ALL SADDAM WANTED WAS TIME:

INVASION VS. PERSUASION (George Packer, 2004-12-13, The New Yorker)

President Bush has put the idea of spreading democracy around the world at the rhetorical heart of American foreign policy. No one should doubt that he and his surviving senior advisers believe in what they call the “forward strategy of freedom,” even if they’ve had to talk themselves into it. Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, and Bush himself are latecomers to the idea; in earlier incarnations, they sounded a lot more like Henry Kissinger than like Woodrow Wilson. By now, though, it’s clear that, however clumsy and selective the execution, Bush wants democratization to be his legacy. So when his critics, here and abroad, claim that his rhetoric merely provides cynical cover for an American power grab, they misjudge his sincerity and tend to sound like defenders of the status quo. And when the Administration tries to wring every last sweet drop of partisan gain from its foreign policy (sincerity is not the same thing as honesty), critics are driven to conclude that “democracy” is just another word for “neoconservatism.”

This is not a good position for the opposition to be in, either morally or politically. The best role for critics in the President’s second term will be not to scoff at the idea of spreading freedom but to take it seriously—to hold him to his own talk. The hard question isn’t whether America should try to enlarge the democratic order but how. [...]

Not every country is lucky enough to be Ukraine, where internal opposition and quiet outside help will likely succeed in replacing a bad regime. But the ordeal in Iraq has shown that a war of liberation is a crude instrument for setting a country free. Democracy is not the absence of tyranny. It has to grow from within over time, and it requires far more care and feeding than Washington seems able to give.

It's almost possible to pity the folks, like Mr. Packer, who yearn for a Decent Left; but then you realize that the idea of waiting for democracy to "grow from within over time" is nothing more than a prescription for neo-isolationism and turning a blind eye to tyranny. That's a perfectly honorable political position--indeed, it's paleoconservatism--and experience demonstrates that no one nation, no matter how blighted, is likely to avoid the end of history forever, but it continues to cede the idea of spreading democracy to the theocons and their neocon minions.

Posted by Orrin Judd at December 22, 2004 3:14 PM