If the Bush Doctrine means linking the foreign policy of the United States to the degree of freedom enjoyed by citizens of other countries—as called for by President Bush in his second inaugural address when he declared that America would “encourage reform in other governments by making clear that success in our relations will require the decent treatment of their own people”—then I have been a supporter of the Bush Doctrine for over three decades. It is the policy long championed by Andrei Sakharov, first practiced in the United States by Senator Henry M. Jackson, and used with devastating effect by Ronald Reagan to bring down the Soviet empire, free hundreds of millions of people, and help secure Western civilization.
The Bush Doctrine has been under assault primarily because of the current situation in Iraq. It is hard to recall that only eight months ago, a headline in a paper not known for its sympathies with the American President or with the doctrine that bears his name asked, incredulously, “Was Bush Right?”
That week, Iraqi voters had shocked the world when 60 percent of them turned out to participate in democratic elections. Confronted by millions of purpled fingers, fierce critics of the President and his Iraq policy, and particularly of its stress on promoting democracy in the Middle East, fell largely silent. To many, the elections offered clear evidence that, just like Italians, Germans, Japanese, East Europeans, Russians, Latin Americans, and others before them, Iraqis, too, truly wanted to be free. As for those who had all along argued the merits of helping Iraqis build a free society, they were gripped by a kind of collective euphoria.
The euphoria was understandable enough: these were people whose ideas had been dismissed by critics on both the Left and the Right as nothing but a utopian fiction. Nevertheless, it was misplaced. The Iraqi elections showed that a democratic Iraq was possible, not that it was inevitable.
Still, the President’s critics, now more certain in their skepticism than ever, would be wise to remember those purpled fingers. For if supporters of the Bush Doctrine were wrong to assume eight months ago that the difficult days were behind them, today’s critics are even more wrong to assume that the project to build a democratic Iraq is bound to fail.
Not that the path ahead will be easy. A democratic Iraq is possible because Iraqis want to be free, and because the President of the United States rightly understands, as few leaders of the last century have understood, that his own nation’s security depends on the advance of freedom around the world. An Iraqi people who want to be free and a world leader determined that they will be free make for a powerful combination. Thanks to it, the Iraqi democratic experiment has overcome many a barrier over the last two years, from the horrific carnage in the streets of Baghdad to antiwar sentiment in America. But it is another question whether, given the array of its enemies, the combination will prevail.
Let us be under no illusions. Not a single non-democratic regime in the Middle East, or anywhere else for that matter, wants Iraqis to be free. The regimes that deny freedom to Iranians, Syrians, Saudi Arabians, Egyptians, and so many others know that success in Iraq will help put an end to their own repressive rule. They also know that the vast majority of their nominally loyal subjects, long trained in the arts of doublethink, will lift their eyes toward a free Iraq and ask themselves a simple question: why not here?
To the formidable opposition provided by non-democratic regimes, one must add the determination of Islamist terrorist groups to wreak havoc in Iraq, correctly appreciating as they do that a free Iraq will represent, for them, a monumental defeat in the war they have been waging on the democratic world for more than a quarter-century. Imagine an occupied post-World War II Japan, surrounded by regimes and terror groups willing to do everything possible to undermine the emergence of Japanese democracy, and one can sense the scale of the challenge in Iraq today.
The Bush administration can be faulted for not recognizing the difficulties involved in helping to democratize the Middle East, but certainly not for lacking the wisdom or the courage to try. If anything, the problem has lain in not applying the Bush Doctrine consistently enough. For example, this past June, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice gave a truly remarkable speech in Cairo about the importance of democratic reform in the Middle East. By the end of the summer, however, the administration was doing everything to help keep Hosni Mubarak’s regime in power in Egypt, while extending little help to the democratic opposition in Iran. It also enthusiastically supported an Israeli disengagement plan from Gaza that utterly rejected the centrality of Palestinian democratic reform to the peace process.
Equally unfortunate is the scant attention paid to the need to turn the Bush Doctrine into a bipartisan policy. No doubt, in a politically polarized climate, this is no simple matter. But if the Bush Doctrine is to succeed in transforming the region and the world, it will have to remain American policy beyond January 20, 2009.
Yet any criticism I may have of the Bush Doctrine’s implementation is tempered by my deep appreciation of the fact that its merits are being discussed at all. For too long, American foreign policy was shaped by the idea that supporting friendly dictators was critical to peace and stability. This illusion collapsed on 9/11, and President Bush was bold enough to chart a different course. For this he deserves nothing but praise and gratitude.
Among the first who owe him gratitude are the millions of Afghans and Iraqis who no longer live under tyranny, the millions of Lebanese who have begun to build a free Lebanon, and the countless democrats now raising their voices throughout a region once characterized only by fear and repression. These are the true beneficiaries of the Bush Doctrine, and I have no doubt that both America and the world are much safer for the bounty that has befallen them.
