ALMATY, Kazakhstan — Ukraine’s leap toward democracy has inspired opposition leaders in formerly Soviet Central Asia and alarmed its long-ruling autocrats, but analysts say the region isn’t ready for a democratic revolution.

Still, they’re ready for surprises, noting that few would have predicted the overthrow of Slobodan Milosevic by Serbian street protesters.

Since then a revolution has toppled a Soviet-era leader in Georgia, and opposition-led mass protests — with advice and inspiration from veterans of the Milosevic ouster — augur big change in Ukraine. Now eyes are now turning toward Central Asia — a region seen as the largest and possibly strongest bastion of post-Soviet dictators.

The energy-rich region of five nations and 60 million people is still led by former Communist bosses — all allegedly experienced in election fraud.

Across the region there is public frustration, fueled by grinding poverty, blatant human rights abuses, political repression, corruption and lack of civil rights.

In oil-rich Kazakhstan, which has made some economic progress, there is infighting among the political elite and a maturing opposition is biding its time. Its leaders addressed protesters in the main square of Kiev wearing orange, the Ukrainian opposition’s color.

“Yesterday it was Georgia, today it’s Ukraine and tomorrow it’ll be Kazakhstan!” Asylbek Kozhakhmetov of Kazakhstan’s opposition Democratic Choice party told the crowd.

The protesters responded by chanting: “Nazarbayev go! Kuchma go!” referring to Presidents Nursultan Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan and Leonid Kuchma of Ukraine.

In Kazakhstan’s neighbor, Uzbekistan, the leader of the opposition Erk party believes the Ukrainian spirit will reach his country too, despite its notoriously repressive government.

“There is huge frustration and there is fear, and maybe fear prevails for now. But more and more people have been overcoming it,” Atonazar Arifov said, noting recent unprecedented mass Uzbek protests against new trade restrictions.

But those in power are also alert.

“In most cases, the reaction to the Georgian events was an increase in control against international organizations in Uzbekistan, and similar rhetoric in Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. I expect a similar reaction to events in Ukraine,” said David Lewis, project director in Central Asia for the International Crisis Group think tank.

“It is also an easy way for existing leaderships to attack opposition groups, by saying that they are somehow puppets of the West, and that demands for democracy and somehow part of a geopolitical battle,” said Lewis.

It’s widely speculated in Kazakhstan that Nazarbayev plans to abolish presidential elections and give the parliament, which is dominated by his loyalists, the power to elect the president. In Turkmenistan, autocratic leader Saparmurat Niyazov has been declared president for life.

The region lacks charismatic leaders, politically conscious publics and basic democratic building blocks such as a modicum of independent media and semi-free elections, Lewis said. Its opposition groups tend to be divided and driven by their leaders’ personal ambitions, and unable to unite behind an agreed candidate.

Another problem is neighbors: The region is surrounded by Russia, China, Afghanistan and Iran — countries not known as exporters of democracy.

While Ukraine has some democratic European neighbors, “we are far from centers of democracy, and we are in a difficult geopolitical surrounding,” said Kazakh analyst Eduard Poletayev.

Still, some say Kyrgyzstan, which will have presidential elections next year, could become the birthplace of the first formerly Soviet Central Asian democracy.

The small country of 5 million people has a vibrant civil society that has earned it the nickname of “a country of NGOs,” nongovernmental organizations.

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Are we a republic or a democracy? (townhall.com, 050105)

Walter E. Williams

We often hear the claim that our nation is a democracy. That wasn’t the vision of the founders. They saw democracy as another form of tyranny. If we’ve become a democracy, I guarantee you that the founders would be deeply disappointed by our betrayal of their vision. The founders intended, and laid out the ground rules, for our nation to be a republic.

The word democracy appears nowhere in the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution — two most fundamental documents of our nation. Instead of a democracy, the Constitution’s Article IV, Section 4, guarantees “to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government.” Moreover, let’s ask ourselves: Does our pledge of allegiance to the flag say to “the democracy for which it stands,” or does it say to “the republic for which it stands”? Or do we sing “The Battle Hymn of the Democracy” or “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”?

So what’s the difference between republican and democratic forms of government? John Adams captured the essence of the difference when he said, “You have rights antecedent to all earthly governments; rights that cannot be repealed or restrained by human laws; rights derived from the Great Legislator of the Universe.” Nothing in our Constitution suggests that government is a grantor of rights. Instead, government is a protector of rights.

In recognition that it’s Congress that poses the greatest threat to our liberties, the framers used negative phrases against Congress throughout the Constitution such as: shall not abridge, infringe, deny, disparage, and shall not be violated, nor be denied. In a republican form of government, there is rule of law. All citizens, including government officials, are accountable to the same laws. Government power is limited and decentralized through a system of checks and balances. Government intervenes in civil society to protect its citizens against force and fraud but does not intervene in the cases of peaceable, voluntary exchange.

Contrast the framers’ vision of a republic with that of a democracy. In a democracy, the majority rules either directly or through its elected representatives. As in a monarchy, the law is whatever the government determines it to be. Laws do not represent reason. They represent power. The restraint is upon the individual instead of government. Unlike that envisioned under a republican form of government, rights are seen as privileges and permissions that are granted by government and can be rescinded by government.

How about a few quotations demonstrating the disdain our founders held for democracy? James Madison, Federalist Paper No. 10: In a pure democracy, “there is nothing to check the inducement to sacrifice the weaker party or the obnoxious individual.” At the 1787 Constitutional Convention, Edmund Randolph said, “ ... that in tracing these evils to their origin every man had found it in the turbulence and follies of democracy.” John Adams said, “Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There was never a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.” Chief Justice John Marshall observed, “Between a balanced republic and a democracy, the difference is like that between order and chaos.” In a word or two, the founders knew that a democracy would lead to the same kind of tyranny the colonies suffered under King George III.

The framers gave us a Constitution that is replete with undemocratic mechanisms. One that has come in for recent criticism and calls for its elimination is the Electoral College. In their wisdom, the framers gave us the Electoral College so that in presidential elections large, heavily populated states couldn’t democratically run roughshod over small, sparsely populated states.

Here’s my question. Do Americans share the republican values laid out by our founders, and is it simply a matter of our being unschooled about the differences between a republic and a democracy? Or is it a matter of preference and we now want the kind of tyranny feared by the founders where Congress can do anything it can muster a majority vote to do? I fear it’s the latter.

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Democracy in the CIS (Washington Times, 050112)

In the last year, a political earthquake has struck the countries of the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Georgia’s 2003 Rose Revolution and the ongoing Orange Revolution in Ukraine are a direct challenge to ruling elites in Russia and elsewhere in the former Soviet Union. They also threaten to derail Russian President Vladimir Putin’s policy of retaining as much control as possible over the former Soviet empire.

Throughout this region, ex-communist rulers allied with oligarchic groups have, to varying degrees, seized control of their countries’ economies and political arenas. While claiming to observe the democracy commitments voluntarily accepted when their countries joined the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe in 1992, these leaders have remained in power by rigging elections and excluding potential rivals, sometimes using any means necessary. Executive control of the legislative and judicial branches of power, as well as the state’s coercive apparatus, has made it possible to largely intimidate the public out of politics, which has remained an “insider’s-only” game.

This arrangement has served the Kremlin well. Building alliances with leaders of dubious legitimacy seemed an ideal way to stem the “invasion of Western influence” and its annoying imperative of free and fair elections. Since the late 1990s, Russian-led observer delegations from the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) routinely approved of elections in CIS countries which OSCE monitors criticized or damned with faint praise. In this way and others, Moscow showed other CIS capitals that, unlike the United States, Russia would not question their right to rule by hook or by crook and was a reliable bulwark, unlike the preachy West.

Consequently, the democratic revolution which swept Georgia last year horrified the leaders of other former Soviet republics. For the first time in ex-Soviet space, opposition leaders united to mobilize a broad-based protest movement that overturned the results of a rigged election. The emergence of Mikheil Saakashvili, who led Georgia’s Rose Revolution and was subsequently elected president in a landslide, signaled more than the end of Eduard Shevardnadze’s corrupt, moribund regime: Mr. Saakashvili symbolized the first popular revolt against the system of pseudo-democracy prevalent on post-Soviet soil. What is now transpiring in Ukraine is the logical continuation of what began last year in the Caucasus. And every successful precedent emboldens opposition movements in other CIS countriesandgiveshopeto impoverished, frustrated and seemingly apathetic publics, proving that real change is possible.

The picture of a victorious Viktor Yushchenko and Mikheil Saakashvili ushering in a New Year in Kiev’s Independence Square no doubt causes angst in other CIS leaders, even as it inspires those living under repressive regimes elsewhere in the region. In a telling twist, CIS election observers for the first time criticized an election held in the former Soviet Union, decrying the conduct of Ukraine’s Dec. 26 repeat runoff and questioning the legitimacy of the poll.

For the Kremlin, Georgia’s Rose Revolution was bad enough; the Orange Revolution in Ukraine is a nightmare. Apart from the stunning loss of face suffered by Mr. Putin, who openly campaigned for pro-RussiancandidateViktor Yanukovich, “People power” can no longer be dismissed as an anomaly or a deviation possible only in small, unstable, atypical Georgia in the wild Caucasus. Now, “fraternal” Slavs in large, European Ukraine also insisted that elections be fair and reflect the voters’ will. The handwriting on the Kremlin wall is clear: Peaceful popular protests backed by OSCE standards on elections can bring down entrenched corrupt regimes that rely on vote fraud to remain in power.

Where will this contagion stop? A worried Moscow has responded by attacking the OSCE. Russia, the other former Soviet states and all OSCE countries have formally agreed that democracy, based on the will of the people expressed regularly through free and fair elections, is the only acceptable form of government for our nations. But with its alliance system in jeopardy, Russia last July orchestrated a CIS assault on OSCE’s “imbalanced” stress on democracy and human rights, followed by a broadside in September against, among other things, allegedly skewed OSCE standards on elections. (In response, 106 human-rights advocates, mostly from CIS countries, issued a sharp rebuttal to these attacks at the OSCE’s main human- rights meeting of the year held in October.) Moscow is now threatening to paralyze the consensus-based OSCE if the organization does not effectively revisit and dilute longstanding election commitments, under the pretext of setting “minimum standards” by which to judge whether elections are indeed free and fair. The Russians are also pushing to de-emphasize human rights and democracy in the work of OSCE’s field missions in CIS states. Recognizing the power of the ideals behind OSCE commitments that it signed up to, Russia appears determined to dilute the democracy commitments that are at the very heart of the OSCE.

It is essential that the United States respond resolutely to this challenge, insisting that there be no retreat from OSCE commitments and principles to placate Mr. Putin, the patron saint of post-Soviet “managed” democracy. Moscow may be intent on precipitating a crisis in the OSCE, or even threatening its very existence. Nevertheless, having stood firm against rigged elections in Ukraine, the United States and its democratic OSCE partners should not be bullied into concessions. Watering down the democracy content of the OSCE would not only undermine the organization’s raison d’etre, but undercut the very people struggling to be free.

Rep. Christopher H. Smith, New Jersey Republican is chairman of the U.S. Helsinki Commission.

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Tidal wave of democracy (Washington Times, 050117)

Now moving as an invisible wave over the undeveloped and oppressed nations of the world is the natural force of self-governance. Most of the developed nations, following the American Revolution of 1776-81, adopted democratic governing in various forms. They later combined this with education and evolving capitalism, established increasingly successful and open societies.

The 20th century was not a steady advance, with new forms of totalitarian control emerging to enslave large populations.Fascismand communismdominateda worldwide struggle with democratic societies throughout the bulk of that century, including two world wars and a number of coups and civil wars that resulted in unprecedented violence and death on a mass scale.

After the defeat of fascism at mid-century, its totalitarian mirror-image, communism, fell apart in the final decade of the century, creating in the rich cultures of Eastern Europe a number of new self-governing states already educated and industrialized. At the same time, the two largest nations on Earth, each with populations of about 1 billion, emerged from their socialist slumbers to become rising world economic forces. India, already democratic (though torn by religious strife and violence) shed its socialism. China, maintaining a Marxist autocracy, began abandoning its socialistic practices and increasingly embraced capitalistic forms. These two countries will almost certainly rival the United States during this century.

Three large regions, however, did not participate in this political and economic transformation. In South and Central America, oligarchal and dictatorial regimes persisted, often briefly shaking off one form of totalitarian rule for another. Argentina, a great economic power of the 19th century there, lost its head to Peronism in the 20th century and still has not righted itself. An emerging economic power of the 20th century, Brazil, whose population is approaching 200 million, has only at the outset of the 21st century begun to realize its potential. Venezuela and Mexico, each with enormous oil reserves, continue to fail to create equitable democratic societies.

In Africa, which is beset by the worst impact of the international AIDS pandemic, tribal societies continue to trump true democratic capitalism, although the long-suffering oppression of the majority blacks by the South African Boer regime was finally overthrown at the end of the last century, offering some hope for the continent’s current bleak future.

From North Africa through the Middle East to Pacific Asia, the mostly Islamic nations, in spite of their often immense wealth, historic culture and natural resources, have persisted with feudal forms of government. An almost 50-year grudge match with the tiny state of Israel has overwhelmed any impulse toward democratic capitalism. Ironically, the aggression of September 11 by a small but deadly number of Arab nationalist terrorists may have precipitated an unpredicted tidal wave toward self-government in this part of the world. Inlessthanoneyear, Afghanistan, the Palestinians and the new Iraqi government have held or will hold free elections. Of course, this is not taking place in a political vacuum, and this impulse toward self-government by Arab masses is being violently resisted by the totalitarian terrorists. Success is not assured, and there is no guarantee that the forces of totalitarianism will not rise again.

But totalitarianism is ultimately a loser in the world we now live in, with its stunning advances of transportation and communications. That is why the United States was attacked, why Europe is now under siege and why democratic capitalism has been targeted everywhere in the world. Violence is intimidating, and the terrorists know that, but the human species seems more determined to survive than to fall back to feudalism and perish.

Could anyone imagine feudal totalitarian regimes being able to cope with the horror and destruction of the recent tsunami in the Indian Ocean? Does anyone suggest that such regimes would promptly and generously move to heal and restore the areas devastated by natural disaster?

Anti-Americanism, which is now fashionable in Europe, is really only words. When small terrorist groups combine this with violence, it can be deadly and temporarily intimidating, but the natural wave toward worldwide self-governing is much more powerful than terror and propaganda. The tsunami from the sea lasted only minutes, producing terrible destruction. The tidal wave of democratic capitalism has an indefinite duration, and it creates a whole and incalculably new world.

Barry Casselman occasionally writes for The Washington Times.

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Democracy in Russia (Weekly Standard, 050218)

Based on testimony delivered before the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations.

(1) What are the necessary institutional requirements for a successor state of the former Soviet Union to succeed in a transition to democracy? And how have these institutions, which would be essential for a democratizing Russia, fared in President Putin’s Russia?

(2) What policy is President Putin pursuing towards democracy in Russia and towards the prospect of positive democratic change in Russia’s neighbors?

(3) Has Russia become hostile to both the democratic values and the institutions of the West? And, if so, what should be done about it?

IN RETROSPECT, we now recognize that the arrest of Mikhail Khodorkovsky on October 25, 2003 by heavily armed, special forces troops was the watershed event in the deterioration of democracy in Russia. Prior to this arrest, the soft suppression of democratic forces appeared to some as a manifestation of Moscow’s historic political insecurity and an understandable effort to “manage’ democracy and ameliorate the excesses of, and societal stress from, the Yeltsin era. Subsequent to October 2003, it became apparent that what President Putin had undertaken was a comprehensive crackdown on each and every perceived rival to state power and the re-imposition of the traditional Russian state, autocratic at home and imperial abroad.

However, if we focus only on the animus President Putin has towards Khodorkovksy and the resultant “show trials” of Yukos executives, we risk missing the breadth of the crackdown on democratic forces and risk failing to see the logic of authoritarian and possibly even dictatorial power behind the events in Russia over the

past two years.

Let me contrast the situation in Russia with the positive developments in Georgia during the Rose Revolution in November 2003 and in Ukraine during the Orange Revolution of December 2004. Democratic leaders in CIS countries and outside analysts have paid considerable attention to the attributes of Georgian and Ukrainian society that allowed their respective transitions to peacefully sweep away autocratic regimes despite their total control of the hard power of the security services and military forces.

While the encouragement of Western democracies and the prospect of membership in such important institutions as the European Union and NATO have been important factors in the thinking of reformers in CIS countries, the preconditions of democratic change in the former Soviet Union appear to be:

(1) An extensive civic society comprised of multiple NGO’s where pluralism can develop;

(2) Independent political parties which can contest elections;

(3) An opposition bloc in Parliament which can offer alternative policies and serve as a training ground for future governance;

(4) The beginnings of a business community which can financially support an opposition as a counterweight to the regime’s use of government resources and corrupt business allies;

(5)An independent media with the capability to distribute printed materials and with access to at least one independent television station; and

(6) Civilian control of the military and security services adequate to ensure that armed force will not be used to suppress civil dissent.

Regrettably, Putin and the former KGB officers who surround him, the so-called “Siloviki,” conducted an analysis of the preconditions of democratic change, similar to the one I have just outlined, but reached a radically different conclusion. Rather than support and encourage these positive developments in post-conflict and post-Soviet states, President Putin evidently resolved to destroy the foundations of democracy in Russia and actively to discourage their development in countries neighboring Russia and beyond. And this is precisely what he has done.

(1) In May 2004, Putin formalized the attack on the civil sector in his state-of-the-nation address by accusing NGO’s of working for foreign interests and against the interests of Russia and its citizens. Coupled with the conviction of academics Igor Sutyagin and Valentin Danilov on fabricated charges of espionage, the NGO sector in Russia has been effectively silenced.

(2) Human Rights Watch reports that “opposition parties have been either decimated or eliminated altogether, partially as a result of the deeply flawed elections of December 2003.”

