Although I am more optimistic (or perhaps naive) than he is and still support democracy promotion for idealistic reasons, I found TigerHawk’s argument that we should fight for democracy on a Mafia-like basis (“the enemy of my enemy,” etc.) provocative in the good sense. TH is responding to an article in Foreign Affairs which has a more jaundiced outlook.
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Roger,
I find TigerHawk’s arguments fairly persuasive.
Even if he is being too pessimistic, a policy based on this kind of rational pessimism is more realistic, and less likely to disappoint us.
The Islamist mindset is certainly not mollified in its medievalistic brutality, mysogyny, and all-purpose hatreds by the mere presence of, or even long tradition of, democracy and democratic traditions. For evidence of that, one has merely to look a few miles to my east in Lodi, California, where there appears to be a small, but thriving, “community” of these losers.
Jamie Irons
My impression of what Bush has said is that democracies don’t generally attack each other and aren’t usually state sponsors of terrorism. I think there is plenty of anecdotal evidence to show that this is true.
The Foreign Affairs article takes Bush’s premise and turns it into democracies aren’t free from terrorist attacks and organizations. This is also true, but it’s apples and oranges. The author is being disingenuous.
I concede that in the short run a dictator intent on stomping out terrorists might keep us safer. Nonetheless, our long term security depends on encouraging the Islamic populations to join the modern democratic world. Nobody in their right mind advocates a pure democracy. Democracies do not instantaneously come into existence. They evolve over a period of time. A viable society must embrace political principles which guarantee rights to individual citizens which transcend the arbitrary wishes of the majority.
I certainly agree with Ed Poinsett that Bush has also said that democratic states do not sponsor terrorism and that they generally don’t attack each other. And I also agree that Gause and other critics (see Pat Buchanan’s column, also linked in my post) are deliberately interpreting what Bush and Rice have said narrowly. However, Bush has emphasized the Sharankyist romantic view that democracy will in and of itself diminish terrorism, and this has left him open to empirical attack. My own opinion is that the Bush administration also needs to make the realist case, or the democratization strategy will be at the mercy of less nuanced critics in January 2009.