President Bush has repeatedly spoken of the capacity of “liberty” to transform “hostile regions.”  Transform them, I wonder, into what?  Permanent centers of perpetual, white-hot hatred?  But by the man’s own standard, his own express assumption about the strategic value of democratising the Near East, democratisation has not only backfired (and could have been predicted to do just that) but completely exploded in “our” hands.  It is high time to run democratists out of their positions of influence, vote them out of office and show their “Freedom Agenda” to be the colossal fool’s errand that it is and always has been.  Enough, I say, of nonsense like this:

And the best proof of how dangerous democracy is to Islamic fascists is the energy with which they are trying to defeat it.

A very few Islamic terrorists are trying to defeat the new Iraqi government in Iraq, but otherwise the persistent efforts of the so-called “fascists” on the whole have been towards putting up candidates and winning influence in this way.  This is arguably a short-term strategy, and they will throw out elections and all the rest of it as soon as they are in power, but “democracy” is not a danger to them–they represent, God help us, the prevailing, vibrant ideology of their time in the lands where we are providing them the mechanisms to rise to power without firing a shot.  Democracy in the Near East is dangerous to no one so much as us and our allies in the region.  A group that believes in this would have to be a band of historically ignorant, hubristic buffoons if they think that this would work out to our advantage.  Oh, wait, that’s exactly what they are.

Free elections are not sufficient, but they can be catalyzing.

Yes, like the precursor to an explosive!

It’s also worth emphasizing that democracies in the Middle East will not look like our own, because they will reflect the traditions of their own citizens. 

This is true, and entirely to be expected, which is why Near Eastern democracy will as often as not be authoritarian, illiberal, majoritarian and tyrannical.  Which is why it has always been a bad idea to spread this particular regime to this part of the world.

Do they believe that Iraq, which consists of a freely elected, multiethnic government whose leadership is fighting terrorism instead of supporting it, was better under Saddam Hussein than it is now?

Well, it’s rather obvious that Iraq was better off in terms of security and, for the most part, in the relations between the different sects.  If the first purpose of government to ensure civil order, Hussein’s government was better than the current government.  If the purpose of government is to have elections and watch impotently as citizens are blown up in the street, then, no, Hussein’s government clearly loses the contest.

Do they believe that it was better to have the Taliban control Afghanistan, not Hamid Karzai?

And what exactly does that have to do with anything in the Near East?  This is an attempt to swindle the audience–Karzai was installed as our man after we took out a regime that was hostile to us.  As anyone remotely familiar with the current scene in Afghanistan knows, Karzai controls his bedroom and office in Kabul and not a lot else; the country is, as it normally is, ruled by the local warlords and “democracy” is a front for their interests.  That’s to be expected, but spare us the comparison, as if the purpose of installing Karzai was to promote democracy–it was to conciliate the Pashtuns so they wouldn’t revolt en masse against the Tajik warlords whom we used to throw the Taliban out of the country.  This was fairly smart, unusually so for this crowd, but had literally nothing to do with the democratisation schemes for the other countries and nothing whatever to do with a Freedom Agenda.

Do they believe we should support more repression within Arab societies?

Well, no.  Why we should revert to one bad scheme of imperial management because the new one is failing has never been clear to me.  Perhaps we should get out of the imperial management business all together.  We believe, or at least I believe, that we shouldn’t be very closely involved with any of the governments in the region, so that our country does not become a target of the rebels and dissidents in any of those countries.  I happen to think, oddly enough, that the Arabs’ countries are their own (rather than being the playthings of Washinggton poli-sci guys and undereducated business majors) and that they will make of them what they can; we should wish them well and leave them to it.  If they can make a go of sane, orderly representative government, good for them, but what that really has to do with us will always remain a mystery to me.

Democracy and the accompanying rise in free institutions are what they deserve, and what our own security demands.

Actually, no nation automatically “deserves” democracy or free institutions.  These are things that must be developed and earned by each people that obtains them.  Even the nations that possess them must keep earning the right to have them again and again–they must demonstrate that they are worthy of such an inheritance (sadly, I think most Western countries would fail any such test), and if found wanting they can lose what it took centuries to build. 

These things are earned over a long process of becoming habituated to the practises necessary to sustain such institutions–otherwise, the institutions will break down and fail.  Without being able to make these things their own, democracy and “free institutions” are not only meaningless, but they are not really theirs and they will not risk very much or make any sacrifices to secure things that are not really part of their world.  The preeminent problem of Arab nationalism was that it created nation-states and ideals to which none of the people felt any loyalty; being able to vote will not engender any greater loyalty in the people of the modern Near East, and when a crisis comes they will abandon the institutions of their precious democracies just as Arab armies deserted their worthless Arab nationalist masters in the various Arab-Israeli wars.  No one will really fight and die for chimeras and abstractions, and if the new democratic order cannot offer something more than that it will fail just as Nasser’s revolutionary Arab nationalism and Baathism have failed before it. 

These things, democracy and “free institutions,” are built on a chain of abstract concepts and loyalties that most normal peoples throughout history have never held and, given the chance, have typically found deficient when compared to the real connections of concrete loyalties that they possess in other political ties of kinship and religion.  When these two sets of loyalties conflict, as they will inevitably conflict, the latter will always win out among sane, normal people.  It is actually, in a sense, to the credit of the peoples in the Near East that they do not buy into these abstractions with the eagerness of some other peoples.  But if we are premising our security on their embrace of such things, we had better be prepared to be very insecure, because either democracy will work and create enemies or it will fail and the supposed “security” a democratic Near East will bring us will evaporate.

In the words of President Bush, “The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world.”  Those who disagree with him must believe, by the power of their own logic, that continued tyranny is the route to a better world. 

Um, no.  That’s quite a stunning conclusion, and one that suggests a certain degree of illiteracy.  Mr. Bush posits a necessary connection between the survival of liberty in this country and its success in others.  Not to get all paleo on you, Mr. Wehner, but the argument could be made that America has actually become progressively less free as “freedom” and “democracy” have spread around the world, which would suggest that there might almost be an inverse relationship.  But that is not the main problem with Mr. Bush’s formulation.  He is mistaken about the relationship, because he thinks there is one.  Liberty in the United States is contingent on three things: the virtue of the people, the size of the government and the ability of the people to resist the usurpations of the government.  None of which really has anything to do with whether they are voting in Tikrit and Gaza.  It is almost impossible to believe that educated men can believe in this fairy-tale, but I will not assume that Mr. Wehner is engaged in pure cynicism, even though he does work for the President’s propaganda office (the Office of Strategic Initiatives). 

He may actually believe this stuff, which is perhaps much more worrisome than if he were simply trying to put one over on us.  What is worrisome is how, in almost zombie-like fashion, Mr. Wehner regurgitates every talking point Mr. Bush and his propagandists have used to date, as if no one had ever heard these ridiculous claims before.  Don’t they ever get new writers over at the Ministry of Propaganda?  Perhaps they should try out Blair’s speechwriters with their wacky phrases (“renaissance of strategy” and “alliance of moderation”)–equally vapid, but at least it’s different!  Do they expect people to say, “Oh, so freedom transforms hostile regions–why didn’t you say so before?  I completely agree now.  It’s so obvious after hearing it for the 5,732nd time!”

The president has a fundamentally different view, and his remarkable effort to promote human liberty and American security sets him apart from his critics. 

It also sets him apart from a little thing we’d like to call the real world.