(3) By 2004, United Russia, Putin’s party in the Duma, controlled two-thirds of all seats and enough votes to enact legislation of any kind and to change the constitution to suit the President. On December 12, 2004, Putin was thus able to sign into law a bill ending the election of regional governors and giving the President the right to appoint Governors, thereby eliminating the possibility of any parliamentary or regional opposition.

(4) The destruction of Yukos and the seizure of its assets marked the beginning of the destruction of the business class, but do not fully convey the scale of re-nationalization. The Kremlin has made no secret that Russia claims all oil and gas reserves in the former Soviet Union as well as ownership of the pipelines which transit the territory of the former Soviet Union. The outflow of investment from Russia over the past year and a half confirms that the business base which could support alternative political views inside Russia is shrinking rapidly. The elimination of a

politically active business community was precisely what President Putin intended to bring about by the arrest and subsequent show trial of Mikhail Khodorkovsky.

(5) Of all the areas where the Russian Government has suppressed the possibility of democracy, it has been most comprehensive and ruthless in its attack on independent media. All significant television and radio stations are now under state control. The editor-in-chief of Izvestia was fired for attempting to cover the tragic terrorist attack on the school children of Beslan, and two journalists attempting to travel to Beslan appear to have been drugged by security services. The state of journalism in Russia is so precarious that Amnesty International has just reported that security services are targeting independent journalists for harassment, disappearances and killing. It should surprise no one that the distinguished Committee to Protect Journalists lists Russia as one of the World’s Worst Places to Be a Journalist in its annual survey.

(6) Among the most alarming of recent developments, however, is the return of the KGB to power in the Presidential Administration. According to Olga Kryshtanovskaya, a leading Russian sociologist, former KGB officers are regaining power at every level of government and now account for 70% of regional government leaders. Other analysts state that the number of former secret police in Putin’s government is 300% greater than the number in the Gorbachev government. In this situation, there is a high probability that military and security services would be used to suppress civil dissent and, indeed, are already being used to this effect.

If the conditions which supported democratic change and reform in Georgia and Ukraine are any guide, President Putin has orchestrated a sustained and methodical campaign to eliminate not only democratic forces in civil and political life, but also the possibility of such forces arising again in the future. I do not think that it is accurate to say that democracy is in retreat in Russia. Democracy has been assassinated in Russia.

Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Andrei Sakharov wrote, “A country that does not respect the rights of its own people will not respect the rights of its neighbors,” and this is an admonition to hold in mind when assessing the overall direction of Putin’s policies. Rather than simply label Russia as an autocracy or as a borderline dictatorship, it is probably more accurate and useful for this Committee to regard Russia as an “anti-democratic state” locked in what its leadership imagines is a competition with the West for control of the “post-Soviet space.”

President Putin’s initial argument for “managed democracy” rested on his belief that the sometimes unpredictable quality of liberal democracy could weaken the security of the Russian state unless it were subject to a substantial degree of state control. Whether or not he actually believed this, he quickly advanced to a more militant conviction that independent political parties, NGO’s and journalists, by questioning the wisdom of his policy towards Chechnya, were effectively allies of terrorism. It is a short walk from the authoritarian view that domestic freedom must be curtailed in wartime to the dictatorial conclusion that all opposition and dissent is treasonous. By 2004, President Putin had arrived at the dictatorial conclusion.

To put it bluntly, the growing view in Putin’s inner circle is that in order to regain the status of a world power in the 21st century, Russia must be undemocratic at home (in order to consolidate the power of the state) and it must be anti-democratic in its “near abroad” (in order to block the entry of perceived political competitors, such as the European Union or NATO, invited into post-Soviet space by new democracies.) The war on terror is not central to this calculation and is little more than something to discuss with credulous Americans from time to time.

Again, the statements of Gleb Pavlovsky confirm understandable suspicions about Russian intentions. Shortly after the election of Victor Yushchenko as President of Ukraine, Pavlovsky urged the Kremlin to adopt a policy of “pre-emptive counter-revolution” towards any neighbor of Russia which manifested politically dangerous democratic proclivities. Another of the so-called “polit-technologists” Sergei Markov, who also advises President Putin, has called for the formation of a Russian organization to counter the National Endowment for Democracy, whose purpose would be to prevent European and American NGO’s from reaching democratic movements anywhere in the Commonwealth of Independent States, in other words in post-Soviet space. (There is, of course, not the slightest reference to countering militant fundamentalism or Islamic terrorist cells in any of this.)

In December 2004, Russia vetoed the continuation of the OSCE-led border monitoring operation which polices the mountain passes along Georgia’s borders with Ingushetiya, Chechnya and Dagestan in the North Caucasus. Most observers believe the removal of international monitors is intended to allow Russia complete freedom to conduct military and paramilitary operations inside Georgia under the pretext of chasing terrorists. Russia has continued to hand out Russian passports to secessionists in Abhazia and South Ossetia, and, despite its multiple international commitments to withdraw its military forces from Soviet-era bases in Georgia, continues to occupy and reinforce these bases. In a word, Putin’s policy towards Georgia is indistinguishable from the 19th century policies of Czarist Russia towards the easily intimidated states of the South Caucasus.

In Moldova, since December 2003 when the Russian negotiators proposed in the Kozak Memorandum to legalize the permanent stationing of Russian troops in Transdnistria, Russia has worked tirelessly to exacerbate tensions between Transdnistria and Chisinau and to prevent the demilitarization of Transdnistria. As a result, Russia has been able to keep Moldovan leadership sufficiently weak, divided, and corrupt so as to be incapable of enacting the reforms necessary for democratization. Transdnistria remains exclusively a criminal enterprise under Moscow’s protection and the largest export hub of illicit arms traffic in the Black Sea region. And remember, Russia shares no border with Moldova, a fact which adds to the imperial character of Russian intervention.

In Ukraine, the massive scale of Russian interference and President Putin’s personal involvement in the recent fraudulent presidential elections is well-known. Most analysts believe that the Kremlin spent in excess of $300m and countless hours of state television time in the attempt to rig the election for Victor Yanukovich. What may be less well known to this Committee is that explosives used in the botched assassination attempt on Victor Yushchenko and the dioxin poison that almost succeeded in killing him both almost certainly came from Russia. Western diplomats and numerous Ukrainian officials in Kiev say privately that the investigation into these repeated assassination attempts is expected to lead to Russian organized crime and, ultimately, will be traced to Russian intelligence services. There is mounting evidence that the murder of political opposition figures in neighboring countries is seen by some factions of the Russian security services, such as the GRU, as being a legitimate tool of statecraft, as it was in the dark years of the Soviet Union.

With regard to Belarus, President Putin’s government has been an accomplice with Alexander Lukashenko in the construction and maintenance of what has been often called “the last dictatorship in Europe.” This unholy alliance has brutalized and impoverished the people of Belarus and is distinguished only by the degree of Russian cynicism which motivated it. Here again, I cannot improve on the words of Putin-advisor Gleb Pavlovsky:

We are totally satisfied with the level of our relations with Belarus. Russia will clearly distinguish between certain characteristics of a political regime in a neighboring country and its observance of allied commitments. Belarus is a model ally.

Think about this for a moment. The last dictatorship in Europe is the closest ally of the Putin Government. If this fact were not a tragedy, it would be laughable.

III

Given the reversal of democratic trends in Moscow and the appearance of a threatening Russia in Eurasian politics, what are the implications for US foreign policy? It seems to me that we are forced to six conclusions:

(1) Russia will actively contest the growth of democratic governments along its Western border with Europe, throughout the Black Sea and Caucasus region, and in Central Asia. President Putin intends to block the resolution of the frozen conflicts from Transdnistria to South Ossetia to Nagorno-Karabakh and to maintain the Soviet-era military bases which serve as occupying forces and prolong these conflicts. The instability this policy will cause in the governments throughout the post-Soviet space will be a long-term threat to the interests of Europe and the United States in stabilizing and democratizing this region.

(2) Russia will obstruct the development of effective multi-lateral institutions and their operations, such as the OSCE and NATO Partnership for Peace, anywhere in what Putin perceives as Russia’s historical sphere of influence, thereby isolating Russia’s neighbors from the structures of international dialogue, conflict resolution, and cooperation.

(3) Russia will increasingly engage in paramilitary and criminal activities beyond its borders, both as an instrument of state policy and as a function of simple greed. Thus, the United States should expect the persistence of arms traffic to embargoed states and the irresponsible proliferation of small arms (as in South Ossetia) as well as a higher incidence of both politically and criminally motivated bombings and murders (as in the recent car bombing in Gori, Georgia and the repeated attempts on Victor Yushchenko’s life.)

(4) President Putin’s goal of a 21st century empire will cause him to seize, extort or otherwise secure the oil and gas reserves of the Caspian and Central Asia as a source of funds for state power. Indeed, the seizure of Yukos and the network of pipelines were the first two steps in a larger plan to control the resources of Central Asia. Setting aside the negative impact these developments will have on world energy prices, our allies in Europe will become increasingly dependent on an oil monopoly controlled by the Russian security services for its growing energy needs. Without doubt, this oil and gas will come with a political price.

(5) The policies of Russia and the conduct of President Putin are growing increasingly eccentric and seem to be motivated more by an angry romanticism, than by a rational calculation of national interest. Putin’s insistence in an interview with Russia journalists at the time that there were no casualties in the slaughter in the Nord-Ost Theater is revealing. Putin was only conscious of casualties among the Russian security services; the lives of civilians did not figure in his calculus. As everyone knows, the unpredictable and uncalculated use of power in international politics is highly dangerous. In a word, we are not dealing with a benevolent autocracy; we are now dealing with a violent and vulgar “thuggery.”

(6) And, finally, President Putin’s plan cannot possibly work. Both strategically and economically, Russia cannot support itself as a world power and cannot feed its people with an economy run by the Kremlin. Thus, if these trends are not reversed, Putin will bring about the second collapse of Moscow which may well be far more dangerous and violent than the collapse of the Soviet empire in 1989. It was precisely this outcome, the return to empire and the resultant collapse, that US policy has been trying to avert since the fall of the Berlin Wall. As Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice advised presciently some years ago, a critical challenge for US policy will be “to manage the decline of Soviet power.” So far, we are not meeting this challenge.

It seems to me that there are four policy steps that the United States should take in response to the threat posed by an anti-democratic Russia. First, we have to end the exemption from public criticism that President Putin’s administration seems to enjoy. If Saudi Arabia and Egypt are no longer immune from legitimate criticism of their undemocratic practices, so too must Russian practices be subject to public censure by US policymakers.

Second, the United States must end the policy of advancing access to the inner councils of democratic institutions (the G-7, NATO, and the White House) as long as Putin continues to abuse human and political rights at home and attempts to undermine democratic institutions abroad. If the conduct of Putin is free from penalty, he will undoubtedly continue to pursue policies counter to the interests of the community of democracies.

Third, the United States should work with our partners in NATO and the European Union to develop common strategies to deal with the death of democracy inside Russia and with its imperial interventions abroad. The recent enlargements of the EU and NATO added many European countries with first-hand knowledge of what it means to be an object of Russia’s predatory policies. For Czechs, Slovaks, Poles, Balts and others, Russian imperialism is not an abstraction. We can and must expend the political capital to develop a common Western approach that promotes democracy inside and alongside the Russian Federation.

Finally, Natan Sharansky reminds us that “moral clarity” is the essential quality of a successful democracy in its foreign policy. As a nation, we have been far from morally clear about the political prisoners in Russia and the human rights abuses throughout the North Caucasus, to name two of the most egregious examples.

Closely related to the lack of moral clarity is the absence of “strategic clarity.” We simply have not informed Russia where the “red lines” are in their treatment of vulnerable new democracies and what the consequences are for Russia in pushing beyond what used to be called “the rules of the game.”

A stern and public rebuke to Putin may cause Russia to rethink the self-destructive path on which it has embarked and serve to protect the long-term democratic prospects and future prosperity of Russia and its neighbors. It would also send a message of hope to embattled democrats inside Russia and the beleaguered democracies on its borders. Let us hope that President Bush delivers this message to Putin next week in Bratislava.

Bruce P. Jackson is president of the Project on Transitional Democracies.

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The democratic symphony (Washington Times, 050223)

By any measure, the past 15 months have been an extraordinary time of success for the advancement of the principle that people should be free to choose their own governments. Since then, the world has witnessed popularly elected governments taking office in places such as Iraq, Afghanistan, Georgia, Ukraine and the Palestinian territories — events all but unimaginable just a few years ago.

Now, in the wake of the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri nine days ago, new questions are starting to be raised about the future of Syrian strongman Bashar Assad. Lebanon — where Syria has repeatedly used assassination and intimidation to maintain control and to silence political opponents —has been convulsed by eight days of demonstrations by angry Lebanese from virtually every ethnic background and religious sect demanding that Syria end its 29-year occupation. The demonstrations have been accompanied by physical attacks directed at individual Syrians and Lebanese linked to Damascus. Mr. Hariri’s murder has created new momentum in favor of a tougher policy toward Syria — not just in Washington but in Europe, where French President Jacques Chirac and other leaders may be edging toward a tougher, more realistic stance.

While President Bush is not yet calling for regime change in Damascus, he is clearly demanding a drastic change in Syria’s behavior. In particular, Mr. Bush demands that Syria: get out of Lebanon; end its support for Iraq’s terrorist insurgency; and end its support for terrorist groups.

In one sense, it is certainly understandable that Mr. Assad may not take Washington all that seriously. After all, during his father’s 29-year reign as Syrian dictator, which ended with his death in 2000, and during the ensuing five years, the United States has refused to confront Damascus.

But recent international trends have not been terribly kind to despots and autocrats like Mr. Assad. In the cases of Afghanistan and Iraq, Washington invaded and toppled the Taliban and Ba’athist regimes. In Ukraine, the administration dissuaded Russian President Vladimir Putin from interfering on behalf of Moscow’s preferred candidate, who had won an earlier vote that had been marred by irregularities. Mahmoud Abbas’ election last month as president of the Palestinian Authority would not have happened but for the campaign begun by Mr. Bush with his historic June 24, 2002, speech demanding that the Palestinians and Arab governments reform their corrupt, undemocratic political institutions. The trends have led to the greatest advance of democracy since the period immediately following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, when communist dictatorships in such nations as the Soviet Union, the Baltic States, Central Europe, East Germany, Romania, Bulgaria and Poland collapsed.

For now, the United States is not demanding a change of regime in Syria. But there are things that Washington and the European Union can do to step up the pressure. These include going after the personal assets of Mr. Assad and other senior regime leaders, which may include billions stolen as a result of corruption. It means instituting sanctions barring American mutual funds, banks or brokers against the National Bank of Syria, a government-controlled financial institution. But the Syrians will be able to effectively circumvent these sanctions if the EU votes next month to approve an association agreement for Syria — something that will encourage further European trade with Damascus and negate much of the effect of tightened U.S. sanctions.

Just three days before Mr. Hariri’s murder, the head of the EU’s foreign-aid program visited Damascus, where he called the regime “an active partner in our ring of friends.” This way of thinking needs to change. If Mr. Chirac is serious about improving relations with Washington, or is at least serious about giving substance to his call for Syria to leave Lebanon, he needs to work against an EU association agreement with Syria.

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Arab leader reverses view of Iraq war (WorldNetDaily, 050224)

Now sees it as catalyst for democracy across Mideast

The leader of the Lebanese opposition, a sharp critic of Washington foreign policy, says he’s changed his view of the U.S. war in Iraq, seeing it now as a catalyst for democratic change across the Arab world.

Druze Muslim leader Walid Jumblatt, who is calling for an uprising against Lebanon’s Syrian occupiers, is almost sounding like a neoconservative, says Washington Post columnist David Ignatius, who interviewed him in Beirut Monday.

“It’s strange for me to say it, but this process of change has started because of the American invasion of Iraq,” Jumblatt told the Post columnist.

“I was cynical about Iraq,” Jumblatt said. “But when I saw the Iraqi people voting three weeks ago, 8 million of them, it was the start of a new Arab world.”

Jumblatt said this spark of democratic revolt is spreading.

“The Syrian people, the Egyptian people, all say that something is changing,” he said. “The Berlin Wall has fallen. We can see it.”

In an exclusive interview with WorldNetDaily Monday, Jumblatt blamed the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri on Lebanese security officials backed by Syria.

Jumblatt said Hariri told him in a meeting two weeks ago he felt they both were in danger.

The Druze leader told WND he is calling for an “uprising for independence” demanding Damascus withdraw its nearly 20,000 troops from the country and urging the current pro-Syrian government to step down.

“We ask all in Lebanon to claim independence from Syria peacefully and democratically,” said Jumblatt.

Jumblatt, in conjunction with other major figures of the anti-Syrian movement, put out a statement Friday urging the “dismissal of the government, which has no legitimacy, and the formation of a transitional administration to protect the Lebanese people and ensure the immediate withdrawal of the Syrian army from Lebanon to pave the way for holding free and honest legislative elections.”

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Changing minds (townhall.com, 050228)

Michael Barone

Nearly two years ago, I wrote that the liberation of Iraq was changing minds in the Middle East. Before March 2003, the authoritarian regimes and media elites of the Middle East focused the discontents of their people on the United States and Israel. I thought the downfall of Saddam Hussein’s regime was directing their minds to a different question — how to build a decent government and a decent society.

I think I overestimated how much progress was being made at the time. But the spectacle of 8 million Iraqis braving terrorists to vote on Jan. 30 seems to have moved things up to be changing minds now at breakneck speed.

Evidence abounds. Consider what is happening in Lebanon, long under Syrian control, in response to the assassination, almost certainly by Syrian agents, of former Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri. Protesters have taken to the streets day after day, demanding Syrian withdrawal.

The Washington Post’s David Ignatius, who covered Lebanon in the 1980s and has kept in touch since, has been skeptical that the Bush administration’s policy would change things for the better. But reporting from Beirut last week, he wrote movingly of “the movement for political change that has suddenly coalesced in Lebanon and is slowly gathering force elsewhere in the Arab world.”

