Long on ideas but short on specifics, President Bush’s speech Thursday about democracy marked an important shift in rhetoric, if not in actual policy.

Speaking to the National Endowment for Democracy, the president called on Middle East allies and foes alike to embrace democratic rule, saying Islam and self-governance can successfully co-exist.

With support for the invasion of Iraq failing at home, the president has tried to cast his foreign policy as a moral battle for liberty, using ideas reminiscent of President Ronald Reagan’s call for freedom in the Soviet Union. Not once was the hunt for weapons of mass destruction mentioned, and talk of national security took second billing to the poetic dreams of the world’s democratic destiny.

For more than 50 years, the United States has put regional stability and national security above true democratic reforms in the Middle East, and elsewhere. Knowing full well that elections would likely lead to popular regimes unfriendly to U.S. interests, administration after administration has been forced to accept the rule of dictators and autocrats.

Egypt, one of this country’s strongest allies in the region, was singled out for critique, and the president pushed the country to move closer to a representative government. Saudi Arabia, which is annually criticized for its human rights abuses, was also called upon to improve conditions.

There is a long history of American presidents paying lip service to the spread of democracy. A quick look around the geopolitical map illustrates the conflict inherent in such grand ideas. Russia, under Bush’s friend Vladimir Putin, is slipping backwards toward autocratic rule. Pakistan’s chief executive, Pervez Musharraf, who is a vital ally in the war against terror and the fight for Afghanistan, came to power in a coup and is unelected. A state of emergency, which limits freedoms and silences critics, has been in effect in Egypt almost every day since 1967.

World security would be threatened if a radical, violent and fundamentalist regime – even one popularly elected – took possession of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal. And imagine the havoc on world oil markets and economies if newly elected and extreme leaders in Saudi Arabia turned off the spigot and stopped feeding America’s growing addiction to fossil fuels.

We strongly support the ideals of self-determination for all the world’s peoples. But we should not become distracted from our current missions in Iraq and Afghanistan. Our success in building free societies there will determine the prospects for helping other countries realize their potential.

Building democratic governments in Iraq and Afghanistan has become our responsibility. But this country did not go to war to spread the Jeffersonian ideal. We went to war in Afghanistan because the country had turned into a festering refuge for terror. We went to war in Iraq because we were told that Saddam Hussein represented an imminent threat to our national security.

We need to finish what we’ve begun there before we try to impose enlightenment on the world.


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