astonishing record in a period of only three years. [There’s the liberal progressivist mentality for you. The liberal posits a utopian goal (and remember that “utopia” literally means no-place, a hoped-for condition of society that does not and cannot exist); then the liberal finds some tiny signs that he can say are moving society in the direction of this utopian goal; and on that basis he concludes that the effort to reach utopia not only is rational and realistic, but is already a proved success.]
[A final comment. Even if we knew nothing about the actual progress of the Bush doctrine on the ground, the fact that its proponents engage in such blatant distortions and evasions, and have consistently done so since 2003, should suggest to us that the doctrine is not succeeding but failing. Why else would the evasions be needed?]