Ignatius interviewed Walid Jumblatt, the Druze leader long a critic of the United States. Jumblatt’s words are striking: “It’s is strange for me to say it, but this process of change has started because of the American invasion of Iraq. I was cynical about Iraq. But when I saw the Iraqi people voting three weeks ago, 8 million of them, it was the start of a new Arab world. The Syrian people, the Egyptian people, all say that something is changing. The Berlin Wall has fallen. We can see it.”

As Middle East expert Daniel Pipes writes, “For the first time in three decades, Lebanon now seems within reach of regaining its independence.”

Minds are changing in Europe, too. In the left-wing Guardian, Martin Kettle reassures his readers that the Iraq war was “a reckless, provocative, dangerous, lawless piece of unilateral arrogance” — the usual stuff. “But,” he concedes, “it has nevertheless brought forth a desirable outcome which would not have been achieved at all, or so quickly, by the means that the critics advocated, right though they were in most respects.”

Or read Claus Christian Malzahn in Der Spiegel. “Maybe the peoples of Syria, Iraq or Jordan will get the idea in their heads to free themselves from their oppressive regimes just as the East Germans did,” he writes. “Just a thought for Old Europe to chew on: Bush might be right, just like Reagan was.”

And minds are changing in the United States. On “Nightline,” The New York Times’ Thomas Friedman and, with caveats, The New Yorker’s Malcolm Gladwell agreed that the Iraqi election was a “tipping point” (the title of one of Gladwell’s books) and declined Ted Koppel’s invitation to say things could easily tip back the other way.

In the most recent issue of Foreign Affairs, Yale’s John Lewis Gaddis credited George W. Bush with “the most sweeping of U.S. grand strategy since the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt,” criticized Bush’s implementation of that strategy in measured tones and called for a “renewed strategic bipartisanship.”

George W. Bush gambled that actions can change minds. So far, he’s winning.

Michael Barone is a senior writer for U.S.News & World Report and principal coauthor of The Almanac of American Politics.

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Freedom ‘on the march,’ White House declares (Washington Times, 050301)

The White House, buoyed by the fall of Lebanon’s pro-Syria government and other signs of democratization throughout the Middle East, yesterday proclaimed that “democracy and freedom are on the march.”

Although careful not to gloat over encouraging developments that still could turn sour, administration officials were heartened by the speed with which President Bush’s foreign policy of introducing liberty to the Middle East appears to be bearing fruit.

“You’re seeing across the world, most notably in the Middle East, that democracy and freedom are on the march,” said White House spokesman Scott McClellan. “There is a commitment to moving forward on democratic reforms.”

Middle East analyst Marc Ginsberg, who was an ambassador to Morocco during the Clinton administration, said Mr. Bush “deserves credit” for aggressively trying to spread freedom in the region. He said the catalyst for reform was Iraq, which held its first free elections on Jan. 30.

“That vote had enormous emotional ramifications for the people in that region, who were really taken aback by what they saw,” he said. “Every Arab newspaper that I’m reading now uses the phrase: ‘Why there and not here?’Â “

Dennis Ross, who was a Middle East envoy under the first President Bush and President Clinton, said the tide has begun to turn in the region.

“Something profound’s going on right now, and what it really is, more than anything else, is a loss of fear,” he said. “Every Arab regime has ruled basically through coercion and intimidation, and suddenly the fear factor is eroding.”

He added: “It’s not just regional. I think that what has influenced the Lebanese in particular was also the Orange Revolution in Kiev. The notion that if you stand together, you can reverse fraud, you can force those who have always oppressed you to, in fact, withdraw.”

Although Mr. Bush has described his push for democratization of the Middle East as a strategy that might take 50 years or more to fully implement, his aides noted that it already is paying short-term dividends.

•Lebanon’s pro-Syria government abruptly resigned yesterday amid pro-democracy demonstrations in Beirut. The move came one week after Mr. Bush gave a speech in Brussels declaring that “the Lebanese people have the right to be free.”

•Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak announced Saturday that Egypt will hold its first direct, multiparty presidential elections. Mr. Bush, in his Brussels speech, called on Egypt to “show the way toward democracy in the Middle East.”

•Iraq announced this weekend that Syria has captured Saddam Hussein’s half brother, a leader of Iraq’s insurgency, and turned him over to Baghdad with 29 other fugitives. The announcement came in the wake of Mr. Bush’s admonition in Brussels that “the Syrian regime must take stronger action to stop those who support violence and subversion in Iraq.”

While these developments transpired within the past week, the stage for democratization was set earlier by the toppling of despotic regimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. Meanwhile, elections have been held in the Palestinian territories and, on a limited basis, in Saudi Arabia.

In Lebanon, Druze opposition leader Walid Jumblatt, a frequent critic of the United States, credited Mr. Bush for the recent trend toward democratization.

“It’s strange for me to say it, but this process of change has started because of the American invasion of Iraq,” he told columnist David Ignatius of The Washington Post last week. “I was cynical about Iraq. But when I saw the Iraqi people voting three weeks ago, 8 million of them, it was the start of a new Arab world.”

He added: “The Syrian people, the Egyptian people, all say that something is changing. The Berlin Wall has fallen. We can see it.”

Seeking to capitalize on this momentum, Mr. Bush will welcome Lebanese reformer Nasrallah Boutros Sfeir, a Maronite cardinal, to the White House on March 16. The visit was announced by Mr. McClellan just hours after Lebanon’s government resigned. The spokesman called Cardinal Sfeir “an important voice for Lebanese independence, freedom and democracy.”

Michael O’Hanlon, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, said Mr. Bush’s overarching foreign policy objective — securing the United States by democratizing the Middle East — is showing signs of promise.

“It’s definitely a good week for democracy in the Middle East,” he said. “You have to assume Mr. Bush’s words had at least something to do with that.”

But he cautioned against “counting our chickens before they’ve hatched,” especially in Egypt.

“It may all be part of a con game where Mubarak has realized that the United States is demanding reform, so he’s going to have to at least give the appearance of reform,” he said. “He may still figure out a way to pull the strings and maintain his hold on power.”

He added: “Still, the fact that he felt obliged to do something so quickly is notable and at least somewhat surprising.”

Mr. Ginsberg added: “I don’t believe for one moment in the end that Mubarak is going to position anyone to be able to legitimately challenge him. This is all about positioning his son to be able to take over for him.”

Mr. Ross said Mr. Mubarak is “trying to get out in front of” Mr. Bush’s demand for reforms, but that the Egyptian and other Middle East leaders might embrace reforms that are “as cosmetic as possible.”

White House officials pointed out that some regimes will move more swiftly than others toward democratization and insisted that the overall trend is in the right direction. Mr. Bush said as much in his Brussels speech.

“Across the Middle East — from the Palestinian territories, to Lebanon, to Iraq, to Iran — I believe that the advance of freedom within nations will build the peace among nations,” he said. “We support the spread of democracy in the Middle East — because freedom leads to peace.”

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Lebanon’s red rose revolution (Washington Times, 050301)

The Lebanese are launching a velvet revolution in a region where bare-knuckled revolutions have not traditionally been padded with velvet. The people of Lebanon have exhibited remarkable courage and power in bringing down the puppet government in Beirut, whose strings were held by the repressive regime of Damascus.

Yesterday, Lebanon’s Prime Minister Omar Karami announced his government’s dramatic resignation as more than 25,000 demonstrators defied a government ban on protests, flooding the streets in Beirut in opposition to the government, Syrian occupation and the Feb. 14 assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. The protesters gave red roses to soldiers and police, who by and large allowed the demonstrations to proceed. “Syria out!” yelled the flag-waving protesters.

Remarkably, Mr. Karami, who had in effect taken his orders from Damascus, said, “Out of concern that the government does not become an obstacle to the good of the country, I announce the resignation of the government I had the honor to lead.” Lebanon’s democratic traditions and prosperity before the outbreak of civil war in 1975 bodes well for the country’s future.

Mr. Karami’s cabinet will apparently continue on as a caretaker government. If parliamentary elections are not held ahead of the scheduled May vote, Lebanon’s pro-Syrian president, Emile Lahoud, will appoint a prime minister. That prime minister can be subjected to a vote of no-confidence in parliament.

The turn of events in Lebanon are significant in and of themselves, but they also build on democracy’s march in the region. This weeknd, Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak announced constitutional reform allowing a presidential election, though the details are unclear. The government may only allow candidates from officially registered political parties to run, which would eliminate many prominent opposition figures. Also, the tightly controlled media will likely continue to strictly limit the public debate. Still, a vote would represent considerable improvement over the “referendums” that Mr. Mubarak has held in the past to try to legitimize his 24-year rule. Egypt’s announcement follows the democratic elections in Afghanistan and Iraq, and by Palestinians.

Saudi Arabia, meanwhile, is holding municipal elections and the country’s foreign minister, Prince Saud al-Faisal, said Sunday the government may allow women to vote in future elections. The ongoing municipal elections could grant marginalized Shi’ites a degree of local power in that country.

These advancements demonstrate that President Bush’s firm support of democracy is showing tangible results, despite considerable obstacles. Mr. Bush had specifically called on both Egypt and Saudi Arabia to lead democratic reform in the region by example. The president’s strategy is beginning to look more than merely plausible, even to some of his sharpest critics. We support the president’s Middle Eastern democracy project because the status quo has been the primary cause of the current plague of global terrorism — and because we have not heard proposed a more plausible method to end that still growing, mortal threat.

But we are also mindful that should full representative governments emerge in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and elsewhere in those troubled lands, there is no certainty that they will behave consistent with our national security interests. The administration should make at least as much effort to shape the attitudes of those future democracies, as it is making to bring them into being in the first place. Betting on democracies is the best bet available — but it is not a sure bet.

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The march for freedom (townhall.com, 050301)

Cal Thomas

Whatever else one takes from President Bush’s trip to Europe, it is obvious who’s on the offense and who’s playing defense.

Twenty years after Ronald Reagan proclaimed freedom inevitable for what were then called “captive nations,” freedom is on the march as perhaps never before.

Europeans are going to have to rethink their policy of vacillation, accommodation and surrender to evil. In the ‘80s, millions of Europeans demonstrated against Reagan’s policy of victory over Soviet communism and its offspring in Central America. But the paradigm has shifted. Now it is totalitarianism — from the Middle East, to North Korea, to a resurgent virus in Vladimir Putin’s Russia — that must justify depriving people of their freedom and keeping their governments undemocratic.

The definition of freedom underscores what is at stake: “The absence of necessity, coercion, or constraint in choice of action; liberation from slavery or restraint or from the power of another; the quality or state of being exempt or released, usually from something onerous.”

How could anyone be against (ITALICS) that ? Many are against freedom because they wish to maintain the unique position enjoyed by religious and political dictators who seize rights and power for themselves, while denying such things to others.

In a speech in Bratislava, Slovakia, last Thursday, President Bush spoke to the “citizens of a free Slovakia” and noted that nearly 17 years ago “thousands of Slovaks gathered peacefully in front of this theater. They came, not to welcome a visiting president, but to light candles, sing hymns, pray for an end to tyranny and the restoration of religious liberty.”

The president said that communist authorities “watched thousands of candles shining in the darkness - and gave the order to extinguish them.” While noting that the authorities succeeded in crushing the 1988 protest, the president said, “The people of Bratislava lit a fire for freedom that day, a fire that quickly spread across the land. And within 20 months, the regime that drove Slovaks from this square would itself be driven from power. By claiming your own freedom, you inspired a revolution that liberated your nation and helped to transform a continent.”

This is the Bush Doctrine: Freedom is something to be embraced by all people, regardless of faith, history or ethnicity. It is a universal value. The tide of history has turned. Where within memory the oppressors were on the march and free people had to explain why they wouldn’t move; now freedom is marching and dictators are being told to get out of the way.

Even the left-leaning German magazine Der Spiegel revealed a crack in Europe’s failed leftist ideology when it wrote in its Feb. 23 issue: “Germany loves to criticize George W. Bush’s Middle East policies — just like Germany loved to criticize former President Ronald Reagan. But Reagan, when he demanded that Gorbachev remove the Berlin Wall, turned out to be right. Could history repeat itself?”

This is heresy in much of the European Union, but the magazine has stated an undeniable truth: Reagan was right, and because he stuck to his guns (literally and figuratively) Eastern Europe is free. Despite some setbacks in Russia, things are better than under communism, though not as good as they are in the Ukraine. Not yet.

President Bush has nothing for which to apologize when he champions freedom. Dictators and those European leaders who have been on the wrong side of history more than once should at least entertain the possibility that Bush may be right and this time align themselves on the side of freedom and liberation for people who do not enjoy it.

There is no benefit to coddling, ignoring or buying off dictators. Protection money only protects until the dictators are sufficiently strong to come after those paying the bribes. Then who will protect them?

As the liberal playwright Lillian Hellman wrote in “Watch on the Rhine” (1941): “For every man who lives without freedom, the rest of us must face the guilt.” Isn’t President Bush saying the same thing?

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Kifaya . . . in the Arab world (Washington Times, 050303)

“Something is beginning to happen in Egypt,” reports an Egyptian blogger who goes by the name of “Big Pharaoh,” after President Hosni Mubarak asked the parliament last Saturday to amend the constitution to allow more than one candidate to run in the country’s presidential elections next fall.

What is happening in Egypt is also starting in Lebanon, and will likely spread to other parts of the Middle East. It’s a new phenomenon that can be summed up in a single word — “kifaya,” Arabic for “enough.” Monday, Lebanon’s prime minister and entire Cabinet resigned, satisfying a demand of tens of thousands of protesters.

It may sound strange to hold a presidential election with one candidate, but this has been done in the Middle East for decades. Or to amend the constitution at the behest of another country to extend a president’s term, as in Lebanon.

More recently, millions of Egyptians and Lebanese have started saying “enough” to those practices. Whether in English or Arabic, the message is the same; People have had enough of the region’s political and economic stagnation. There is growing frustration in the lack of participation in government. In greater numbers Middle Easterners are saying “kifaya.”

While slow, democracy fever is starting to catch on. In recent weeks the word “kifaya,” or “enough,” has appeared on hundreds of posters carried by demonstrators in Cairo demanding Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak not run for a fifth term. And, the same word was seen in English in Beirut, carried after former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri’s assassination by thousands at protests against Syrian occupation of Lebanon.

Mr. Mubarak, a key U.S. ally in the Arab world, received $1.9 billion in financial aid during fiscal 2004, according to U.S. State Department figures. The Egyptian president uses his police and intelligence services to maintain a semblance of democracy. Gehad Auda, an Egyptian political analyst, describes democracy in Mr. Mubarak’s Egypt as a place where “democratic politics were to be conducted in parliament rather than on the streets.”

Summing up the political mood of the country, Egypt’s National Campaign for Change has adopted the word “Kifaya” as its name; Kifaya has been one of the groups demanding Mr. Mubarak allow more than a single candidate for the presidency.

Kifaya, which evolved from an anti-Iraq war group into a movement calling for an end to Mr. Mubarak’s rule, encompasses some 26 organizations of diverging political view ranging from Islamists to Nasserites and communists. Its spokesman, George Ishaq, is a Coptic Christian.

Until now Egypt’s parliament would nominate a single candidate for a six-year term — invariably the president. The people would then vote “yes” or “no” in a referendum where the single candidate would typically win with about 99% of the vote. Egyptians are now saying kifaya. It’s time to move on.

Since the monarchy was overthrown in a bloodless military coop in 1952 when King Farouk was exiled, Egypt has had only four presidents; Muhammad Naguib, who ruled for 16 months before his ouster by Gamal Abdel Nasser, who then governed Egypt for 16 years. Upon his death in 1970, Nasser was replaced by an obscure vice president called Anwar Sadat. Sadat ruled for 11 years until his assassination in October 1981. Mr. Mubarak, 77, was Sadat’s vice-president, replaced the assassinated leader and has been in power almost 24 years.

Consider for the sake of comparison that in the same time, the United States has voted 11 presidents in and out of power.

The kifaya factor, and U.S. pressures, is beginning to force Mr. Mubarak, who has governed Egypt with the authority of a pharaoh, to make changes. President George W. Bush had singled out “the great and proud nation of Egypt” in his State of the Union address, which, he said, “showed the way toward peace in the Middle East.” Mr. Bush then added Egypt “can now show the way toward democracy in the Middle East.”

Mr. Mubarak’s move comes as somewhat of a surprise as Egypt faces growing domestic problems and mounting pressures from the Bush administration to introduce more democratization.

While Mr. Mubarak’s request for a change in the constitution is encouraging, there remain a number of unanswered questions about how fair the next elections are likely to be. Will all candidates be allowed to campaign freely? Will the state-controlled media allow them to air their views without restriction? Will it allocate them equal air time and equal space in the printed press? What sort of harassment are opposition candidates likely to face from the security police?

It remains to be seen how much democracy Mr. Mubarak will allow by next fall when the elections are scheduled when only last month he called reform demands “futile.”

While they welcomed the reform, opposition activists said it did not go far enough, describing it as mostly “cosmetic.” Potential presidential candidates would still need parliament’s approval to run. The government sees this as a precautionary measure that would preclude participation by candidates of the Muslim Brotherhood, possibly the country’s largest opposition group. But the ruling could also be applied to other candidates.

Meanwhile, continued human-rights abuses — such as the arrest and detention of Ayman Nour, a lawyer and representative of the al-Ghad (Tomorrow) Party — and the disregard of basic demands for reform will continue building up the kifaya factor.

Claude Salhani is international editor for United Press International.

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Jon Stewart smells it, too (Washington Times, 050303)

The Democratic dominoes clearly are beginning to fall when Jon Stewart, the host of “The Daily Show,” says, “I haven’t seen results like this ever in [the Middle East].” As anyone who watches the Comedy Central “news” show knows, Mr. Stewart isn’t a serious political pundit, but he is unabashedly liberal both on and off air. And since he commands a fairly large audience of mostly younger adults, he is perhaps as much an indicator of the liberal mindset as the New York Times.

