With President Bush these days, often there’s nothing left to do but laugh. As when we learn that in a conversation with Egyptian democracy activist Saad Ibrahim, the president said, “You’re not the only dissident. I too am a dissident in Washington.” As Eric Kleefeld told me yesterday, President Bush seems confused. Dissidents are the ones who get tortured and wiretapped. Not the ones who do it. I guess that’s one of those sentence structure mistakes.
In any case, it’s not a simple matter disentangling the president’s vainglory from his narcissism. So for today let me just focus on the former.
As in the Post article from which that quote above comes, we are today frequently called on to see the president’s wrecked ‘democracy promotion agenda’ as an example of some sort of failed though laudable, even tragic, idealism. The president appears to think his plans have been sabotaged by an army of mediocrities running the State Department. If only he could steamroll them like the intelligence community!
But the whole story, like so much else from the Bush White House, is press and pomp with no substance. What’s remarkable is how little questioning there’s been about whether such an agenda ever existed at all — even from many who are normally the president’s critics. If the president wants kudos for speaking up for democracy at the level of rhetoric and looking the other way when it’s in the United States’ strategic interests, he can get in line — behind Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, Jack Kennedy, Franklin Roosevelt, Bill Clinton and actually pretty much every other president of the post-war era. Indeed, pretty much every president in American history.
As many critics have argued, the substance of America’s role as a democracy-promoter may be debatable, but surely the claim or the conceit is nothing that began with this president. Indeed, the claim contrasted with the reality — sometimes sizing up well and other times not so well — is also beyond a cliche in the post-World War II era. Had the president taken any steps to push for democratization in Egypt, Saudi Arabia or anywhere in Central Asia, perhaps there’d be something to discuss. But of course nothing like that has happened.
Yes, there’ve been a number of elections in Afghanistan and Iraq. But that’s only because this administration has overthrown more governments on its watch. In recent decades pushing for anything short of some level of popular sovereignty has just been deemed unacceptable. Just the same happened in Central America and the Balkans, indeed, by most measures more successfully in the Balkans.
So let’s just stop the talk about what’s happened to the president’s ‘freedom agenda’. There just never was one. It’s really that simple.
