April 20, 2005
NOT AFRAID OF COMPETITION:
Dangerous democracy: Imperial America won't like the free Arabia that missionary America will have helped to spawn (David Hirst, April 20, 2005, Guardian)
At last month's anti-war conference in Cairo, Egyptian delegate Kamal Khalil excoriated President Mubarak's regime over "torture, poverty, unemployment, corruption, tyranny and despotism" - then added that the "liberation of Jerusalem starts here with the liberation of the people in Cairo". This linkage of domestic reform with the external foe dramatised the quandary lying in wait for President Bush's crusade for "freedom and democracy". God-given rights of all peoples are the panacea that will, among other things, end international terror and induce the Arabs to make their peace with Israel. So what, in this era of American-sponsored diplomacy and reconciliation, could this self-styled democrat possibly have meant by this reversion to the militant rhetoric of yesteryear?The extent to which Bush is contributing to the winds of change now blowing across the world's last monolithically tyrannical region is passionately debated by the Arabs, perplexingly confronted, as they feel themselves to be, by two Americas, the new missionary one of Bush's second term and the old unrepentant superpower. The US as a promoter of democracy is a far from new idea. But the scope, fervour and lofty expectations Bush has invested in it are new. Yet, at the same time, never has imperial America, with which the missionary one is inextricably intertwined, been as rampant and detested as it is today.
For Bush didn't embark on this radically interventionist, quasi-colonial phase of America's relations with the Middle East only, or even mainly, to confer democracy on it. He did so for other reasons, too, that had far more to do with the traditional drive for strategic and economic dominance - as well as with an Israel whose influence on US policy has reached unprecedented levels.
Mr. Hirst would do well to look around him: America had little trouble establishing strategic and economic dominance over the nations it freed in its 20th Century Crusades. It has nothing to fear from a liberated Arabia. Posted by Orrin Judd at April 20, 2005 10:58 PM
Mr. Hirsch would do well to read my weblog, where I discuss this very thing and how wrong he is.
What I read from this is that politicians will use whatever the putatively popular trope is to increase their own political strength. I don't why this is much different than Schroeder riding anti-Americanism to his last electoral victory. The problem for Hirsch is that voters in poor democracies ask "why can't you fix the streets before invading somewhere else?" and rich ones have no interest in acquiring other (poorer) countries (except for W. Germany acquiring E. Germany and that's generally acknowledged to have not worked out so well).
Posted by: Annoying Old Guy at April 20, 2005 11:22 PM