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COMMENTARY
October 1, 2005
What doctrine?
The good news from Iraq -- i.e. the side of the coin that is considered not to merit press coverage -- is the resilience that Iraqis are showing in the face of bombardment. In Iraq, as in Afghanistan, amid explosions and in despite of threats, millions were willing to go out and vote in national elections, and very likely will do so again in the approaching constitutional referendum. An obvious and overwhelming majority in both countries support the establishment of constitutional democracy, and in Iraq's case, right in the heart of a region where such serious reforms have not been attempted since the 19th century.The media give us almost loving descriptions of every car and suicide bomb, from the fanatic opponents of this project -- the casualty counts, the number of American dead especially, and anything that might contribute to despair. They report almost nothing about rebuilding efforts that proceed on an extraordinary scale. Except for a few -- and those, the best-informed -- the attitude is, "Anything that hurts Bush or the Republicans is fair game; anything that might help them is a sell-out." It was the same attitude on display this week when the Republican House leader, Tom DeLay, was indicted by a maverick and partisan Texas prosecutor, on a single dubious and indirect count, over a debatable election funding regulation, in the "blue bastion" of Travis County. In newsrooms across Washington, I am told, a party atmosphere broke out at this news, with journalists exclaiming, "We got him!", "Yes!", and "Alright!" It is not necessary to be pro-Bush, pro-Republican, or even pro-American to tell the truth, as completely as one can. Nor is it necessary to be neutral. What is instead required is a mind that wants to know the truth, and will report what it discovers candidly. It is not even necessary to like people, to treat them fairly: only necessary to realize that hatred makes one blind. But where was I? Oh yes, Iraq. As President Bush himself warned this week, we should expect a spike in terrorist attacks in the run-up to that constitutional referendum, just as during the Iraqi general election campaign last January. But this need not distract us from what has been accomplished: the emergence of something very like a civil society in the short time since the liberation. This should be apparent to anyone familiar with the dreary face of Middle Eastern official life, who looks at the contrast in new Iraqi media. The spirit of electoral democracy is there -- the give-and-take across many party and ethnic lines, the coffee-shop discussion of issues large and small. The Iraqis have come through to a degree greater than even some of the Bush administration's apologists anticipated. It is constantly argued that the (minority) Sunni Arab community in Iraq feels disenfranchised -- as well they might having lost their perks after a half-century of Sunni dictatorships. Again, the flip side of this coin shows something spectacular: the first time in modern Arab history that a Shia populace have escaped from under the Sunni thumb; or that a large ethnic minority such as the Kurds have gained real freedom. And yet the bad news is, that the momentum carrying the Iraqi democratization forward is being lost, elsewhere in the region, by a Bush administration that, as its friends and foes alike are now observing, appears beaten up by its encounters with the bureaucracy, the media, the "angry left", the Europeans, and lately, Hurricane Katrina. Is Mr Bush himself not proving less stalwart than the late President Reagan who, regardless of criticism or polls, continued hurling bricks at his own "Evil Empire"? In an excellent piece that appeared yesterday in the Israeli "liberal" daily, Ha'aretz, Michael Rubin, the astute editor of the excellent Middle East Quarterly, detailed a great number of cases in which the Bush administration has left backsliding allies unchallenged, and re-embraced "dictators of convenience", rather than suffer a little stress. Across the region, pro-democracy dissidents are being quietly bundled away, and reform commitments are being openly reversed. "What happened to the Bush Doctrine?" Mr Rubin asks. For it is less than a year since, at his second inauguration, the President reiterated, "All who live in tyranny and hopelessness can know: the United States will not ignore your oppression, or excuse your oppressors. When you stand for your liberty, we will stand with you." At the very moment when the cause of democracy was finding voices in Lebanon, Egypt, Libya, and elsewhere, Washington suddenly went silent. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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