January 26, 2005
Dave Eberhart
NewsMax
All who live in tyranny and hopelessness can know the United States will not ignore your oppression or excuse your oppressors. When you stand for your liberty, we will stand with you. – President George W. Bush, Jan. 20, 2005.
Just what, exactly, did President George W. Bush mean in his inaugural address by spreading democracy and eliminating tyranny throughout the world?
The answer to that question created a firestorm in U.S. and foreign circles that remained unquelled throughout the weekend.
Former President George Bush Sr. on Saturday suggested: “People want to read a lot into [the address] – that this means new aggression or newly assertive military forces. That’s not what that speech is about. It’s about freedom.”
But the father’s view is only one, as governments around the world try to digest what is already becoming known as the “Bush Doctrine.”
In his weekly radio address over the weekend, Bush tried to clarify his remarks by repeating his inaugural theme that security at home depends on “the success of liberty abroad. So we will continue to promote freedom, hope and democracy in the broader Middle East – and by doing so, defeat the despair, hopelessness and resentments that feed terror.”
Some nations have expressed concern that Bush’s speech is the salient to a more aggressive policy that could worsen global tensions.
And conservatives who supported the president believe the U.S. may be on a Wilsonian global plan that will end in failure.
North Korea’s communist government denounced the U.S. as a “wrecker of democracy” that “ruthlessly infringes upon the sovereignty of other countries.”
A BBC World Service survey last week of nearly 22,000 people in 21 countries found that 47 percent see U.S. influence in the world today as largely negative, with 58 percent believing Bush’s re-election will make the world more a dangerous place.
At home, some were quick to interpret the Bush rhetoric as more benign than it perhaps sounded on its face.
For example, Clark Judge, a former speechwriter for Ronald Reagan and special assistant to George Bush Sr., opined that the president made explicitly clear that he’s not setting out to impose democracy on other nations:
“Rather, what [Bush] defined in the inaugural address was a bias toward foreign policy – a way in which foreign policy will lean when the opportunities arise. He said this is not primarily a matter of arms but when we have choices about diplomatic relations, about the nuances of policy, we will take ... the course that is most in favor of the democratic forces within any country.”
Clark argued that the idea of imposing democracy against people’s will is contradictory in itself, noting that the president emphasized that in countries where people are ruled by oppressive regimes, the U.S. will “lean on the side of people who yearn to be free. In other words, we are the friends of the people, and we are going to use the instruments of policy as we can.”
State Department spokesman Richard Boucher echoed the Clark analysis in a recent statement that Bush “made clear it was not something preceded by force of arms. I think you'll see him carry a new level of, shall we say, support for democratic forces in various countries. It doesn't mean we abandon our friends. But many of our friends realize it's time for them to change anyway.”
Boucher cited municipal elections in Saudi Arabia as one democratic advance, and he said the United States has long raised objections to human rights violations in China.
Writing in an recent opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal, Reagan and Bush 41 speechwriter Peggy Noonan said President Bush's widely praised inaugural speech left her with “a bad feeling and reluctant dislike.”
In her piece, entitled “Way Too Much God,” Noonan quoted the president: “We are led, by events and common sense, to one conclusion: The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. ... Across the generations we have proclaimed the imperative of self-government. ... Now it is the urgent requirement of our nation's security, and the calling of our time. ... 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 the world.”
Asked Noonan: “Ending tyranny in the world? Well that's an ambition, and if you're going to have an ambition it might as well be a big one. But this declaration, which is not wrong by any means, seemed to me to land somewhere between dreamy and disturbing. Tyranny is a very bad thing and quite wicked, but one doesn't expect we're going to eradicate it any time soon. Again, this is not heaven, it's earth.”
Meanwhile, the Los Angeles Times was reporting that Bush’s speech brought joy to the hearts of the neoconservative wing of the Republican party, “that determined band of hawkish idealists who promoted the U.S. invasion of Iraq and now seek to bring democracy to the rest of the Middle East.”
In one dramatic gesture, the president’s speech revived what had been seen as the sagging fortunes of the neocons, who had virtually disappeared from the political scene during the presidential campaign as a result of continuing problems with the U.S. role in Iraq – a role frequently blamed on the neocons.
As noted by the Times, for at least a year now the neocons have kept low profiles and toned down their rhetoric. During the campaign, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz, one of the leading and most coherent voices for invading Iraq and a prominent neocon, virtually disappeared from public view. He has re-emerged with the announcement that he will keep his top Defense Department post.
Pundits have been working overtime trying to put the speech into the context of history:
# NBC's Tim Russert: “Well-crafted, well-delivered. The themes of freedom and liberty ... I thought the call to national service will resonate with all Americans – Democrats, Republicans and Independents.”
# CBS News' Bob Schieffer said the speech was “eloquent and the rhetoric lofty.”
# ABC News' George Will: “It's not just the survival of liberty he's about. He is about the expansion of liberty into every nook and crevasse of the planet.”
# Howard Fineman of Newsweek called the address “Powerful. I think it is the biggest statement of American purpose in the world of any president I can think of. It is Woodrow Wilson on steroids. It's big.”
# Dick Morris, former aide to President Clinton, said the address “was the greatest [inaugural address] ... since John F. Kennedy's and one of the five or six greatest of all time. It was beautiful, it was poetic ... and it articulated a bold new doctrine for American policy. It was a very substantive speech.”
# Robin Wright of the Washington Post told Tim Russert on “Meet the Press” Sunday: “It's interesting how the second administration really is redefining the war on terrorism to a war to achieve liberty and to go after the regimes whose unjust rule has led to resistance and the emergence of Islamic extremism.
“The one flaw in his speech, or the one limitation, is that he defines it in terms purely of liberty, and he doesn't really talk a lot about human rights law. And there's a big difference. Liberty is achieving, you know, political change. But achieving it is often dealing with the very regimes … responsible for creating this extremism – Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt.
“There are a number of countries where the United States faces a challenge. As noble as it sounds to take on the cause of liberty, it's very difficult in practical terms to get regimes we count on for the war on terrorism to actually undergo that transition.
# On the same program, Stephen Hayes of the Weekly Standard opined: “[T]his speech potentially marks a significant shift. I mean, if you look at Egypt, if you look at Saudi Arabia, you look at those places where we have had ‘allies’ in their leaders – ‘allies’ in quotes – the populations are anti-American.
“If you look at places like Iran, where we've been critical of the leadership, to say the least, you have populations that are vastly more pro-American. I don't think that's an accident. I think one of the things the president can do, and frankly, some of us think he should have been doing more in his first term, was speaking directly to these reformers in Iran, in places throughout the region, giving them the moral support.
“I mean, that worked for President Reagan. You remember when he said, ‘Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.’ We didn't show up with a crane and bring the wall down ourselves. Rhetoric is sometimes action. And I think, in that sense, what the president did the other day is significant and historic and could mark a significant turning point in the history of both this nation and in the world.”
Whatever its nuances, the Bush Doctrine will figuratively go on the road next month as the president travels to Europe for talks with NATO allies and European leaders in Brussels. There will follow a visit to Germany and a meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Slovakia.
http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2005/1/23/174509.shtml