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The Mideast as arc of freedom - or false hope
As Bush touts the Mideast as another Soviet bloc ripe for change, critics see a blend of rhetoric and rationalization.
WASHINGTON
The Bush administration's professed vision for the Middle East is undeniably appealing. In recent weeks US officials from the president on down have talked more and more about their hope that the region will now slowly develop into an arc of freedom and democracy. They go so far as to compare today's Middle East to the Soviet bloc of the early 1980s - a vast swath of land on the verge of an historic transformation.
But their use of an end-of-the-cold-war metaphor is instructive. The long fall of the Soviet Union was caused by many factors, not all under the control of the US. Nor has the demise of communism resulted in a continent of Canadas - as today's chaos in the ex-Soviet republic of Georgia shows.
Indeed, the bringing of democracy to the Middle East might be just the sort of Sisyphean nation-building that many American conservatives have long opposed. Details would be devilish. Right now the US can't even figure out how to bring democracy to Iraq, a country it dominates. Most important, an effort that would stretch from this administration, to the next, to the one after that, might well result in consequences unforeseen today.
"It's not clear that democratizing the region would play itself out the way they anticipate," says John Mearsheimer, a political scientist at the University of Chicago.
Bush himself described the White House ideal for the Middle East in expansive detail in a speech last month at the National Endowment for Democracy. He said the world was now at a turning point comparable to 1982, when Ronald Reagan called for an end to Soviet tyranny.
It's time for the explosion of democracy that remade Europe and Latin America in the 1980s to remake the Middle East, said Bush. He invoked both US adversaries (Iran) and US allies (Saudi Arabia and Egypt) in arguing that Islam is compatible with progress toward popular votes. "A religion that demands individual moral accountability and encourages the encounter of the individual with God is fully compatible with the rights and responsibilities of self-government," Bush said.
Iraq is only the beginning, administration officials argue. The point is to use a free and democratic Iraq as a model to show the rest of the region what it might aspire to. The US fought a "war of ideas" with the communist world during the cold war, and it is similarly fighting a war of ideas with Islamic terrorists today, said Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith last week.
A free Iraq might give "tens of millions of people an alternative way to look at the future," Mr. Feith told a Heritage Foundation audience. Do they really mean it? Or is this rhetoric just another way of justifying the invasion of Iraq? Those are the first questions that spring to some critics' minds when they hear talk of transforming the Middle East.
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