THOUGHTS IN ITALY
David Frum's Diary
Here is that column for Il Foglio I mentioned yesterday:
Piero Fassino did not quite say that George Bush had been
right all along: That would be going too far for the leader
of an ex-communist party. But in an interview this week with
La Stampa, Mr. Fassino did say that he had come to recognize
that President Bush is “fighting for freedom and democracy”
in the Middle East. The leader of Italy’s Left Democrats
added that this fight has set in motion dramatic changes that
promise to weaken the forces of religious extremism in the
region.
Mr. Fassino remains a fierce opponent of both the Iraq war
and the Bush presidency. But he is not blind. Within days of
the successful Iraqi elections, a wave of change swept the
region: peaceful protests in Lebanon against Syrian
occupation, local elections in Saudi Arabia, the amendment of
the Egyptian constitution to permit opposition candidates,
official support for women’s suffrage in Kuwait, and many
other examples besides.
Nor is Mr. Fassino blind to his own political advantage.
Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has stumbled from
uncertainty to uncertainty over recent days. First he won a
vote in Parliament extending the deployment of the 3,300
Italian troops in Iraq. Then he high-handedly told a
television interviewer he would begin withdrawing the troops
in September. Then he reconsidered once more and promised to
withdraw the troops only after consulting with Italy’s
coalition partners, the US and the UK.
Mr. Berlusconi’s stumble opened a low-cost opportunity for
Mr. Fassino to present himself as a moderate, fair-minded,
and pro-democratic leader – and to distance himself from the
shrill, delusional accusations of Giulana Sgrena and the far
left.
So long as Italian troops remain engaged in the war on
terror, there will remain a large and substantial difference
between Mr. Berlusconi and his left-wing critics. But once
the troops come home, the gap shrinks away: If Italy’s
support for the war is reduced to a matter of words and UN
votes, Mr. Berlusconi’s opponents will find it far easier to
match him.
Still, it is interesting and important that Mr. Berlusconi’s
opponents should ITAL wish END ITAL to match him. Why are
they not content to loiter out there in Michael Moore land,
pedaling conspiracy theories and chanting slogans about war
and oil?
Mr. Fassino’s La Stampa interview offers a clue. At one point
he tells the interviewer that it is necessary to acknowledge
that President Bush is acting on very different principles
from previous Republican presidents, such as Richard Nixon,
Gerald Ford, or Bush’s own father.Those men, acting on the
advice of former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger or (in
the case of the elder Bush) Kissinger’s disciple Brent
Scowcroft, often found themselves supporting dictators and
other unsavory regimes in the name of anti-communism.
The younger Bush, however, is following the tradition of
Ronald Reagan. In the 1980s, Reagan faced multiple global
crises: not only a Soviet arms buildup in Europe, but also
communist insurgencies in Central America and threats to the
stability of authoritarian American allies in East Asia:
South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines. A small cadre of mid-
level aides argued that the surest way to defeat communism
and to strengthen America’s position in the world was by
encouraging democracy in non-democratic allied states.
A young Assistant Secretary of State named Paul Wolfowitz
organized the campaign of pressure that forced Ferdinand
Marcos out of power in the Philippines and that led to
elections in South Korea.
Another assistant secretary, Elliott Abrams, argued that the
United States would never be taken seriously as a defender of
democracy in Central America until it forced Augusto Pinochet
out of power in Chile. Abrams incessantly pressed for
elections in El Salvador and Guatemala as essential to the
defeat of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua.
And although apartheid South Africa had its defenders among
some conservatives, these same mid-level officials argued
that American support for democratization there would
constitute a global test of American commitment to the ideals
it professes.
Fifteen years later, East Asia is a zone of advancing
democracy , every government in the western hemisphere except
Cuba’s is an elected one, and South Africa has made a
peaceful transition to a government representing all its
citizens. The mid-level aides I mentioned, plus many others,
who witnessed the power of the democratic ideal in the Cold
War have now risen to high office – and have committed the
United States to a new policy of democratization in the
Middle East.
The European left has long given lip service to the
international support of democracy. And yet, when George
Bush adopted this very policy as his own after 9/11, the
leaders of the European left began to fret about stability,
sovereignty, and the supreme right of local despots to wield
power free from foreign interference. After all those years
of fulminating against Henry Kissinger, the European left
overnight became more Kissingerian than Kissinger himself had
ever been.
Is this outcome not ironic? Is it not embarrassing? And might
it not explain Mr. Fassino’s sudden, overdue, but still
welcome praise for a president who – whatever his faults –
has committed the United States more whole-heartedly to the
support of democracy worldwide than any of Europe’s self-
declared leaders of conscience? |