His comments came during a Tuesday night interview with former Clinton aide Nancy Soderberg, who was promoting her new book, “The Superpower Myth: The Use and Misuse of American Might.” Unfortunately for Mrs. Soderberg, the host spent the entire interview essentially undermining the very thesis of her book, which, as far as we can tell, criticizes the Bush doctrine of transforming the Middle East.

As a microcosm of the Democrats’ dilemma, the interview proved enlightening. One such moment came when Mrs. Soderberg said, “[A]s a Democrat, you don’t want anything nice to happen to the Republicans, and you don’t want them to have progress. But as an American, you hope good things would happen.” To which Mr. Stewart replied, “Do you think that the people of Lebanon would have had the courage of their conviction, having not seen — not only the invasion but the election which followed [in Iraq]? It’s almost as though that the Iraqi election has emboldened this crazy — something’s going on over there. I’m smelling something.”

Mr. Stewart should be applauded for his intellectual honesty, as well as his obvious pride in America’s accomplishments. Mrs. Soderberg, however, couldn’t be deterred from her rank partisanship. Here’s one of her more odious comments: “Well, there’s still Iran and North Korea, don’t forget. There’s still hope for the rest of us ... There’s always hope that this might not work.” Mr. Stewart is funny — it’s his job. Mrs. Soderberg is not, which is why there’s no other way to parse this other than as a desire to see America defeated for political gain — and perhaps book sales.

Mr. Stewart is indeed “smelling something.” He’s smelling the birth of democracy in the Middle East. Regrettably, too many Democrats refuse to stop and smell the sweet scent of freedom.

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The march of freedom (townhall.com, 050304)

Charles Krauthammer

WASHINGTON — Revolutions do not stand still. They either move forward or they die. We are at the dawn of a glorious, delicate, revolutionary moment in the Middle East. It was triggered by the invasion of Iraq, the overthrow of Saddam, and televised images of 8 million Iraqis voting in a free multiparty election. Which led to the obvious question throughout the Middle East: Why Iraqis and not us?

To be sure, the rolling revolution began outside the Middle East with the Afghan elections, scandalously underplayed in the American media. That was followed by the Iraqi elections, impossible to underplay even by the American media. In between came free Palestinian elections that produced a moderate reform-oriented leadership, followed by an amazing mini-uprising in the Palestinian parliament that rejected an attempt to force corrupt cronies on the new government.

And it continued — demonstrations in Egypt for democracy, a shocking rarity that led President Mubarak to promise the first contested presidential elections in Egyptian history. And now, of course, the Cedar Revolution in Lebanon, where the assassination of opposition leader Rafiq Hariri led to an explosion of people power in the streets that brought down Syria’s puppet-government in Beirut.

Revolution is in the air. What to do? We are already hearing voices for restraint about liberating Lebanon. Flynt Leverett, your usual Middle East expert, takes to The New York Times to oppose immediate withdrawal of Syria’s occupation of Lebanon. Instead, we should be trying to “engage and empower” the tyranny in Damascus.

These people never learn. Here we are on the threshold of what Arabs in the region are calling the fall of their own Berlin Wall, and our “realists” want us to go back to making deals with dictators. It would be not just a blunder but a tragedy to try to rein in the revolution in Lebanon. It would betray our principles. And it would betray the people in Lebanon who have been encouraged by our proclamation of those principles.

Moreover, the Cedar Revolution promises not only to liberate Lebanon, but to transform the entire Middle East. Why? Because a forced Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon could bring down the Assad dictatorship. The road to Damascus goes through Beirut. And changing Damascus will transform the region.

We are not talking about invading Syria. We have done enough invading and there is no need. If Assad loses Lebanon, his regime could be fatally weakened.

For two reasons: economics and psychology. Like all Soviet-style systems, the Syrian economy is moribund. It lives off Lebanese commerce and corruption. Take that away and a pillar of the Assad kleptocracy disappears. As does the psychological pillar. Dictatorships like Assad’s rule by fear, which is sustained by power and the illusion of power. Control of Lebanon is the centerpiece of that illusion. The loss of Lebanon, at the hands of unarmed civilians no less, would be a deadly blow to the Assad mystique, perhaps enough to revoke his mandate from heaven.

And why is Syria so important? Because Assad has succeeded Saddam as the principal bad actor in the region. Syria, an island of dictatorship in a sea of liberalization, is desperately trying to destabilize its neighbors. The Hariri bombing in Lebanon is universally believed to be the work of Syria. The orders for the Feb. 25 Tel Aviv bombing, deliberately designed to blow up the new Palestinian-Israeli rapprochement, came from Damascus. And we know that Syria is sheltering leading Baathist insurgents who are killing Iraqis and Americans by the score in Iraq.

There was a brief Damascus Spring five years ago when Syrians began demanding more freedom. Assad repressed it. Now 140 Syrian intellectuals have petitioned their own government to withdraw from Lebanon. They signed their names. The fear is lifting there too. Were the contagion to spread to Damascus, the entire region from the Mediterranean Sea to the Iranian border would be on a path to democratization.

This of course could all be reversed. Liberal revolutions were suppressed in Europe 1848, Hungary 1956, Czechoslovakia 1968 and Tiananmen 1989. Nothing is written. Determined and ruthless regimes can extinguish revolutions. Which is why the worst thing we can possibly do is “engage and empower” the tyrants.

This is no time to listen to the voices of tremulousness, indecision, compromise and fear. If we had listened to them two years ago, we would still be doing oil-for-food, no-fly zones and worthless embargoes. It is our principles that brought us to this moment by way of Afghanistan and Iraq. They need to guide us now — through Beirut to Damascus.

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Freedom’s march down the ‘Arab street’ (townhall.com, 050304)

Oliver North

WASHINGTON, D.C. — “Explosion Kills Former Prime Minister.” “Suicide Terrorist Kills Five at Nightclub.” “Car Bomber Kills 125 Police Recruits.” “Iraqi Judge Assassinated.” These recent headlines describe bloody events in Lebanon, Israel and Iraq, where IEDs, or “body bombs,” have killed and maimed hundreds. Though true, these reports have apparently distracted many in the so-called mainstream media from a discomfiting reality: Freedom is on the march down the “Arab street.”

Ever since U.S. troops first went to Afghanistan in October 2001, our supposedly more experienced “betters” in Europe and the “prudent potentates of the press” have said that U.S. military action against an Islamic nation would cause the “Arab street” to rise up and crush us. This theme was widely replayed in the build-up for Operation Iraqi Freedom — and has been reiterated many times in the aftermath of Saddam Hussein’s capture.

Since his Inaugural Address, President Bush has been repeatedly castigated for his “naivety” on one hand and for his “aggressive arrogance” on the other — because he boldly tells those who suffer tyranny that “the United States will not ignore your oppression or excuse your oppressors. When you stand for your liberty, we will stand with you.”

Yet, despite the carping critics — and the carnage caused by those who would rather die than see freedom flourish — any objective observer has to conclude that George W. Bush is right. “The call of freedom” does indeed come “to every mind and every soul.” Freedom is indeed on the march — even down the “Arab street.”

It was evident last October in Afghanistan, in the ballots cast by Palestinians in early January and again in late January on the ink-stained fingers of Iraqi men and women, raised in proud defiance against murderous thugs who would return them to brutal bondage.

Whether the America-haters and Bush-bashers want to acknowledge it or not, the “call of freedom” is now being heard in places where American “influence” has long been deemed by the “experts” to be minimal, at best:

— In December, hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians peacefully protested to force a new election when a rigged vote installed Vladimir Putin’s handpicked presidential candidate. Today, reformist Viktor Yushchenko governs in Kiev. The Bush administration needed to do little more than lend its voice to the calls for a free and fair election.

— Last week, in long-suffering Syrian-occupied Lebanon, 25,000 unarmed Christian and Muslim civilians, protesting the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, forced the resignation of Syria’s puppet government in Beirut. In the aftermath, the new Iraqi government — and even the French — have joined our call for the Syrians to withdraw their forces from Lebanon and deport the residue of Saddam’s regime hiding there.

Though they have yet to fully comply, the Syrians have arrested and turned over the former dictator’s half-brother, Sabawi Ibrahim al Hassan. And to ensure that those in Damascus who support terror don’t get the idea that this is sufficient, President Bush has since told them to “get your troops and your secret services out of Lebanon, and give democracy a chance.”

— In Cairo, Hosni Mubarak, never known to be a friend of liberty or democratic institutions, has announced that opposition candidates will be allowed to run for office in the upcoming Egyptian elections. Mubarak has been the only presidential “candidate” since taking power in 1981. While questions remain about who will be “allowed” to run, a taste of liberty in a democratic election may ignite the “fire of freedom” among the “people of the Nile.”

— And now, even the royal family in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, seems to be getting the message. Though the recent Saudi “municipal elections” were more show than substance — the elected councilors wield little power, the ruling House of Saud appoints as many councilors as were elected and only men could vote — the taste of democracy has intensified the call on the “Arab street” for real elections.

Last week, the kingdom’s Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal, speaking the heretofore unthinkable, said that in future elections women “may” have the right to vote. Unfortunately, he then added, “We know we want to reform, we know we want to modernize, but for God’s sake leave us alone.”

And therein lies the first problem: The prince doesn’t get it. It’s not just Bush’s promise, “When you stand for your liberty we will stand with you,” at work in Saudi Arabia — it really is a quest for freedom that is sweeping down his “Arab streets,” right past minarets preaching repression and hatred for all things “Western.”

But Saud al-Faisal isn’t alone in misunderstanding what freedom really means — and from whence it springs. Last week, when President Bush confronted Vladimir Putin about Russia’s freedom of the press, Putin shot back with: “We didn’t criticize you when you fired those reporters at CBS.”

Thus the second problem: Saud al-Faisal and Putin apparently believe that holding an election is enough. It’s not. As we have learned from the “election” of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, there is much more to freedom than casting a ballot. Liberty also means a free press; freedom to worship— or not; the rule of law where justice is tempered with mercy; freedom from fear — of government, criminals or outsiders — and the freedom to come and go, to speak politically, to work and create wealth.

All of this — and more — is what freedom is about. Elections are not the end of the process, just the beginning. That’s what’s wrong with the argument being waged by some in Congress to start withdrawing American forces from Iraq now that there has been an election. Whether it’s the “Arab street,” or elsewhere, liberty doesn’t march to the beat of a cadence — it arrives to the sound of many drummers, and impatience is never the friend of freedom.

Oliver North is a nationally syndicated columnist and the founder and honorary chairman of Freedom Alliance.

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Running Up the Score (American Spectator, 050304)

By John Tabin

Let’s once again check the score:

The development of the Afghan state is going surprisingly well, and now some other spots in that neighborhood bear watching. Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan each held parliamentary elections on February 27, both fraught with irregularities favoring the leadership — including the muzzling of the press. While the Tajik opposition is for now too fractured and weak to seriously challenge strongman Imomali Rakhmanov’s dominance, in Kyrgyzstan, where run-off elections for many parliamentary seats will come on March 13, democracy activists talk of a Kyrgysz “Lemon Revolution,” modeled on last year’s successful Orange Revolution in Ukraine (which was itself inspired in part by the Rose Revolution in Georgia). There have been large protests, but so far they seem mostly limited to the southern part of the country — but if there is no Lemon Revolution this month, it may still come with the presidential election in October.

In Lebanon, too, the Orange Revolution has had its influence, as protesters have borrowed Ukrainian techniques for their effort to push the Syrians out; they’ve already succeeded in forcing a pro-Syrian government to resign. Iraq’s successful election was another important catalyst: “It’s strange for me to say it, but this process of change has started because of the American invasion of Iraq,” Druze Muslim leader Walid Jumblatt told David Ignatius of the Washington Post last week. “I was cynical about Iraq. But when I saw the Iraqi people voting three weeks ago, 8 million of them, it was the start of a new Arab world. The Syrian people, the Egyptian people, all say that something is changing. The Berlin Wall has fallen. We can see it.”

It seems pretty safe to bet that Syria will pull out of Lebanon soon; they may try withdrawing troops and leaving the intelligence network behind, but even that gambit is unlikely to take the heat off. And if Syria loses Lebanon — a critical pillar of the Baathist regime’s economic power — there’s a fair chance of a government collapsing in Damascus as well as Beirut.

Saudi Arabia, sensing the direction of the wind, held its first municipal elections yesterday (albeit with only men participating), and has now called for Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon — “The End,” according to Beirut Daily Star opinion editor Michael Young. In Egypt, President Hosni Mubarak has decided, under American pressure, to amend the constitution to allow someone to actually run against him; he may try to keep the process under his control, but as Egyptian democrat Saadeddin Ibrahim puts it, the “democratic genie is out of the bottle.”

For partisan Democrats, this invites all sorts of mixed feelings and hand-wringing about what credit, if any, George W. Bush deserves for these developments. One of Andrew Sullivan’s emailers tells of a Democratic friend, upon being told of developments in Lebanon, looking like “I told him his dog had died.” One suspects that history will smile upon this administration, just as the view that Ronald Reagan was just in the right place at the right time for the Cold War’s end is now marginalized. (“If someone else had been in his place, I don’t know if what happened would have happened,” no less than Mikhail Gorbachev has said.) But for now, the question is hardly worth engaging. Remember the sign that Reagan famously kept in the Oval Office: “There is no limit to what a man can do or where he can go, if he doesn’t mind who gets the credit.”

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After 1/30/05 (Weekly Standard, 050307)

Just four weeks after the Iraqi election of January 30, 2005, it seems increasingly likely that that date will turn out to have been a genuine turning point.

HISTORY IS BEST VIEWED IN the rear-view mirror. It’s hard to grasp the significance of events as they happen. It’s even harder to forecast their meaning when they’re only scheduled to happen. And once they occur, it’s usually the case that possible historical turning points, tipping points, inflection points, or just points of interest turn out in the cold glare of history to have been of merely passing importance.

But sometimes not. Just four weeks after the Iraqi election of January 30, 2005, it seems increasingly likely that that date will turn out to have been a genuine turning point. The fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989, ended an era. September 11, 2001, ended an interregnum. In the new era in which we now live, 1/30/05 could be a key moment—perhaps the key moment so far—in vindicating the Bush Doctrine as the right response to 9/11. And now there is the prospect of further and accelerating progress.

Consider three surprising testimonials from this past week—one from the Old Middle East, one from Old Europe, the third from Old New York.

From the Middle East, listen to Walid Jumblatt, the Lebanese Druze Muslim leader and member of parliament, formerly an accommodator of the Syrian occupation and no friend of the Bush administration or its predecessors. On February 21, Jumblatt, in Beirut, told the Washington Post’s David Ignatius that he is determined to work to get the current Syrian-stooge government out of office and to get Syrian troops out of Lebanon. What accounts

for his new sentiment—echoing and echoed by millions of others, in Lebanon and elsewhere in the Middle East? Here’s Jumblatt:

It’s strange for me to say it, but this process of change has started because of the American invasion of Iraq. I was cynical about Iraq. But when I saw the Iraqi people voting three weeks ago, 8 million of them, it was the start of a new Arab world. . . . The Syrian people, the Egyptian people, all say that something is changing. The Berlin Wall has fallen. We can see it.

Of course the assassination of Rafik Hariri was the proximate cause of the peaceful uprising the Lebanese are calling their “intifada.” But plenty of people were assassinated in the old Middle East, and rarely did their deaths spark a democratic stirring. That was the pre-1/30/05 world. Now, after the Iraqi election, it seems possible that a democratic, nonviolent “intifada” has become the model for the new Middle East, replacing the suicide bombings and political murders of the old. It is possible to hope this is the case—and, more important, to work to make it so.

From Old Europe, listen to Claus Christian Malzahn of Der Spiegel, writing under the headline “Could George W. Bush Be Right?” Malzahn’s answer: Perhaps.

President Ronald Reagan’s visit to Berlin in 1987 was, in many respects, very similar to President George W. Bush’s visit to Mainz on Wednesday. . . . The Germany Reagan was traveling in, much like today’s Germany, was very skeptical of the American president and his foreign policy. When Reagan stood before the Brandenburg Gate—and the Berlin Wall—and demanded that Gorbachev “tear down this wall,” he was lampooned the next day on the editorial pages. He is a dreamer, wrote commentators. Realpolitik looks different.

But history has shown that it wasn’t Reagan who was the dreamer as he voiced his demand. Rather, it was German politicians who were lacking in imagination—a group who in 1987 couldn’t imagine that there might be an alternative to a divided Germany. . . . When George W. Bush requests that Chancellor Schröder—who, by the way, was also not entirely complimentary of Reagan’s 1987 speech—and Germany become more engaged in the Middle East, everybody on the German side will nod affably. But . . . Bush’s idea of a Middle Eastern democracy imported at the tip of a bayonet is, for Schröder’s Social Democratic party and his coalition partner the Green party, the hysterical offspring of the American neocons. Even German conservatives find the idea that Arab countries could transform themselves into enlightened democracies somewhat absurd. . . .

Europeans today—just like the Europeans of 1987—cannot imagine that the world might change. Maybe we don’t want the world to change, because change can, of course, be dangerous. But in a country of immigrants like the United States, one actually pushes for change. In Mainz today, the stagnant Europeans came face to face with the dynamic Americans. We Europeans always want to have the world from yesterday, whereas the Americans strive for the world of tomorrow. . . .

It was difficult not to cringe during Reagan’s speech in 1987. He didn’t leave a single Berlin cliché out of his script. At the end of it, most experts agreed that his demand for

the removal of the wall was inopportune, utopian and crazy.

