Bush to UN: An agenda for freedom

When President Bush speaks to the United Nations General Assembly here this week, he will studiously avoid Iran's President Mahmoud Amadinejad.

And Mr. Bush probably won't take up the controversial leader's challenge to the American president to face him in a "civilizational debate."

But Bush does plan to lay out his vision for the world, including an elaboration of his "freedom agenda" and the role of democracy in building global security, when he addresses the 192-country assembly Tuesday.

In that sense, the global airing and weighing of two distinct visions is already on. The president "will stress the United States' commitment to a broad international agenda that recognizes the connection between freedom, democracy, prosperity, counterterrorism, and security," according to the White House.

Focusing on the Middle East as "the main battle ground" in the struggle for freedom, according to a senior administration official, Bush will outline two tasks the international community must take on in the region: "to help people who don't have freedom achieve this," the official says, "and to help people with weak but democratically elected governments strengthen their institutions."

From his corner, Mr. Ahmadinejad – who has been busy lambasting the West and primarily the US and Britain as the major sources of the world's ills, while arguing for the rise of new world powers – will also no doubt offer his own perspectives during his stay in New York.

One question is whether the US, as the sole superpower and in particular as the leader of the widely unpopular war in Iraq, can even get a fair hearing in the world today.

"The fact is this debate has already started, and there is no way either side can think people out there – and I mean all around the world – aren't listening," says Michael Doyle, a former senior United Nations official now at Columbia University in New York. "Without it being face to face, [Bush] should take on some of the challenges that Ahmadinejad has posed to America and the West, like human rights as part of the global agenda, or the tension between sovereign rights and multilateral principles."

The US has not done enough to take the case for free and democratic societies to the world under the Bush administration, Mr. Doyle says, although he does see some greater effort in the president's second term.

The White House appears to agree that the US is already in this ideological debate, if not with Ahmadinejad himself, then with what it sees as the antidemocratic and extremist forces holding the region back.

"The president will lay out ... the bright democratic future we see" for the Middle East "in contradistinction to some who have an almost backward-looking vision for the region," says the senior administration official, who spoke on condition he would remain unnamed.

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