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Where Woodrow Wilson was going to make
the world safe for democracy, George W. Bush is going
him one better. President Bush is going to make the whole
world democratic. As he declared in his Inaugural Address,
our "great objective" is "ending tyranny"
on earth.
And how does the president propose to
achieve it?
So, it is the policy of the United
States to seek and support the growth of democratic
movements and institutions in every nation and culture,
with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.
The president is here asserting a unilateral
American right to interfere in the internal affairs of
every nation on earth, without regard to whether these
nations have threatened us or attacked us. Their domestic
politics are now our concern, because if they are not
democratic, we are not secure.
Let it be said: This is a formula for
endless collisions between this nation and every autocratic
regime on earth and must inevitably lead to endless wars.
And wars are the death of republics.
President Bush also plans to badger and
hector foreign leaders on the progress they are making,
or failing to make, in attaining U.S. standards of liberty
and freedom:
We will persistently clarify the
choice before every ruler and nation: The moral choice
between oppression, which is always wrong, and freedom,
which is eternally right. ... We will encourage reform
in other governments by making clear that success in
our relations will require the decent treatment of their
own peoples ...
One awaits with anticipation the next
visit of the Saudi crown prince. And as there are at least
50 autocracies or tyrannies in Africa, the Middle East
and Asia, questions arise.
If President Musharraf refuses to yield
dictatorial powers, will Bush sanction Pakistan, and risk
his overthrow and transfer of his nuclear weapons to pro-Taliban
generals sympathetic to al-Qaida?
If Beijing declares its treatment of dissidents
to be none of Bush's business, will Bush impose sanctions
and enrage a regime ruling 1.3 billion people with whom
we have $200 billion in annual trade?
When a Chinese fighter crashed a U.S.
reconnaissance plane and Beijing held its crew hostage,
Bush meekly apologized. Now, he's going to take these
xenophobic Chinese communists to the woodshed?
If President Putin tells Bush the oligarch
Mikhail Khordokovsy will stay in prison and he will decide
how elections are run in Russia, what is Bush going to
do? Isolate him and drive Russia into the arms of China,
as we have already done with our sanctions on Burma?
If the Saudis reject democracy, are we
going to stop buying their oil? Somewhere, Osama is praying
that Bush will undermine the Saudi monarchy, as another
democracy-worshiper, Jimmy Carter, helped to undermine
the Shah – after whom we got the Ayatollah.
President Bush is championing a policy
of interventionism in the internal affairs of every nation
on earth. But did we not learn from 9-11 that intervention
is not a cure for terrorism, it is the cause of terrorism.
Clearly, the president does not understand
this, or believe it. For, in his inaugural, he describes
9-11 as the day "when freedom came under attack."
But Osama bin Laden did not dispatch his fanatics to ram
planes into the World Trade Center because he hated our
Bill of Rights. He did it because he hates our presence
and our policies in the Middle East.
President Bush says we have no other choice
than to end tyranny on earth because the "survival
of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success
of liberty in other lands." But this is ahistorical.
The world has almost always been a cesspool
of despotisms, but America has always been free. We have
retained our liberty by following the counsel of Washington
and staying out of foreign wars that were not America's
wars. It has been when we intervened in wars where our
vital interests were not imperiled – crushing the
Philippine insurrection, World War I, invading Iraq –
that America has come to grief.
Occupying the Philippines led us to intervention
in Asia, war with Japan and, soon after, wars to defend
the South Korean and Indochinese remnants of the Japanese
empire. Wilson's war gave us the Versailles peace treaty
that tore a defeated Germany apart and imposed unpayable
debts on her people, leading directly to Hitler.
The invasion of Iraq has reaped a harvest
of hatred in the Arab world, cost us 10,000 dead and wounded
and $200 billion, and created a new training ground and
haven for terrorists to replace the one we cleaned out
in Afghanistan.
In declaring it to be America's mission
in the world to end tyranny on earth, President Bush is
launching a crusade even more ambitious and utopian than
was Wilson's. His crusade, too, will end, as Wilson's
did, in disillusionment for him and tragedy for his country.
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An
Inaugural Formula For Endless War