Cast aside the nonsensical rhetoric about President George W. Bush’s ostensibly successful efforts to bolster democratic tendencies “sweeping” the Middle East, and you will discover that the facts are not so rosy, with Iraq remaining the most horrific reminder.
President Bush seems to preside over an entirely different world reality, when he adamantly presents himself as a visionary world leader whose uppermost concerns are freedom and democracy all over the world, with due emphasis on the Middle East.
Neither genuine freedom nor representative democracies are truly on Bush’s foreign policy agenda, no matter how much prominence these topics receive in the president’s ever-predictable speeches.
We know for a fact that most tyrannical, repressive regimes have historically been the traditional friends and allies of successive US administrations, in the Middle East and elsewhere. Despite politically motivated frictions between the Bush government and some of those natural allies, anti-democratic approach of the overall US foreign policy remains.
While Bush and other members of his hawkish administration are brashly taking credits for the under-occupation and halfhearted elections in the occupied territories, they have, with an equal brazenness, turned a blind eye to Israel’s most domineering rule over the hapless Palestinian voters.
Bush is also increasingly adopting the Cedar Revolution in Lebanon, as if the Lebanese people (who fully comprehend the US government’s key role in their historically tragic plight) moved on the signal of Washington and its neoconservative clique.
By why overstate and embellish the supposed democratic triumphs in the Middle East in the first place? The answer lies in Iraq.
With the disastrous dismissal as a forgery of every excuse for war against Iraq — from the pretense of illicit weapons to the linking of former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein to Al-Qaeda militants — US administration experts began devising what they must perceive as an impenetrable war pretext: A case for democracy. The aim was not only to justify the ruinous war retrospectively, but also to stretch the Bush administration’s political and subsequently military mandate to other countries and regions, without the halting limitations experienced in Iraq.
One hardly needs to sell a case for democracy to the American public, genuinely supportive of democratic initiatives anywhere in the world, but also easily deceived through political indoctrination to consent to, or simply to overlook their government’s bloody wars to “restore democracy” anywhere in the world.
But there is more to the overemphasis of the “democratic tsunami” hitting the Middle East and the fantasizing on the Bush administration’s role in stirring it. The news coming from Iraq is too gory to detail, too frightening to recount, and the administration is doing all it can to balance the Iraq debacle by focusing on heartening democratic potentials, even if new forgeries.
Meanwhile, a very bloody battle is under way, involving US forces and Iraqi fighters in the remote western frontier of the country, near the Syrian border. Scores have been reportedly killed, although US troops have recounted to the Los Angeles Times that they are combating an “invisible enemy.”
The need to entangle the Iraq calamity with rhetoric about democracy elsewhere takes on another level of urgency when one follows the extremely cynical undertone of American foreign policy experts. “Everything we thought we knew about the insurgency obviously is flawed,” says Judith Kipper of the Council on Foreign Relations. “It was quiet for a little while, and here it is back full force all over the country.”
Bush’s claims of imaginary wars for democracy under his counseling should be taken as serious as Don Quixote de La Mancha’s battling windmills; both are fictional and silly. While there is indeed a growing desire for freedom and democracy in the Middle East, this popular yearning is independent of the US government’s political agendas and military designs. In fact, Bush’s increasing identification with pro-democracy movements in the region is stripping democracy advocates of badly needed credibility, and classifying them as simply, “pro-American”, a euphemism for disloyalty.
It would be more advantageous for President Bush and his administration to contemplate, confront and reconcile their own adversity in Iraq, for the real calamity began there and only there it can be brought to an end.