Yet three years later, East Germany had disappeared from the map. Gorbachev had a lot to do with it, but it was the East Germans who played the larger role. When analysts are confronted by real people, amazing things can happen. And maybe history can repeat itself. Maybe the people of Syria, Iran, or Jordan will get the idea in their heads to free themselves from their oppressive regimes just as the East Germans did. When the voter turnout in Iraq recently exceeded that of many Western nations, the chorus of critique from Iraq alarmists was, at least for a couple of days, quieted. Just as quiet as the chorus of Germany experts on the night of November 9, 1989, when the wall fell.

Just a thought for Old Europe to chew on: Bush might be right, just like Reagan was then.

Surely Bush’s impressive European trip might have put this thought in a few other European minds, as well—but only because that trip took place in the aftermath of 1/30/05.

As for Old New York, listen to Kurt Andersen in the February 21 New York magazine:

Our heroic and tragic liberal-intellectual capaciousness is facing its sharpest test since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Back then, most of us were forced, against our wills, to give Ronald Reagan a large share of credit for winning the Cold War. Now the people of this Bush-hating city are being forced to grant the merest possibility that Bush, despite his annoying manner and his administration’s awful hubris and dissembling and incompetence concerning Iraq, just might—might, possibly—have been correct to invade, to occupy, and to try to enable a democratically elected government in Iraq. . . .

It won’t do simply to default to our easy predispositions—against Bush, even against war. If partisanship makes us abandon intellectual honesty, if we oppose what our opponents say or do simply because they are the ones saying or doing it, we become mere political short-sellers, hoping for bad news because it’s good for our ideological investment.

The Bush short-sellers—in the Middle East, in Europe, and here at home—are being squeezed. But now is no time for the president to let up, or to cash in. Now that Bush has gathered momentum, he needs to forge ahead. There will be bumps, and setbacks. But if Bush can succeed in Iraq, force Syria out of Lebanon, and undermine the mullahs in Iran, then historians will say: Bush was willing to fight—and Bush was right.

—William Kristol

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What Hath Ju-Ju Wrought! (Weekly Standard, 050314)

In the Middle East, the democratic genie is out of the bottle.

HAVE THE IRAQI ELECTIONS PRODUCED a democratic earthquake that has changed forever the fundamental political dynamics in the Muslim Middle East? Only the culturally deaf, dumb, and blind—for example, Michigan’s Democratic senator Carl Levin—can’t see what George W. Bush’s war against Saddam Hussein has wrought. The issue is not whether the basic understanding of contemporary Muslim political legitimacy has been overturned—it has—but how forcefully the regimes in place will resist the growing Muslim democratic ethic.

And the crucial question for the United States is whether the Bush administration will realize that the most consequential regimes in place—Hosni Mubarak’s in Egypt, the Saudi dynasty in Arabia, the military junta in Algeria, and the theocracy in Iran—probably won’t evolve without some internal violence. The Bush administration ought to be prepared to encourage or coerce these regimes into changing sooner, not later. What the United States should fear most is not rapid change—the specter of the fallen shah of Iran will surely rise in many minds—but the agonizing, dogged resistance of dictatorship. (Would that the United States had understood in 1971, after the shah’s delusional and obscenely expensive celebration of 2,500 years of Persian kingship, that Washington had an increasingly sclerotic, corrupt autocracy confronting perhaps the most intellectually dynamic and angry society in the Middle East.)

Although it is now beyond doubt that President Bush is philosophically a Reaganite—holding, that is, that the United States’ self-defense is inextricably connected to the expansion and protection of democracy—many within his administration share Europe’s overriding concerns about “stability” in the region. And even among Reaganites, it’s not hard to find those who are profoundly anxious about Muslim fundamentalists becoming potentially powerful players if free elections were actually held in the Arab world. The Bush administration has not yet worked out a grand strategy of democratization: Clear, simple principles applied with as much consistency as practicable would be an entirely adequate approach. Events are likely to make Elliott Abrams’s democracy-promotion job on the National Security Council perhaps the most critical office to President Bush. Iraq has unleashed a wave of pent-up frustration and anger against the status quo throughout the region. The clever dictators, like Mubarak and Tunisia’s Zine el Abidine ben Ali, will try to preempt it by fixing multiparty elections and adopting pro-American/pro-Israeli foreign policy initiatives. The Bush administration will likely get hit from several directions at once, as the peoples of the Middle East and their rulers continue to react to what started on January 30, 2005.

Let’s take a quick tour d’horizon and see where we are.

Lebanon—This may be the most promising—though it may not be the most important—aftershock of the January 30 elections. Syria is obviously in trouble in Lebanon. The assassination of former prime minister Rafik Hariri, coming so soon after Arabic satellite television beamed astonishing pictures of Iraqis risking their lives to vote, ignited long-simmering, anti-Syrian animosity among the Lebanese Christian and Sunni communities. (There may well be a Lebanese who doesn’t believe Hariri was murdered by Syria’s ruler Bashar al-Assad, but what is striking about the Lebanese rumor mill—one of the most energetic in the Middle East—is how unified the view is on Syrian culpability.) The most urgent question now is whether the Lebanese Shiite community, specifically the Amal and Hezbollah political movements, will back the Sunnis and the Christians in their call for Syria’s ejection. Both organizations have substantial ties to Iran—Hezbollah is revolutionary Iran’s only true child and remains the clerical regime’s only foreign-policy success—and would be petrified of completely losing Tehran’s support. It remains unclear what the Lebanese Shia are going to do, but if one had to bet, the odds are decent that Amal and Hezbollah will not break from the Lebanese Christian and Sunni communities.

As the Lebanese-American scholar Fouad Ajami regularly points out, the Lebanese Shia as a people do not want to be left behind in the country. If the vast majority of the other Lebanese have decisively broken with Syria—and they have—then the Shia will not separate themselves from their countrymen. This is even more true if clerical Iran, Hezbollah’s mother ship, does not ride to the rescue of Bashar al-Assad. And there is reason to hope this will not be the case.

First and perhaps foremost, Bashar is inept. The cool, calculating rule of his father, Hafez al-Assad, has given way to the blundering of a young leader who has galvanized anti-Syrian sentiment even among traditionally pro-Syrian Lebanese. Say what you will about Iran’s ruling clerics—they are a nasty collection of highly ideological power politicians willing to deploy terrorism at home and abroad whenever necessary—they are not fond of expending their own prestige and power on behalf of juveniles, especially when the odds are they would lose. Iran probably wouldn’t mind seeing Bashar al-Assad fall from power in a palace coup—not an unlikely possibility if Syria gets forced out of Lebanon. As long as the Alawite clan (a heretical branch of Shiite Islam that has dominated Syria’s Baath party) stays in power, the Iranians aren’t likely to become too worried.

And the events in Lebanon don’t necessarily spell disaster for the Syrians. What Thomas Friedman called the “Hama rules”—the willingness to slaughter regime opponents by the thousands, as Hafez al-Assad did in the town of Hama in 1982—still hold, and the Alawite regime appears cohesive enough to do this without hesitation. The Syrian Sunni desire for revenge against the minority Alawites is easily enough to ensure Alawite solidarity. The Sunnis, who believe they have always had the historic right to rule Syria, would probably not show the same consideration that Iraqi Shia have so far shown their former Baathist tormentors. It is possible that the democratic ethic may be growing among Syria’s Sunni Arab population—Syria’s awful tyranny, like Baathist Iraq’s, can teach well the benefits of restraining state power—but that won’t matter much against a savage regime with a ferocious internal security service and elite military units capable of artillery barrages against civilians.

Also, Lebanon has seen some form of democracy. Lebanon has never been fully of the Arab world—it is historically, religiously, culturally, and geographically a special place—and the idea of a democratic Lebanon probably isn’t nearly as scary to the Middle East’s despots as is the idea of a democratic Iraq or Egypt. (A Palestinian democracy has a bit of the same quality about it—Palestinians have existed in a surreal world for decades, where their triumphs and tragedies don’t relate well to the day-to-day lives and local political frustrations of most Arabs.) Iran’s clerics, or Syria’s Alawites, or the Saudi princes, or the Mubarak family in Egypt don’t necessarily view the return of Lebanese democracy as a dagger aimed at them. It is something they could live with—a price worth paying to eliminate from among them a damaging, Paris-Washington-uniting incompetent like Bashar al-Assad.

Unless Iran’s clerical regime views the liberation of Lebanon as a lethal defeat for Hezbollah—and the organization’s chief, Hassan Nasrallah, has been rhetorically fence-sitting about joining or damning the Christian and Sunni opposition to the Syrians—then the odds are good that the Syrians will withdraw. One can appreciate why the Lebanese youth cannot stop praising “Ju-Ju,” an affectionate Arabic take on “George.” They are willing to admit easily what comes much harder to many in Congress and in Washington’s Democratic think tanks.

Syria—Drive them out of Lebanon but don’t spend much time or effort trying to tighten the noose around the Baathist Alawites. The state is not as Orwellian as was Saddam Hussein’s, but the ethnic and religious dynamics of its regime will make regime solidarity very difficult to overcome. However, if the Syrian Baathists are aiding the Iraqi Baathists to the extent that the Bush administration alleges—and the allegations appear solid—the United States ought to strike militarily. If American and Iraqi lives are being lost because of Bashar al-Assad’s support of Iraqi Baathists in his country, then the Bush administration is being tactically and strategically negligent in not retaliating. This doesn’t mean the United States should invade Syria. But Syrian intelligence and military bases—and any locales where Assad is hosting Iraqi insurgents—are legitimate targets for air and special-ops raids. It is possible that such limited military strikes could threaten the stability of the Alawite dictatorship, allowing an opportunity for a Sunni civilian and military opposition to gain ground.

But the administration shouldn’t bank on the democratic aftershocks of Iraq shaking Syria itself. It might happen. A good rule of thumb is that an appreciation for democracy has become more widespread in the Arab world than the American and European “realist” crowd would have us believe. But the best we should hope and plan for is an eventual cracking of Alawite power, allowing for a return of Sunni rule. With the Sunnis in charge, political evolution has some chance, particularly if the United States starts to focus its democratizing attention on the country in the Arab world that matters most—Egypt.

Egypt—Democratizing Egypt is what President Bush’s post-9/11 “forward strategy of freedom” is all about. End the nexus between tyranny and Islamic extremism in the lower Nile Valley—the perverse pattern of Egyptian dictators Gamal Abdel Nasser, Anwar Sadat, and Hosni Mubarak fueling anti-American Islamic militancy through both suppression and support—and one of the two most important intellectual breeding grounds for bin Ladenism (Saudi Arabia is the other) will turn into a laboratory where both secular and fundamentalist Sunni Muslims can make their case democratically. If Egypt doesn’t democratize, bin Ladenism will not end. The hatred for American-supported dictators will continue to grow; the Muslim Brotherhood, the fount of all Sunni fundamentalists, will not be able to evolve politically further, moving devout Sunnis from Koranic shibboleths to democratically derived legislation that will be seen by most Islamic activists as both legitimate and at odds with the Muslim Holy Law.

Since Iraq, President Mubarak, who used to equate democracy with “chaos,” sees a need for “more freedom and democracy” in Egypt. The odds are excellent he is actually trying to devise a system whereby, with less friction, he continues in power and the chances of succession for his son increase. But that doesn’t mean the United States shouldn’t take advantage of Mubarak’s opening. If Mubarak thinks Egypt is ready for more democracy and freedom, then far be it from the United States not to take him at his word. Now is the time to announce that American aid to Egypt is henceforth conditioned on democratic progress. Mubarak cheats, the aid is cut. Mubarak cheats a lot, the aid ends. We should not allow Mubarak to scare us again with the specter of Islamic extremism. Fear of another Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini—who, by the way, didn’t come to power democratically—has too long paralyzed our thinking about Egypt.

As has Egypt’s peace treaty with Israel. Many supporters of Israel in the United States have become de facto backers of dictatorship in Egypt because they fear the Islamist boogeyman. They want to believe that the system in Egypt can liberalize—even though nowhere in the Arab world have we yet seen an Ataturkist evolution. Indeed, the evolution of Arab dictatorship has been in the opposite direction, toward the nexus that gave us bin Ladenism and 9/11. They really don’t want to give fundamentalists a chance to compete in elections; they want “progressive Muslims” to somehow be nourished—to spring more or less full-grown from the head of Mubarak, as did Athena from Zeus. They would rather not reflect too long on the history of democratic Christendom—that you don’t get to arrive at Thomas Jefferson unless you first pass through Martin Luther. But Natan Sharansky is right: Democracy, sooner not later, is the only way out. The liberal critics of the Bush administration’s democracy promotion have usually been cranky and unfair—it’s pretty hard to envision the region’s democrats, particularly those on the front lines in Iraq and Lebanon, cheering John Kerry—but they may soon have a point. In the not too distant future, Washington is going to have to break with the Mubarak regime. If we don’t, bin Laden’s jihadist call, and not the shouts for “Ju-Ju,” will be the summons with lasting appeal.

Saudi Arabia—Continue to push the democratic agenda publicly in the Arabian peninsula. The rather pathetic Saudi attempt to defuse democratic ferment at home and the Bush administration’s growing anti-Saudi attitude by holding highly restricted municipal elections is likely to do the opposite of what the royal family intended. The Shiites of the Eastern Province—where most of Saudi Arabia’s oil is located—may, as the Arab Shiites of Iraq continue to advance democratically, become more inclined to protest. The turnout for the municipal elections clearly showed that the Shiites in the Eastern Province didn’t consider the exercise a joke (as was the case among many Sunnis).

The Wahhabi clerical establishment, the religious backbone of Saudi power, may become more inclined to use older, violent means to oppress the Shiites. Washington should rhetorically preempt the issue, by declaring loudly and often that it favors modern democracy in Saudi Arabia, where minority rights are protected. We would be wise not to assume that the Saudi royal family is more “modern” than the people of the country. It may well be more “modern” than the average Wahhabi in the Najd region, the heartland of Wahhabi power. But Saudi Arabia is much larger than the Najd.

It is possible that a variation of the Iranian experience has been at work in Saudi Arabia, that Saudi-Wahhabi power has distanced an ever greater number of people from the Saudis’ rigorous fusion of religion and state. Saudi Arabia is an odd place, with a large number of people permeated with Western ways. Sometimes that fuels Islamic militancy. Sometimes it does the opposite. Both may be happening in Arabia. In either case, we know for certain that Saudi Arabia was the cradle of bin Ladenism. There is scant evidence to suggest that the Wahhabi establishment has changed its spots (philosophically it can’t). The Wahhabis should have to compete for their flock. Inside the country and out, the United States should be relentlessly pushing for democracy. As in Egypt, we should increasingly tie government-to-government relations and joint programs directly to Saudi progress with real national elections.

Algeria and Tunisia—North Africa has traditionally been ignored by the Americans. It shouldn’t be. It would be a good test of France’s desire to advance democratic change in the Middle East to see if Paris would rhetorically join the United States in energetically encouraging democracy in both countries. Tunisia has an increasingly lively democratic culture developing on the Internet in the form of blogs and virtual publications, both inside and outside the country. Stealing a page from Hosni Mubarak’s playbook, President Zine el Abidine ben Ali recently invited Israel’s Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to Tunisia in a crude (but with the Egyptians effective) effort to get on America’s good side through the Israelis. Ben Ali read the tea leaves after the January 30 election and decided to preempt.

The Bush administration should relentlessly thump ben Ali—criticize his dictatorship whenever and wherever possible. Since ben Ali, like Mubarak, has recently discovered the damage the lack of democracy has done to the Arab world, Washington could begin simply by using his words against him. Tunisia, like Algeria, is hardly a strategically critical country for the United States. There are no airfields there that we absolutely must use to continue the war on terror. All official dealings with these two states should be premised on their governments’ support of democratic reform. And the Bush administration would be wise to revisit the position of Algeria in the Arab world. Scarred by the civil war of the early 1990s, Algerians are probably a much wiser people than they were when Islamists first began to challenge the corrupt military dictatorship.

Algeria’s highly Westernized young would probably embrace the chance to remove the military dictatorship over them—if they had some possibility of doing so without confronting the official black ninjas who rival the throat-slitting Islamic militants in savagery. Algeria’s failed experiment with democracy in the 1990s was closely watched in the Muslim world, particularly among fundamentalists. If Algeria were to get back on track and follow through with democratic reforms, the impact on the region, and on the millions of Algerians who live in Europe, would likely be significant.

Iran—Don’t compromise the democratic future of the country by trying to buy the mullahs’ nuclear goodwill. Democracy in Iran is the key to ending that country’s long embrace of terrorism. And if there is a nationalist desire in Iran to have nuclear weapons (we only know for sure there is a clerical will to have these arms), then talking with a democracy about them is entirely different from trying to appease a dictatorship, which is what the French, British, Germans, and certain quarters at the State Department and the National Security Council would like to do. One can live with a nuclear-armed democracy. The Bush administration should realize that the American policy of containment has helped create the most pro-American Muslim population in the Middle East. We should be patient. Let Iraq’s Shia, in particular Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani’s democratic opinions and actions, have their effect.

Iraq—Remember that January 30 was only the first democratic wave to come out of that country. If Iraq doesn’t go off the rails—and the odds are very good that the Shiites, Kurds, and Sunnis will find workable democratic compromises—there will be more election aftershocks issuing from Mesopotamia, probably of a magnitude greater than January 30. The trial of Saddam Hussein is coming. There are many things the administration should do to exploit the people power of Iraq, but first and foremost is an Iraqi C-SPAN controlled by Iraqis. There is a large audience in the Arab world, especially in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, just waiting to see the next episode from Baghdad. Let the millions watch Saddam’s trial live. Republicans and Democrats who believe in spreading democracy in the Muslim Middle East shouldn’t disappoint these hungry viewers. Perhaps Osama bin Laden will also watch and see the end of his dreams.

Reuel Marc Gerecht is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard. He is the author of The Islamic Paradox: Shiite Clerics, Sunni Fundamentalists, and the Coming of Arab Democracy.

