EWWWWWW, IT HAS HIS COOTIES ON IT:

A Quieter Approach to Spreading Democracy Abroad (PETER BAKER, 2/22/09, NY Times)

Four years after President George W. Bush declared it the mission of America to spread democracy with the goal of “ending tyranny in our world,” his successor’s team has not picked up the mantle. Since taking office, neither Mr. Obama nor his advisers have made much mention of democracy-building as a goal. While not directly repudiating Mr. Bush’s grand, even grandiose vision, Mr. Obama appears poised to return to a more traditional American policy of dealing with the world as it is rather than as it might be.

The shift has been met with relief in Washington and much of the world, which never grew comfortable with Mr. Bush’s missionary rhetoric, seeing it as alternately cynical or naïve. But it also underlines a sharp debate in Democratic circles about the future of Mr. Bush’s vision. Idealists, for lack of a better word, agree that democracy-building should be a core American value but pursued with more modesty, less volume and better understanding of the societies in question. The realists, on the other hand, are skeptical of assumptions that what works in America should necessarily be exported elsewhere, or that it should eclipse other American interests.

The essential tension for the Obama team is whether to let Mr. Bush’s strong association discredit the very idea of spreading democracy. [...]

Moreover, Mr. Obama’s National Security Council has not duplicated the high-profile democracy post Mr. Bush had. Instead, Mr. Obama’s top democracy adviser during the campaign, Michael McFaul, was given the Russia portfolio. Coincidentally, this comes as the State Department Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor is being relocated across the street from headquarters, although the assistant secretary in charge will remain on the executive floor. The move, instigated in the last days of the Bush administration, stems from renovation schedules, but proximity is power in government and advocates are worried.

No one has been nominated for that assistant secretary position yet. Many Democrats thought Tom Malinowski, the Washington director of Human Rights Watch, would be a powerful choice, but he cannot take the job under Mr. Obama’s rules against lobbyists. Mr. Malinowski was registered as a lobbyist to advocate for victims of genocide, torture and oppression, rather than moneyed interests, but that has not earned him a waiver.

“As a Democrat, I am particularly troubled,” said Jennifer Windsor, executive director of Freedom House, a group that promotes democracy and liberty abroad. “To see democracy promotion as particularly Republican or Bush policy is to misunderstand our country’s foreign policy history.”

Too bad to let others suffer because you're immature and selfish, but they are the childish party.

Not that they can avoid our manifest destiny, Obama's War and the Risks Of Realism (Fred Hiatt, February 22, 2009, Washington Post)

But is Obama really contemplating a less ambitious mission? Pretty much everyone agrees that if you want to deny al-Qaeda a haven, you have to defeat or defuse the Taliban. That requires whittling away at the opium fields and narco-trafficking that fuel the insurgency. They won't diminish until farmers and traders have other, more legitimate opportunities. Such opportunities won't emerge unless there is a taming of the nation's virulent corruption. For that, you need to train police, encourage the rule of law, and build roads and other infrastructure. You need improved governance. Pretty soon, you are back to nation-building.

Without using that phrase, Central Command chief David Petraeus, the general who oversees the U.S. military effort in Afghanistan, acknowledged the breadth of the task in a recent talk at a conference in Munich. In addition to more intense combat efforts, he said, "a surge in civilian capacity is needed . . . to help our Afghan partners expand their capabilities in key governmental areas, to support basic economic development and to assist in the development of various important aspects of the rule of law, including initiatives to support the development of police and various judicial initiatives."

If you're engaged in nation-building, are there reasons not to say so? Well, yes, there might be. At a time of economic implosion, the nation can hardly afford, and Americans rightly will not support, highflying adventures overseas. Many are tired of what they saw as President George W. Bush's overreaching; that certainly applies to Democrats in Congress, and to plenty of Republicans, too, who only pretended to join in Bush's post-election conversion to an activist foreign policy. Allied leaders, many of whom fancy themselves above naive American pretensions to spread freedom to backward nations, welcome what they see as a return to reality.

But there are risks in such a public relations strategy, and not only that you may fool yourself into believing that the job is not so hard. The bedrock requirement for defeating the Taliban is the support of the Afghan people -- their continued belief, even as civilians get killed and war drags on, that our fight is their fight; that our enemy is their enemy; that foreign troops are helpmates, not occupiers. Is such support likelier if we acknowledge that we are hoping to help them achieve a better life -- or if we say we are roaming their country only to protect ourselves from another Sept. 11?

Posted by Orrin Judd at February 22, 2009 7:15 AM