WONDER LAND
Just Another Word?This means it's all right to be excited about freedom if it's just an old, familiar song, but not so good if you might have to do something about it.
The core idea of Mr. Bush's speech is that the time has come to do something about it: "The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands." In other words, freedom or liberty is no longer something sitting outside the window when you wake up. Ronald Reagan's morning in America is a little different now. America's good-day sunshine is contingent. September 11, A.Q. Khan's nuclear bad-boy network, Pyongyang, Iran's mullahs, the commercial cynics who live in and do business in China, the state of missile technology all mean the status quo between liberal and authoritarian governments won't hold. We have to get more of them freer, before they get us. If Mr. Bush's realist critics believe the cross-border forces of authoritarianism can be contained by the Cold-War model of spy vs. spy, they should say so.
Alas, Main Street America cannot uncouple from events such as the election in Iraq this Sunday. At last Friday's prayers in Diwaniyah, a preacher from the Al-Fadeela party said voting "is a national moral duty, and not doing it would waste the chance for coming generations to a better future." It is in America's national security interests to have preachers in Iraq saying this, rather than what the government holy men pray for in Iran. Absent these elections, the prayers in Diwaniyah likely would resemble those in Iran.
Mr. Bush's inaugural speech should put to rest the notion of a monolithic American "right." It set off a nice fight on the right among realists, internationalists, libertarians and neocons. (Liberals and the left are simply "against Bush" so it is hard to credit their arguments beyond brute obstruction.)
The tone of the speech, notably its five references to God, discomfited some. It is okay for a President in the 1860s routinely to intone God, the "Almighty" and "His own purposes." But a modern President doing so is otherworldly and "over the top." Days later newly elected Ukrainian President Victor Yushchenko said in his inaugural: "Thank God for Faith, Hope and Love. . . . Only democracy guards the most valuable things for every person--family and children, peace and order, work and well-being. . . . Glory to God! Glory to Ukraine!" Only democracy? Was President Yushchenko also "over the top?"
Others have translated the speech's text to mean that Mr. Bush plans to hurl American might capriciously at tyrannies everywhere and hector imperfect allies such as Pakistan and oily whales such as Saudi Arabia. There is concern that Mr. Bush wants to make the rest of the world "like us." That is, a Lockean nation that makes respect for freedom, life, tolerance and property standard operating procedure. A Lockean world--that of the U.S., U.K., Australia and Canada, would be a world one wouldn't have to much worry about, and worth having.
In Commentary recently, James Q. Wilson made a crucial distinction between freedom and democracy, which Mr. Bush's critics are eliding. Mr. Wilson wrote, "Freedom--that is, liberalism--is more important than democracy because freedom produces human opportunity." Freedom is a bridge to democracy, which in turn protects people from the authoritarian troll under the bridge. This dynamic--freedom as a precursor to democracy--is a modern realism appropriate to the world of the 21st century. People living in a state of "human opportunity" don't become suicide bombers, or are less likely to. People in a democracy never will. Why is a more active U.S. leadership toward this end a wild and crazy idea?
In its current world survey, Freedom House notes a link between terrorism and relative degrees of freedom. After September 11, freedom measurably rose in East Central Europe, East Asia and sub-Saharan Africa--no threats to us. It fell or froze in Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, the UAE, Algeria, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Syria, China, and one might add Russia.
We are not living in a static political world. We have to be in the game spreading our model because the other side is most certainly out spreading theirs. The liberal world view is being contested by the harder authoritarian models of Russia, China, the Middle East and Venezuela. The real anti-Americanism loose in the world resides in often corrupt elites--in politics and business--who see the American system of freedom as a threat to their interests. They want the informal definition of acceptable governance tipped toward them. Who is going to defend us--France?
We need a counter-ideology, and freedom is the one we've got. What is the problem with proclaiming it in a way suppressed peoples and their governments will get? This no more means parachuting the 101st Airborne into Damascus now than into Moscow in 1956. What it does mean, as it did then with Solzhenitsyn, Sakharov, Sharansky and Medvedev, is speaking out to protect dissidents such as journalists in Russia, kangaroo-court prisoners in China or voters gunned down in the streets of Caracas.
Mr. Bush called the time after the Cold War "years of repose." He's right. It may simply be that some Cold Warriors are worn out for another such long ideological fight, or the idea that one is necessary. Dream on. It's here. We're in it, and it's worth at least a song.
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