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The Sharansky moment? (townhall.com, 050305)

JERUSALEM, Israel — In the history of Israel’s relations with the US, there has been no precedent for the influence that Israeli Minister-without-Portfolio Natan Sharansky has had on US foreign policy. While in the past Israeli leaders have worked closely with their American counterparts, no one other than Sharansky has managed to actually influence the way that American policymakers think about foreign affairs or perceive the role of the US in the world.

Today it is beyond debate that Sharansky has deeply influenced US President George W. Bush’s thinking on international affairs. After reading Sharansky’s book, The Case for Democracy, Bush told The New York Times that Sharansky’s worldview “is part of my presidential DNA.” This Sharansky-inspired “presidential DNA” posits that the Arab world’s conflict with Israel, like its support for global jihad, will end when the Arab world democratizes. In Sharansky’s view, once Arabs are governed democratically, they will not wish to sustain the conflict.

If Sharansky and Bush are correct, then the past week has been one of the greatest weeks in the history of the Middle East. Syria’s puppet government in Beirut has resigned and Syrian dictator Bashar Assad is being squeezed from all directions. He has declared that he will end Syria’s occupation of Lebanon and has turned over Iraqi Ba’athists to American forces in Iraq in the hope of stemming the seemingly inexorable demise of his regime. Egypt’s dictator, Hosni Mubarak, under attack from Washington and from his democratic opposition – that for once is being supported by the Western media – has announced that he will enable other candidates to run against him in the upcoming presidential elections.

Empowered by the support they are receiving from the US, rather than declaring victory and quietly going home, democracy advocates in these countries are ratcheting up their pressure and demands. Damascus’s announcement that it would withdraw its forces from Lebanon was met by a Lebanese demand that Hizbullah be dismantled.

In an interview Wednesday with Al-Jazeera, Druse opposition leader Walid Jumblatt said of Hizbullah and its claim that Israel is wrongfully controlling the so-called Shaba Farms on the Israeli-Lebanese border, “What are these [Hizbullah] fighters doing for us? They want the Shaba Farms. Let the Syrians present documentation that the farms are even part of Lebanon. The Israelis say that they were taken from Syria and we have no proof of anything. And what will happen after the Shaba situation? Will Hizbullah’s people continue to walk around armed in Lebanon and serve the Syrians?”

What is happening in our neighboring lands is nothing short of a revolution. There has never before been a situation in the Arab world where so many people have been willing to stand up to their regimes and demand their freedom. Although the Arab revolution is only in its earliest phases – and it is impossible to foresee what will transpire in the coming days, months and years – the very fact that the Arab world has responded so dramatically to the Iraqi elections at the end of January and to Bush’s call for democracy seems to be a full vindication of both Sharansky’s political theory and of Bush’s decision to graft it onto his genetic code.

But other events from this past week would seem to cast a pall on the excitement. On Tuesday, Israeli Arab parliamentarians Ahmed Tibi and Muhammad Barakei, while participating in an Arab League conference in Abu Dhabi, told their colleagues not to normalize their relations with Israel. According to a report in the London-based Al-Quds al-Arabi newspaper, confirmed by the Ynet Web site, at the conference, held under the aegis of the Abu Dhabi Center for Strategic Research, the two told their audience that Israel was manipulating the world into believing that it was advancing the cause for peace by withdrawing from Gaza, but it was actually entrenching its control over the West Bank and abandoning the cause of peace.

Tibi told Ynet, “The Sharon government is not worthy at this point of any diplomatic prize. The depth of the peace will determine the depth of normalization. And at this point there is no peace and therefore normalization can wait.”

Barakei said, “I said these things in reaction to signs of normalization [between Israel and the Arab world] that is totally unjustified.”

That these politicians – who owe their positions to the fact that they live in a democracy – have called for the Arab world to continue its rejection of their own country would seem to put a damper on the notion that democracy can bring an end to Arab rejection of Israel. Indeed, as an Arab colleague remarked recently, “The reformers in the Arab world hate Israel just as much as their leaders whom they are trying to overthrow.”

It is more than likely that the anti-Semitism with which the Arab world has been inculcated for the past 100 years will not disappear even if the Arab world becomes democratically governed.

But that is not the main issue.

Sixty years after the end of the Holocaust, anti-Semitism is still a potent force in Europe and yet Europeans, whose countries are now entrenched democracies, are not planning to go to war against Israel. Their national identities are not defined by their hatred of Jews or of the Jewish state.

The reason Arab anti-Semitism is so powerful a political force today is because the Arab world is ruled by dictators. These men need an external bogeyman to excuse their failure to bring freedom and prosperity to their people. If Arabs are afforded the freedom to determine how they wish to live their lives, it is likely that social anti-Semitism will not be sufficiently powerful to provoke them into going to war against Israel.

Aside from anti-Semitism’s apparent incurability, the fact of the matter is that in Israel’s immediate vicinity, the democratic revolution now sweeping neighboring states has been smothered. Tibi and Barakei’s statements may seem out of place during this revolutionary moment, but what they represent more than anything else is the failure to apply the Bush-Sharansky Doctrine to the Palestinian Authority.

The Palestinians today, four months after Yasser Arafat’s death, perceive Israel as weak. In a recent poll conducted by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, 74% of Palestinians said that they see Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s plan to destroy the Israeli communities in Gaza and the northern West Bank as a vindication of terrorism as a national strategy. The Palestinians stated that they do not believe that Sharon would have ever presented the plan if it hadn’t been for the Palestinian terror war against Israel.

It is this perception of Israeli weakness and terrorist strength that undoubtedly prompts the opportunistic likes of Tibi and Barakei to side with them against Israel. Just as every time Israel opens negotiations with the Ba’athists in Damascus, the Druse on the Golan Heights hold parades in honor of the Assads, so today, when Israel looks weak, Israeli Arabs want to make sure that the PA sees them as loyal to the cause. While they can rest assured that a democratic but weak Israel will do nothing to punish them for their treachery, they cannot risk supporting Israel as it strengthens and legitimizes the terror-supporting, quasi-tyranny next door in the PA.

Ironically, it is Israel’s democratically elected leadership that has been most opposed to the notion of Arab democracy. Sharon and Vice Premier Shimon Peres have passively and actively colluded with those who reject the Bush-Sharansky Doctrine in the US State Department to ensure it remains unapplied among the Palestinians.

Sharansky wrote in his book that when he presented his ideas to Sharon, the prime minister told him that they “have no place in the Middle East.” One of Sharon’s advisers reportedly said that Sharon “views Sharansky’s ideas with scorn.” Peres, the father of the idea of replacing Israel’s Civil Administration in the territories with a PLO dictatorship imported from Tunis, has spoken vacuously of the need to build an “economic democracy” – rather than a political democracy – among the Palestinians.

And the result of Israel’s rejection of Palestinian democracy and its consequent effective abandonment by the Bush administration is the continuation of Arafat’s dictatorial and terror-supporting regime in the territories. On Thursday, Yemen’s news agency reported that PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas is scheduled to meet with Hamas kingpin Khaled Mashal in the coming weeks.

Abbas’s decision to engage rather than fight terrorists has enabled a precipitous rise in the terror threat to Israel’s population centers around the West Bank. During his election campaign, Abbas embraced Fatah terrorists in Jenin led by Zakariya Zubeidi. Two months ago, the IDF arrested Zubeidi’s brother, Jibril, who is a member of Islamic Jihad. The arrest led to the uncovering of a Hamas factory in the Jenin area for the manufacture of Kassam rockets that Jibril and his associates had planned to fire on Afula in northern Israel. And Abbas plans to enlist these men into his “reformed” security services that are set to be trained and equipped by the US, Jordan, Egypt, Russia and the EU.

Israel’s decision to prefer the rule of Arafat’s deputy to genuine democratic transformation in the PA has paved the way for the international community’s embrace of Abbas. Rather than demand an accounting for the billions of dollars in international aid that were stolen by Arafat (and by Abbas and PA Prime Minister Ahmed Qurei and their associates), in London this week the international community pledged to transfer more than a billion additional dollars to the PA.

Buoyed by this unqualified support, Abbas is now demanding that the international community drop the demand that he fight terrorists and enable the establishment of a sovereign Palestinian state immediately. The EU’s foreign policy chief, Javier Solana, has already accepted this position.

So in the space of one week, we see the consequences of both the Bush-Sharansky Doctrine and the appeasement-based status quo in action. While the region’s war-torn, radical and terror-engendering history tells us what the ultimate consequences of the status quo will be, we have yet to harvest the fruits of the Bush-Sharansky-inspired revolution.

The main question we should be concerning ourselves with now is whether the revolution will be extended to the Palestinians or whether – once Sharon-Peres-style appeasement is grafted onto its genetic code – the revolution will fade away and be forgotten.

Caroline B. Glick is the senior Middle East fellow at the Center for Security Policy in Washington, DC and the deputy managing editor of The Jerusalem Post where this article first appeared.

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Bush: Democracies Will Combat Terrorism (Foxnews, 050308)

WASHINGTON — President Bush is offering a status report on the War on Terror in a major address Tuesday and he is telling the American people his policies are leading to a push for democracy in the Middle East.

In a speech at the National Defense University, a center for professional military education at Fort McNair in Washington, Bush is saying his drive to spread democracy and freedom is the best way to combat terrorism.

The president is updating the “American people on the progress that we’re making in the war on terrorism and to talk about the remarkable developments that are taking place in the broader Middle East,” White House press secretary Scott McClellan said before the speech. In particular, he cited elections in Iraq, the Palestinian territories and Afghanistan and pressures in Lebanon for Syria to withdraw its troops.

Bush’s speech marks a return to the trademark theme of his successful re-election campaign. After the election, Bush turned his focus to an uphill battle to radically redesign the Social Security program by offering personal investment accounts, a step that would be accompanied by a reduction in future benefits.

While more than half of Americans oppose his Social Security overhaul, a solid majority approve of his handling of the terrorism fight.

Bush, in his Jan. 20 inaugural address, emphasized his goal of spreading freedom and democracy “with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.”

“That is how we will win the war on terrorism.” McClellan said in a preview of Bush’s remarks.

“We’re making tremendous progress in the Middle East toward freedom and democracy,” the president’s spokesman said. “But this is a generational commitment, one that is difficult and requires determination and resolve. Our objective will not be achieved easily, nor will it be achieved all at once.”

Bush has described Iraq as the front line in combating terrorists. More than 1,500 U.S. troops have died there since Bush launched the invasion in March 2003.

The price tag is over $300 billion and climbing, including $81.9 billion more just requested from Congress. The money also covers operations in Afghanistan and the broader war on terror, but the bulk is for Iraq.

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Bush foes admit benefits of Iraq policy (Washington Times, 050309)

Some of the harshest Democratic critics of President Bush’s Iraq policy have grudgingly admitted that it has helped spark a growing desire for democracy in the Middle East.

Democrats aren’t taking to the Senate floor to praise Mr. Bush’s role in the spectacle of Lebanese protesters demanding independence from Syrian control, or the elections in Iraq, or the news that Saudi Arabia and Egypt have committed to freer elections.

But many critics of the war — which Lebanese democrats cite as a turning point in their cause — are slowly admitting that the president may have done the right thing in quickly taking out Saddam Hussein in 2003.

Sen. Frank R. Lautenberg, the New Jersey Democrat who delivered a famous “chicken hawk” speech deriding the war advocates in the Bush administration and voted against funding the war, said yesterday that recent developments in Lebanon and Syria suggest the war was a force for good.

“The war gave the Lebanese the spine they needed,” Mr. Lautenberg said yesterday. “It told them, ‘We can get rid of these vultures.’”

Sen Edward M. Kennedy, Massachusetts Democrat, said on ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday that Mr. Bush deserves some credit for the positive developments in the still volatile region.

“What’s taken place in a number of those countries is enormously constructive,” Mr. Kennedy said. “It’s a reflection the president has been involved.”

Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, Nevada Democrat, said he didn’t hear Mr. Bush’s speech yesterday on spreading freedom in the Middle East, but “if there were ever a place in the world where we need democracy, it’s in the Middle East.”

“Any breakthrough we get there, whether it’s in Lebanon or Egypt, is a step in the right direction and I support the president in that regard,” Mr. Reid said.

Asked whether Mr. Bush deserved credit for those developments, Mr. Reid said “we’ll just have to wait and see.”

But Massachusetts Democratic Sen. John Kerry, whose criticism of Mr. Bush’s Iraq policy did not translate into a presidential victory in November, said Mr. Bush deserves no credit for recent developments in the Middle East.

“An assassination made this happen,” Mr. Kerry said, referring to the car bomb that killed former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri last month. The killing has been blamed on Syria.

Mr. Kerry said any good that comes from the Iraq war does not make it the right decision.

“This was not the reason we went to war, but it’s a very good outcome,” Mr. Kerry said.

A senior Democratic Senate aide acknowledged that many in his party were surprised by recent developments in the Middle East and realized that attacking the president on the war would have less bite.

“You have to give the guy a modicum of credit,” the senior aide said. “There’s no denying that the Iraq vote could be a catalyst for change in the region. Everyone up here, Democrats and Republicans, want to see peace in that region.”

Such conciliatory comments, however, contrast sharply with the heated anti-war rhetoric of just six weeks ago. Mr. Kennedy was the most vocal, calling the entire Iraqi operation a “failure” and demanding immediate U.S. withdrawal.

“Our military and the insurgents are fighting for the same thing — the hearts and minds of the people — and that is a battle we are not winning,” Mr. Kennedy said in a speech at Johns Hopkins University just three days before Iraq’s first free election in decades.

Mr. Kennedy also called Iraq “George Bush’s Vietnam” in a Jan. 12 speech at the National Press Club, insisting Mr. Bush “has bogged America down in an endless quagmire.”

Another Democratic Senate aide said he doesn’t expect to hear much of that kind of talk in the future.

“Even if things start to go south, I think we all agree that ripping Bush over this is not very constructive,” he said. “And nobody wants to be on the wrong side of this if it continues to go well, either.”

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Totenberg Eats Shoe, Admits Misjudgment on Iraq Election’s Power (Media Research Center, 050307)

NPR’s Nina Totenberg eats her shoe. Opening the second segment of the panel program produced at, and carried by, Washington, DC’s ABC affiliate, WJLA-TV, host Gordon Peterson showed video of protesters in Lebanon and then read from a March 1 New York Times editorial: “The New York Times wrote: ‘The Bush administration is entitled to claim a healthy share of the credit for many of these advances. It boldly proclaimed the cause of Middle East democracy at a time when few in the west thought it had a realistic chance.’ Is this the Bush doctrine here?”

Totenberg eagerly answered: “Let me say something here. If I had a hat I would have to eat it. [brings shoe to mouth] I’ve got my shoe here. I really did not think that this election in Iraq would make that much difference and I was wrong. Of course, it really does help that Arafat died and they had a real election in Palestine. That’s just not insignificant. But, Charles [Krauthammer], when you were right, you were right.”

Peterson soon turned to former Washington Post reporter Eugene Robinson, who is now a columnist: “Can we put it at the foot of the Bush administration?”

Robinson: “Well, you know, yeah, sure. I mean, a stopped clock is right a couple of times a day...”

A bit later, Harwood proposed: “If we continue on this positive track we’re on, George Bush is going to deserve more credit for that than Ronald Reagan did for the demise of the former Soviet Union and the felling of the Berlin Wall. When Ronald Reagan took office, a lot of people, including Daniel Patrick Moynihan — a lot of Republicans’ favorite Democrat — were predicting the collapse of the Soviet Union because of internal strains. What George Bush has set in motion, with the Iraq war and Iraq elections, are something very few people thought were going to happen and it’s almost entirely due to what he has done.”.

After some comments from columnist Charles Krauthammer, Totenberg cautioned: “I think it’s important, Charles, that we not engage in a certain level of triumphalism about this.”

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Bush says Iraq elections spur reform (Washington Times, 050317)

President Bush yesterday said the Iraq elections already are inspiring reform throughout the broader region, but declined to claim vindication for signs of democratization in the Middle East.

“I just don’t worry about vindication,” Mr. Bush said in response to a question from The Washington Times at a White House press conference.

He joked that he didn’t have “time to sit around and wander, lonely, in the Oval Office, kind of asking different portraits: ‘How do you think my standing will be?’ “

Mr. Bush faced intense skepticism in the run-up to the Iraq war and widespread criticism in the aftermath because of miscalculations about security. Through it all, he kept insisting the Iraq elections would have a ripple effect in the broader region by inspiring Democratic reform.

Some critics of the president now say he was right. In the weeks after the Jan. 30 elections, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak agreed to multiparty elections, Lebanese protesters ousted their pro-Syria government and Damascus agreed to partially withdraw its troops from Lebanon.

But yesterday, Mr. Bush refused to rebuke his doubters.

“I fully understand that as long as I’m the president I will face criticism — it’s like part of the job,” he said. “Since it doesn’t bother me and I expect it, I don’t then seek vindication.”

Instead, the president credited the fledgling democracies of Iraq and Afghanistan with inspiring neighboring countries. He did not mention that those democracies were installed by the United States after American forces ousted Saddam Hussein from Iraq and the Taliban from Afghanistan.

“It’s important for people in that region to see what is possible in a free society,” he said. “I believe those examples will serve as examples for others over time.”

He cited several examples.

“I believe there will be a Palestinian state,” he said. “I believe we’ll be able to convince Syria to fully withdraw ... from Lebanon, or else she’ll be isolated.”

Mr. Bush repeated his description of Hezbollah as a terrorist organization in Lebanon. But he did not rule out the group running for office in a free election.

“Maybe some will run for office and say, ‘Vote for me, I look forward to blowing up America,’Â “ he said. “I don’t know if that will be their platform or not — I don’t think so.”

The president cited yesterday’s meeting of Iraq’s transitional National Assembly as a “hopeful moment” in the spread of peace throughout the Middle East.

Mr. Bush, notoriously averse to public introspection, was reluctant to gauge his own role in setting democratization into motion.

“People are constantly evaluating ... a president’s standing in history, based upon events that took place during the presidency, based upon things that happened after the presidency,” he said. “George Washington is now getting a second, or third, or fifth, or tenth look in history.”

