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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: LindyBill who wrote (98745)	2/5/2005 1:50:04 AM
From: LindyBill	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793846

Reform Abroad The message of Bush's foreign policy: No more Somozas. WSJ.com OpinionJournal Saturday, February 5, 2005 12:01 a.m. It has been a while since these columns last invoked the name of Anastasio Somoza. But President Bush's State of the Union address reminded us of the former Nicaraguan president, whom Franklin Roosevelt memorably described as "our son of a bitch." If one foreign-policy message really stood out Wednesday night it was this: No More Somozas. That is not to say the United States will not, at times, enter into alliances of necessity with autocratic governments, as it does now with Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. Nor is it to say that the alternative to maintaining such alliances is a policy of seeking the immediate overthrow of every non-democratic government, as some caricatures of Mr. Bush's policy suggest. As the President said Wednesday, "the United States has no right, no desire and no intention to impose our form of government on anyone else." What it is to say, however, is that the United States will no longer give automatic preference to the short-term interests of national or international stability over the long-term interests of individual freedom. Instead, the U.S. will seek democratic openings, encourage democratic reform, stand up for pro-democracy movements, keep faith with pro-democracy dissidents, and give authoritarian governments a choice between moving toward reform or else risking U.S. support. Thus Mr. Bush praised reform in Morocco, Jordan and Bahrain; he urged reform on allies in Saudi Arabia and Egypt; and he told Iranians, "As you stand for your liberty, America stands with you." What Americans need to appreciate is how radically this vision breaks with conventional American policy toward the Middle East. That policy--and it has been bipartisan--held that supporting Mideast dictators was the best thing for U.S. interests. As former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote in the New York Times last March, "Democracy, impatiently imposed, can lead to unintended consequences." In this view, Osama bin Laden is a discrete problem that can best be handled by allying ourselves with Middle Eastern intelligence services. Any hatred of the U.S. in the region results from the Arab-Israeli dispute, and if we could only solve that problem Islamic radicalism would ebb. Mr. Bush's second inaugural, and now his fourth State of the Union, show that he is turning this policy on its head. The lesson he has taken from September 11 is that bin Ladenism breeds in the dictatorships of the Middle East and the only real antidote is freedom. This is why the Iraq project isn't separate from, but is integral to, the larger war on terrorism. It is true that democracies do not always yield palatable, or even pro-American, results: Algeria's Islamic Salvation Front would probably have come to power democratically in 1991 had the Algerian military not interceded. The U.S. supported the military at the time, but these columns said that was a mistake. Had the Islamic fundamentalists come to power, they would suddenly have had to produce results. Instead, those radicals have since directed their rage against the West. If Arabs are now reluctant to credit Mr. Bush's sincerity, it is at least partly because they have spent their lifetimes observing American support for regimes such as the Iran of the Shah or the Egypt of Hosni Mubarak. The arrest this week of Egyptian parliamentarian Ayman Nur on dubious forgery charges offers Mr. Bush an excellent opportunity to remind Mr. Mubarak that he is on notice. At a minimum, the Administration can do better than simply to note, as State Department spokesman Richard Boucher did, that Mr. Nur's arrest was "incongruous" given forthcoming talks between Egyptian government officials and democracy advocates. It has been widely reported that Mr. Bush recently read Natan Sharansky's book, "The Case for Democracy." The power of Mr. Sharansky's argument lies in its insistence that the problems of the Middle East are neither religious nor civilizational. They are political. And the power of Mr. Bush's prescription lies in its faith that the patient promotion of democracy is the only way the Middle East can emerge from its current darkness with the dignity of its better traditions intact. Copyright © 2005 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.