He added: “In my case, hopefully, the march of freedom continues way after my presidency.”

To that end, Mr. Bush has nominated his longtime confidante, Karen Hughes, to be undersecretary of state for public diplomacy. Her job will be to rehabilitate the United States’ image in the Arab world.

“We had the image of wanting to fight Muslims — the United States stood squarely against a religion, as opposed to a society which welcomes all religions,” Mr. Bush said. “In fact, we’re fighting a handful of people relative to the Muslim population that wanted to — I used to say — hijack the religion.”

The president also counseled “patience” in the effort to persuade Iran to abandon its nuclear ambitions.

“They must permanently abandon enrichment and reprocessing,” he said. “And now we’re waiting for an Iranian response.”

Mr. Bush and European leaders have offered economic incentives in exchange for cooperation, but Tehran appears unimpressed. If no deal is reached, the United States and Europe plan to take the matter to the United Nations.

“We go to the Security Council if they reject the offer — and I hope they don’t,” the president said. “I hope they realize the world is clear about making sure that they don’t end up with a nuclear weapon.”

Mr. Bush, who was criticized widely during his first term for holding press conferences infrequently, has made a point of holding them monthly since his re-election. He appeared relaxed and confident in yesterday’s 48-minute exchange in the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room, often kidding with reporters.

“Frankly, you wouldn’t be doing your job if you didn’t occasionally lay out the gentle criticism,” he said at one point.

He laughed when New York Times reporter Elisabeth Bumiller called Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, the president’s pick to head the World Bank, the “chief architect of one of the most unpopular wars in our history.”

“That’s an interesting start,” Mr. Bush said sardonically. He then called Mr. Wolfowitz a “skilled diplomat.”

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Pakistani sees results from U.S. push for democracy (Washington Times, 050330)

Pakistan’s ambassador said yesterday the U.S. push for democracy is forcing countries around the world to re-examine their governmental and human rights practices and that Pakistan too will be strongly affected.

Jehangir Karamat also rejected the notion that democracy was incompatible with Islam, and told editors and reporters at a luncheon interview at The Washington Times that Osama bin Laden has struck a blow against all Muslims.

President Bush’s democracy initiative, he said, had started a discernible trend “in the Middle East, in fact all over the world, to get your act together as far as your human rights, freedom and so on are concerned.”

Countries allied with or dependent on the United States should “look at that trend very carefully and not get into a situation where you are getting isolated because you are not conforming to what is happening around you,” he said.

With democratic structures being established in Afghanistan and the latest protest movements shaking governments in Central Asia, it was inevitable that Pakistan would be affected, he said.

Mr. Karamat also said anti-Western leaders like bin Laden had lost their appeal as the political and economic situations began to turn around in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

“I think there is also the realization that [bin Laden] delivered a very serious blow to Islam. He started a situation nobody in his right mind would want,” Mr. Karamat said.

In Afghanistan, he said, a large number of the Taliban members who once backed bin Laden had gone back to their families and homes.

The hard-core Taliban leaders who once welcomed “Arab leadership and guidance” are finished, he said. “If there are any remnants, they are insignificant.”

He said Pakistani troops were no longer combing the border region for bin Laden, but remained in the region and were responding to any leads from the intelligence services.

Mr. Karamat welcomed a continued U.S. presence in Afghanistan — where warlords still threaten to destabilize the country — as well as Washington’s strategic relationships with both Pakistan and India.

The United States late last week announced it was selling F-16 fighter jets to Pakistan, while offering India considerable defense capabilities, boosting New Delhi to the level of a major world power.

The news sparked criticism in India, which said the F-16s would upset the balance of power in the region.

“India should realize Pakistan is not in an arms race with India. Pakistan is only into selective upgradation of capabilities that will give it enough strength to deter violence against it,” Mr. Karamat said.

“The F-16 gives us the capability of not allowing total supremacy of our airspace by any aggressor and gives us the capability to take out targets which may be a problem to us,” he said.

Mr. Karamat also said the mood on the Pakistani street toward the United States had changed in the past four years.

Anti-U.S. protests are now sporadic, he said, and in fact had never reached the intensity President Pervez Musharraf’s government had expected when it decided to back U.S. military action in Afghanistan.

“There is a comprehension of a strategic change in Pakistan, and that now Pakistan has to cope with the consequences of this strategic change,” he explained.

“I don’t think we see the U.S. as a threat, primarily because even if it was a threat, there is really not much you can do.”

Even with growing international pressure to become more democratic, Mr. Karamat said Mr. Musharraf’s decision to remain both as head of the military and the president was necessary to maintain stability in Pakistan.

“That gives him enough power ... to be able to take some of the very difficult decisions as we move” toward parliamentary elections in 2007. “I tend to see that as a sort of watershed in our move toward democracy,” he said.

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Troubling Russian democracy (townhall.com, 050401)

Helle Dale

The Russian bear is an aging, ailing animal in bad health, but it is still a predator, and it longs for the days when it could dominate its own neck of the woods. From Ukraine to Georgia to Moldova and now Kyrgyzstan, democratic movements are stirring and declaring an end to the old ways. Among the meddlesome strangers in the Russian bear’s woods is the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, an organization that was created through the Helsinki process in the 1970s and whose task it is to monitor elections and borders.

A 55-member international organization with bipartisan credibility, the OSCE has roused the ire of President Vladimir Putin by certifying recent elections in what Russia considers its “near abroad.” “The OSCE is under attack,” OSCE Chairman Dimitrij Rupel, foreign minister of Slovenia, told members of Congress during his visit to Washington last month.

Specifically, the Russian government has moved to block the 2005 OSCE budget of $240 million, which has to be approved by consensus. Ostensibly, this move is in protest to the lack of even-handedness in the organization’s work, which tends to focus on the former Soviet Union and other points east, as opposed to, say, Britain, Canada or the United States. The real problem is that Russia is losing influence in key former Soviet republics, and it doesn’t like it one bit.

Now, we are not talking about vast sums of money here. The organization has a budget of some $233 million, three-quarters of which goes to its important fieldwork in trouble spots like the Balkans and Central Asia. Of this budget, Russia contributes about $11 million, which Moscow now says is too much. To put the Russian complaint into relief, Sweden, Belgium and the Netherlands each pay more.

The simple solution to this unconscionable piece of blackmail by Russia is for the OSCE to operate on the equivalent of a continuing resolution. The European Union is reportedly considering asking its member states to make voluntary contributions to the OSCE budget in order to avoid a financial collapse. This is a sensible solution, that the United States should sign onto. Further, we could surely come up with the money to fill the gap left by Russia withholding its share.

Unfortunately, despite the fact that democracy-promotion is at the heart of the Bush administration’s foreign-policy agenda, the approach of the State Department so far seems to give some credence to Russia’s demands. The administration has agreed to set up a working group in Vienna to examine standards for election monitoring, which Russia finds not to its liking.

Mr. Putin, of course, believes in a “different kind of democracy,” as he told President Bush during the latter’s European trip in February. That would also mean a “different” kind of election standard. Interestingly, Ukraine in the last two weeks has opted out of the CIS election-monitoring group, presumably because it doesn’t care much for democracy, Russian-style.

Also troubling is the fact that the United States has decided to back a candidate for OSCE secretary-general who may not be the best choice at this time of crisis. He is Marc Perrin de Brichambaut, a diplomatic adviser to the French Ministry of Defense and a former French ambassador to the OSCE. Americans who have worked with Mr. de Brichambaut have found his enthusiasm for American causes and trans-Atlantic organizations like NATO rather underwhelming.

This writer’s own experience of Mr. de Brichambaut is based on an admittedly brief meeting in the spring of 2003, when tempers tended to flare hot between Americans and Frenchmen and it would have been hard to find anyone among the leadership of the French government who was friendly.

The selection process, however, is not a done deal, and there is still time to reconsider. Other candidates include Ambassador Gerard Stoudemann of Switzerland, who would be representing a non-aligned country and whose leadership at the Office of Democratic Institutions and Human Rights would seem to give him just the right background. Furthermore, the EU currently fills all the top jobs at the OSCE. Why not introduce a bit of diversity?

Democracy cannot grow without institutions to nourish it, and the OSCE has proven itself both effective and credible. The United States should not compromise on its dedication to those institutions.

Helle Dale is deputy director of the Davis Institute for International Studies at The Heritage Foundation

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Vindicated (Townhall.com, 050318)

Charles Krauthammer

WASHINGTON — At his news conference on Wednesday, President Bush declined an invitation to claim vindication for his policy of spreading democracy in the Middle East. After two years of attacks on him as a historical illiterate pursuing the childish fantasy of Middle East democracy, he was entitled to claim a bit of credit. Yet he declined, partly out of modesty (as with Reagan, one of the secrets of his political success), and partly because he has learned the perils of declaring any mission accomplished.

The democracy project is, of course, just beginning. We do not yet know whether the Middle East today is Europe 1989 or Europe 1848. 1989 saw the swift collapse of the Soviet empire. 1848 saw a flowering of liberal revolutions throughout Europe that, within a short time, were all suppressed.

Nonetheless, 1848 did presage the coming of the liberal idea throughout Europe. (By 1871, it had been restored to France, for example.) It marked a turning point from which there was no going back. The Arab Spring of 2005 will be noted by history as a similar turning point for the Arab world.

We do not yet know, however, whether this initial flourishing of democracy will succeed. The Syrian and Iraqi Baathists, their jihadist allies, and the various regional autocrats are quite determined to suppress it. But we do know one thing: Those who claimed, with great certainty, that Arabs are an exception to the human tendency to freedom, that they live in a stunted and distorted culture that makes them love their chains, and that the notion that the U.S. could help trigger a democratic revolution by militarily deposing their oppressors was a fantasy — have been proved wrong.

As an advocate of that notion of democratic revolution, I am not surprised that the opposing view was proved false. I am only surprised it was proved false so quickly — that the voters in Iraq, the people of Lebanon, the women of Kuwait, the followers of Ayman Nour in Egypt, would rise so eagerly at the first breaking of the dictatorial “stability” they had so long experienced (and we had so long supported) to claim their democratic rights.

This amazing display has prompted a wave of soul-searching. When a Le Monde editorial titled “Arab Spring” acknowledges “the merit of George W. Bush,” when the cover headline of London’s The Independent is “Was Bush Right After All?” when a column in Der Spiegel asks “Could George W. Bush be Right?” you know that something radical has happened.

It is not just that the ramparts of Euro-snobbery have been breached. Iraq and, more broadly, the Bush doctrine were always more than a purely intellectual matter. The left’s patronizing quasi-colonialist view of the benighted Arabs was not just analytically incorrect. It was morally bankrupt too.

After all, going back at least to the Spanish Civil War, the left has always prided itself as the great international champion of freedom and human rights. And yet when America proposed to remove the man responsible for torturing, gassing and killing tens of thousands of Iraqis, the left suddenly turned into a champion of Westphalian sovereign inviolability.

A leftist judge in Spain orders the arrest of a pathetic, near-senile General Pinochet eight years after he’s left office, and becomes a human rights hero — a classic example of the left morally grandstanding in the name of victims of dictatorships long gone. Yet for the victims of contemporary monsters still actively killing and oppressing — Khomeini and his successors, the Assads of Syria, and, until yesterday, Saddam and his sons — nothing. No sympathy. No action. Indeed virulent hostility to America’s courageous and dangerous attempt at rescue.

The international left’s concern for human rights turns out to be nothing more than a useful weapon for its anti-Americanism. Jeane Kirkpatrick pointed out this selective concern for the victims of U.S. allies (like Chile) 25 years ago. After the Cold War, the hypocrisy continues. For which Arab people do European hearts burn? The Palestinians. Why? Because that permits the vilification of Israel — an outpost of Western democracy and, even worse, a staunch U.S. ally. Championing suffering Iraqis, Syrians and Lebanese offers no such satisfaction. Hence, silence.

Until now. Now that the real Arab street has risen to claim rights that the West takes for granted, the left takes note. It is forced to acknowledge that those brutish Americans led by their simpleton cowboy might have been right. It has no choice. It is shamed. A Lebanese, amid a sea of a million other Lebanese, raises a placard reading “Thank you, George W. Bush,” and all that Euro-pretense, moral and intellectual, collapses.

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Democracy vs. demagoguery (Washington Times, 050415)

Many in Africa have welcomed President Bush’s promise to make democracy the lodestar of U.S. foreign policy. For too long we have suffered under self-appointed strongmen. Africans of the 21st century expect to be ruled by laws rather than by the whims of men, under governments freely elected at regular intervals. And we have made epic sacrifices to earn that right. That’s why we salute Mr. Bush’s commitment to our cause, and ask him to back it with concrete actions.

Nowhere in Africa does Washington’s commitment to democracy face a greater test right now than in Cote d’Ivoire, whose ongoing political crisis pits democracy and the rule of law against the politics of violence. And this in a country widely recognized, until recently, as the cornerstone of stability in a region critical to U.S. long-term energy needs, but awash with weapons and increasingly targeted by terrorists.

The best hope for avoiding a catastrophe in West Africa today rests on the Declaration of End of War Agreement, signed in Pretoria, South Africa, recently between the government of President Laurent Gbagbo and the rebel forces that currently hold half the country at gunpoint. But the history of failed truces suggests that the successful implementation of the latest cease-fire agreement — a triumph of African diplomacy and the tireless efforts of South African President Thabo Mbeki — requires active support from the United States. And such engagement has thus far been sadly lacking.

The conflict pits Cote d’Ivoire’s democratically elected government against a self-appointed rebel force led by army mutineers. Previous internationally mandated peace accords designed to disarm the rebels and bring them into the political process have failed because the rebels have refused to honor their commitment to disarm. That may be a product of the fact that the peace process has inadvertently rewarded them for pursuing the path of violence.

Mr. Mbeki’s peace effort seeks to avoid the failures of the past by putting unconditional rebel disarmament and demobilization at the forefront of the process, due to commence within the week. The international community must observe this process with the closest of vigilance, and be ready to deploy neutral peacekeeping troops to oversee rebel disarmament should the cease-fire falter.

A second crucial aspect of the Pretoria agreement is its referral of a dispute over eligibility for the presidency to Mr. Mbeki to resolve, in consultation with the heads of the African Union and the United Nations. The issue had become deadlocked because rebel forces rejected the government’s plan to hold a referendum to approve the constitutional changes relaxing eligibility criteria, as demanded by previous peace agreements. Although the government backs the change demanded by the rebels, Cote d’Ivoire’s constitution, adopted by 86% of the electorate in a referendum, requires that any such amendment be approved in a new referendum.

The rebels insist that Mr. Gbagbo simply ignore the constitution and decree the change. This the president cannot do, nor can the democratic community in good conscience demand that he do so, because Cote d’Ivoire is a constitutional democracy, governed by laws. The constitution cannot be changed except by referendum; to tear it up would promote violence as a political tool. This is the reason both the African Union and the European Union have previously endorsed Mr. Gbagbo’s referendum plan. The voice of the United States needs to be heard on this question, which is a simple matter of democracy.

The best guarantee of success for Mr. Mbeki’s work is the active assistance of the international community, and particularly the United States. Any further breakdowns in the peace process will push a strategically vital country into the abyss of chaos. The international community must stand ready to send resources to supervise and support a democratic referendum and elections in Cote d’Ivoire, and to mandate — and, if necessary, expand — an extended international peacekeeping mission.

It is critically important that Americans understand that the conflict pits democracy and the rule of law against ethnic demagoguery, violence, intimidation and terror. The rebels have repeatedly defied the will of the international community by refusing to disarm. Rewarding or even tolerating such defiance sets a terrible precedent in the region and beyond. And allowing Cote d’Ivoire to devolve into civil war and chaos will without doubt create a fertile new front for terrorism. The choice before the United States could not be more simple, which is why we look forward to greater involvement by the Bush administration in defending democracy in Cote d’Ivoire.

Her Excellency Sarata Ottro Zirignon-Toure is the ambassador at-large and deputy chief of staff in the Office of the President of the Republic of Cote d’ Ivoire

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Natan Sharansky Makes the Case for Democracy (Christian Post, 050704)

President George W. Bush is recommending a book these days, and the President’s new literary interest has caught the attention of the world press. President Bush is recommending Natan Sharansky’s new book, The Case for Democracy, and he has made frequent references to Sharansky and his book, telling audiences that Sharansky’s argument represents “how I feel” and how he thinks.

This is a remarkable turn of events for both Sharansky and Bush. Natan Sharansky first gained international attention in the 1970s as he served alongside Soviet scientist Andrei Sakarov in a struggle against the repressive Communist regime. Sharansky would eventually become one of the most famous dissidents in the Soviet Union, and would spend years in the Communist gulags. Now, Sharansky serves as a minister in the Israeli government, holding a post in the cabinet of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. Sharansky’s transformation from Soviet prisoner to Israeli government minister frames part of the background for his new book. But Sharansky is not only looking backward at his own remarkable story, but forward to a world marked by growing democracy and expanding freedom.

Sharansky, aided by journalist Ron Dermer, has written one of the most thoughtful and interesting treatises for our times. His own liberation from the Soviet gulag came after President Ronald Reagan challenged Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, warning him that “as long as you keep him and other political prisoners locked up, we will not be able to establish a relationship of trust.”

Within months, Gorbachev’s aspirations for a thaw in world opinion would lead him to release Sharansky, but only after attempting to package his release as part of a “spy exchange” between the East and West. The Americans would not play this game, and Sharansky was eventually set free 30 minutes before the official exchange of spies. Within hours of his release, Sharansky was in Jerusalem, warmly greeted by thousands of Israelis at the Western Wall. “In a few hours, I had ascended from hell to paradise,” Sharansky recalled, “from the grim reality of evil to the fantasy world of my imagination.”

Sharansky’s new book arrives as at least two generations of Americans have come to maturity with little knowledge of the Cold War and the terrors it represented. Sharansky will have nothing to do with the moral relativism of the political left. Like President Bush, he describes the war between freedom and tyranny as a struggle between good and evil. When it came to the Soviet Union, Sharansky knew the evil he faced. “The evil was a totalitarian regime that had killed tens of millions of its own subjects, and ruled an empire of fear by repressing all dissent for over half a century.”

From within the bowels of the tortuous Soviet prison system, Sharansky was frustrated by American liberals who served as apologists for the Soviet regime. Furthermore, he and his fellow dissidents were also frustrated by American foreign policy experts of the “realist” school, who advised successive American administrations that the Communist world must be tolerated and cajoled, rather than confronted and destroyed. The foreign policy of “containment” marked presidential administrations from Harry S. Truman to Jimmy Carter, including both Republican and Democratic presidents. Only the arrival of President Ronald Reagan changed the equation—and Reagan’s refusal to accept Communism as a permanent reality changed the situation utterly.

Sharansky is not reluctant to name names. Though he offers a gesture of respect to former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, Sharansky criticizes Kissinger as “the foremost champion of detente” and “a devoted pupil of the realist school of foreign policy” who “immediately went to work doing what realists do: de-emphasizing the ideological and moral dimension of foreign policy.”

Sharansky and his fellow dissidents wanted merely to taste freedom, and to claim freedom on behalf of their fellow citizens. “We all wanted to live in a free society. And despite our sometimes contradictory visions of the future, the dissident experience enabled all of us to agree on what freedom meant: A society is free if people have a right to express their views without fear of arrest, imprisonment, or physical harm.”

Even from within the belly of the Soviet beast, Sharansky and his fellow prisoners knew that the Soviet Union was destined to self-destruct or collapse. “A regime based on fear must maintain increasingly tight control over its population to remain in power,” Sharansky explains, “and such control inevitably triggers a process of decay. Outward signs of this decay may take some time to emerge. In fact, if a fear society is blessed with abundant natural resources, the society may prosper even when the process of internal dissolution is well underway. This is what occurred during the middle decades of the twentieth century in the Soviet Union.”

In the prisons, the inmates would communicate with each other by tapping on the walls in Morse code, or talking through toilets after the bowls had been drained of water. Reports of a collapse in the Soviet economy offered threads of hope to the beleaguered prisoners. Above all, news of the election of Ronald Reagan as President of the United States offered the prisoners hope. When Reagan referred to the Soviet Union as the “evil empire,” the word spread rapidly through the walls and plumbing of the Soviet prisons. “The dissidents were ecstatic,” Sharansky remembers. “Finally, the leader of the free world had spoken the truth—a truth that burned inside the heart of each and every one of us.”

Armed with his experience in the Soviet gulags and his more recent years as an Israeli official, Sharansky calls the world to moral clarity and admonishes nations that they must follow a foreign policy of principle and morality, not merely of “realism” in policy.

Sharansky poses the reality like this: “The great debate of my youth has returned. Once again the world is divided between those who are prepared to confront evil and those who are willing to appease it. And once again, the question that ultimately separates members of the two camps remains this: Do you believe in the power of freedom to change the world?”

Sharansky divides the world’s nations into two categories—the free societies and the fear societies. A free society allows dissent and genuine liberty, passing what Sharansky calls the crucial “town square test.” According to this test, a society is free if its citizens can speak their minds freely in the town square without fear of arrest, harassment, or worse.

The fear societies are those nations that operate by fear and protect their own interests by intimidation, torture, or even the threat of death. “The power of a fear society is never based solely on an army and a secret police,” Sharansky argues. “As important is a regime’s ability to control what is read, said, heard, and above all, thought. This is how a regime based on fear attempts to maintain a constant pool of true believers.”

Tracing a tragic pattern of Western naivete and complicity with dictatorial regimes, Sharansky warns that a “failure to appreciate the inherent belligerency of all nondemocratic regimes results in the dangerous illusion that they can serve as reliable allies in preserving international peace and stability.” With his warning, Sharansky argues that fear societies, whether of the right or the left, cannot be trusted as allies, regardless of the admonitions of the foreign policy realists.

“Freedom’s skeptics must understand that the democracy that hates you is less dangerous than the dictator who loves you,” Sharansky asserts. “Indeed, it is the absence of democracy that represents the real threat to peace. The concept of the friendly dictator is a figment of our imagination because the internal dynamics of nondemocratic rule will always require external enemies. Today, the dictator’s enemy may be your enemy. But tomorrow, his enemy may be you.”

There can be no mistaking Sharansky’s intended point—in the context of the War on Terror, he is advising America and other Western nations that autocratic Arab regimes like the government of Saudi Arabia cannot be trusted as reliable allies. Much like the Communists in the Soviet Union, the royal house of Saudi Arabia is propped up by a regime of fear, he claims, and as such it will inevitably fall of its own weight.

During his prison years, Sharansky believed that the West must have lacked the strength to confront the Soviet reality. After his release, Sharansky found out that the problem “was not that the West lacked the power to spread freedom around the world, but that it lacked the will.”

Accordingly, Sharansky’s appreciation for President Ronald Reagan is directly attributable to Reagan’s determined refusal to accept the Soviet reality. Sharansky’s appreciation for Reagan is understandable and eloquent. “Today, it is fashionable to believe that the Soviet Union would have collapsed regardless of who sat in the White House or which policies were adopted in Washington,” Sharansky acknowledges. “In this view, Reagan was simply lucky, a man in the right place at the right time who benefited from an inexorable historical process. Nothing could be further from the truth. Had Reagan chosen to cooperate with the Soviet regime rather than compete with it, accommodate it rather than confront it, the hundreds of millions of people he helped free would still be living under tyranny.”

Similarly, Sharansky sees President George W. Bush as a man of moral clarity who is willing to risk his own political future for the cause of freedom. Shortly after the November 2, 2004 elections, Sharansky visited Condoleeza Rice’s office in the West Wing. Rice, then President Bush’s National Security Adviser, told Sharansky that she was reading his book “because the president is reading it, and it’s my job to know what the president is thinking.”

Later that afternoon, Sharansky found himself in the Oval Office, talking about his book with the president. Sharansky later recalled what he said to President Bush: “I told the president, ‘There is a great difference between politicians and dissidents. Politicians are focused on polls and the press. They are constantly making compromises. But dissidents focus on ideas. They have a message burning inside of them. They would stand up for their convictions no matter what the consequences.’ I told the president, ‘In spite of all the polls warning you that talking about spreading democracy in the Middle East might be a losing issue—despite all the critics and the resistance you faced—you kept talking about the importance of free societies and free elections. You kept explaining that democracy is for everybody. You kept saying that only democracy will truly pave the way to peace and security. You, Mr. President, are a dissident among the leaders of the free world.’”

A division of all the world’s nations into fear societies and free societies is inescapably reductionistic, but it is also a helpful exercise in moral clarity. Sharansky’s “town square test” is a common sense standard virtually all persons can understand. Free societies demonstrate and prove their commitment to freedom by allowing dissent, protecting the rights of citizens, and accepting limitations on state power. The Case for Democracy is an important book for these times, and Sharansky’s treatise on liberty and foreign policy should remind the United States and all Western nations that we cannot do business with dictators without compromising our own integrity and national security.

The saddest aspect of Sharansky’s book is his recitation of Western failures to confront Communism and defend liberty. Sadder still would be our refusal to learn the lessons of the past as America confronts the challenges of the present. Read The Case for Democracy in order to understand how the Bush administration intends to confront tyranny as it fights the War on Terror. Sharansky’s argument is honored where it matters most.

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R. Albert Mohler, Jr. is president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky.

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Of minds and metrics (townhall.com, 050822)

Michael Barone

Metrics are hard to come by in the war on terrorism. We can know the number of improvised explosive devices that go off in Iraq and the number of suicide bombers there, but we can only guess at whether these numbers represent the last throes of a terrorist movement or its continuing growth.

We can count the number of days the Iraqi parliament has moved the deadline for drafting a constitution — seven, as this is written — but cannot be sure what the effect of a finally drafted constitution will be.

We can note that some 220,000 Iraqis took part in deliberations over the constitution and that the Iraqi electricity supply now exceeds that of prewar levels.

But the most important changes occurring — not just in Iraq, but across the Muslim world — are changes in people’s minds. These are harder, but not impossible, to measure.

George W. Bush has proclaimed that we are working to build democracy in Iraq not just for Iraqis, but in order to advance freedom and defeat fanatical Islamist terrorism around the world. Now comes the Pew Global Attitudes Project’s recent survey of opinion in six Muslim countries to tell us that progress is being made in achieving that goal.

Minds are being changed, and in the right direction.

Most importantly, support for terrorism in defense of Islam has “declined dramatically,” in the Pew report’s words, in Muslim countries, except in Jordan (which has a Palestinian majority) and Turkey, where support has remained a low 14%. It has fallen in Indonesia (from 27% to 15% since 2002), Pakistan (from 41% to 25% since 2004) and Morocco (from 40% to 13% since 2004), and among Muslims in Lebanon (from 73% to 26% since 2002).

Support for suicide bombings against Americans in Iraq has also declined. The percentage reporting some confidence in Osama bin Laden is now under 10% in Lebanon and Turkey, and has fallen sharply in Indonesia.

Similarly, when asked whether democracy was a Western way of doing things or could work well in their own country, between 77% and 83% in Lebanon, Morocco, Jordan and Indonesia say it could work in their country — in each case a significant increase from earlier surveys. In Turkey, with its sharp political divisions, and Pakistan, with its checkered history, the percentages hover around 50%.

Polls in the United States may show that Americans have become less supportive of our efforts in Iraq, as the suicide bombings and roadside-bomb attacks continue. But the Pew polls in these Muslim countries demonstrate that those attacks have moved Muslim opinion against the terrorists and toward democracy. Muslims around the world cannot help but notice that Iraq is moving, however imperfectly, toward representative government. They can’t have missed the “Cedar Revolution” in Lebanon and the expulsion of Syrian forces from Beirut. They may have noticed the small concessions to democracy in Saudi Arabia.

They may also have noticed that Egypt will have its first contested election for president next year.

“There were no arguments over the United States, Israel, Palestine, Iraq or any of the other ‘hot spots’ that used to dominate every meal and spill over into tea, coffee and dessert,” writes Mona Eltahawy in The Washington Post of her trip to Egypt this summer. “This time, all conversations were about a small but active opposition movement in Egypt that since December has focused on ending the dictatorship of President Hosni Mubarak. I have never heard so many relatives and friends take such an interest in Egyptian politics or — more important — feel that they had a stake in them.” Minds are indeed changing.

This is not to say that everybody in these countries has good things to say about the United States. But we are not engaged in a popularity contest. We’re trying to construct a safer world. We are in the long run better off if Muslims around the world turn away from terrorism and move toward democracy, even if we don’t like some of the internal policies they choose and even if they don’t have much affection for the United States.

Two generations ago, Americans, at the cost of hundreds of thousands of deaths, changed minds in Germany and Japan. The Pew Global Project Attitude’s metrics give us reason to believe that today’s Americans, at far lower cost, are changing minds in the Muslim world.

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Muhammad Tries to Vote (Weekly Standard, 050919)

Cairo

THERE’S NO REAL SUSPENSE in Egypt’s first multiparty presidential elections. Most local observers believe the incumbent Hosni Mubarak will win 70% of the votes—a result that will make him feel sufficiently adored and yet provide a cushion of legitimacy to a regime that is doing its best to keep the United States off its back. I’m spending Election Day with an Egyptian who is determined to exercise his right, even though he knows the outcome. There are only a few hours left to vote, and my friend Muhammad, a 25-year-old journalist, is looking for his polling place.

“I wish we had elections every day,” he says. It’s 4:30, usually the height of Cairo rush-hour traffic, but we’re cruising easily through the city. Muhammad figures the government offices all emptied early when employees were bused en masse to polling places throughout the city. As a reward for performing their duty, presumably by voting for their employer to keep his job, they all got to go home early, so while the streets aren’t exactly empty, it’s strangely quiet. And for once, life in Cairo—a city of 18 million that’s short on all sorts of space, personal, social, economic, and political—seems manageable.

But this being Egypt, it has not been an easy day. Muhammad had his wallet stolen a few weeks ago and so he doesn’t have his voter ID card. Many Egyptians are in the same boat, having failed to register by the January deadline. If the nation’s 32 million eligible voters had known that the September presidential election would not merely be a referendum rubber-stamping Mubarak’s fifth six-year term, they might well have signed up in large numbers. But since it wasn’t until March that the president asked for Article 76 of the Constitution to be amended, allowing direct multicandidate elections for the first time in Egypt’s history, only a fraction of those eligible are registered. Voter turnout is so low that Muhammad is at leisure to search through dozens of lists for his name. Unfortunately for him, the register is ordered alphabetically by first name, and virtually every Egyptian family has at least one son named Muhammad.

Soon we’re directed to a second polling place where we run into Sherif, a childhood friend of Muhammad’s who is working as an election monitor. Sherif notes a few irregularities: Some National Democratic party functionaries are pamphleteering for Mubarak without properly identifying that they work for the ruling party; and, bizarrely, one of the presidential candidates came to this polling station to cast his vote and couldn’t find his name on the register. He screamed loud and long enough, so the error was eventually corrected. Still, Sherif is generally pleased. “The police have been very professional, and they’re respectful of my role here as a monitor.”

While much of the foreign press has taken a dim view of the September 7 vote, the State Department is right to call it a “beginning . . . that will enrich the Egyptian political dialogue for years to come.” The elections represent a fairly strong trial run for the country’s nascent democratic process. The problems with the elections were largely technical and organizational. As one American researcher and longtime resident of Egypt put it: “The government wasn’t prepared to hold a presidential election, which was of course intentional. Moreover, the ruling party is at a huge advantage in organizational terms. They didn’t really rig the election, but the NDP is the only party capable of mobilization like that.”

It wasn’t just the participation of other parties that made a difference this time out, but what those parties stood for. “Ayman Nour and the Ghad party gave the elections weight,” says Hala Mustafa, an analyst at the Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies and editor in chief of the quarterly journal Al-Dimuqratiya. “It’s the first time a liberal party has been represented since 1952. The Ghad represents something fresh, a new generation of thought.”

Elections have a certain momentum of their own, but democracy activists here and ordinary Egyptians are rolling this stone up an awfully steep hill. Mubarak has been in power 24 years; political life is still largely shaped by the same Arab nationalist rhetoric that brought Gamal Abdel Nasser to power 53 years ago; and for over 80 years, Egyptians and foreigners alike have been debating whether or not Egyptians were even capable of democracy.

The argument against popular political participation hasn’t changed much over the last century: The masses of Egyptians are so poorly educated—illiteracy here is at least 40%—that they are easy marks for the ruling elite, whose corruption would yet increase the gap between rich and poor. Of course, even without democracy, the ruling classes have succeeded in keeping the poor and illiterate in their place and, moreover, ravaged the country’s middle classes. And it’s that enraged middle class that’s added yet another layer to the argument against Egyptian democracy: Given the choice, under-and unemployed young men are most likely to cast their votes for

Egypt’s outlawed, and ostensibly very popular, Muslim Brotherhood.

Muhammad, a philosophy graduate from Cairo University, is certainly underemployed. His first two months as a journalist, he worked for free and then got bumped up to $40 a month. Though he’s contributed some of his time to working with Islamist charities, he’s hardly in danger of becoming an Islamist activist, never mind a militant. One of his ambitions in life is to translate all of Kant into Arabic. He is not sure whether the reform-minded Kifaya (Enough) movement should have allied itself with the Muslim Brotherhood. “At one of their rallies, they had a few hundred people chanting ‘Kifaya Mubarak,’ and then the much more numerous Brothers drowned them out with ‘Allahu Akbar.’ A lot of the people who were stuck in traffic because of the rally just honked their horns because they wanted to get home.” Maybe that impatience is an indication of political complacency, but maybe it suggests that the Egyptians are by and large pragmatists who want food on their plates, a safe place to live, and are not predisposed to ideological extremes.

“If you were to get rid of the regime-sponsored anti-America, anti-Israel incitement in the media,” says Mustafa, “you’d see that the Egyptians are not highly politicized.”

Perhaps that’s why Mubarak’s costly media campaign was aimed over the heads of ordinary Egyptians and towards another audience entirely. The Mubarak wearing an easy smile and pancake make-up in the slickly produced video ads is not an authoritarian ruler, but a man in an open-necked collar who joshes easily with the press; this Mubarak is not a president-for-life surrounded by corrupt regime hands, but a man at ease with the Egyptian peasantry in all their folkloric splendor; this Mubarak is not an Arab strongman whose decisions consist of winks and nods, but a commander in chief who sits behind a desk and—Saddam will love this one!—signs his name to official papers.

This campaign was for Western consumption, the United States in particular, and it wasn’t promoting Mubarak’s accomplishments, of which there are few to boast. Rather, the regime is campaigning for Mubarak’s 42-year-old Westernized son Gamal to be allowed one day to inherit the presidency. Presumably, the United States will not object too strongly so long as Egypt accomplishes a certain amount of reform before the succession. The catch is that the Mubarak regime has significant leverage of its own.

Insofar as the Bush administration interprets its Middle East policy in terms of the global war on terror, the White House is correct to be concerned about Islamist groups. What’s less clear, however, is why so many in Washington now believe that it is important for Arab states to integrate their Islamist groups into the political process. The argument runs that incorporating Islamists will keep potential moderates from becoming violent extremists, while also moderating those who are already extreme.

Whether or not entry into the realm of real politics actually tempers ideological fanatics—and there is plenty of evidence in the Arab world and elsewhere that it does not—Egypt is willing to use this line of thought to its advantage. Yes, the regime concurs, Islamists should be brought into the political process to moderate them—and it just so happens that this is precisely what Gamal plans on doing. Egypt has long played the Islamist card against U.S. administrations, but this is taking jihadist poker to a level of gamesmanship that must have the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia drooling with envy.

It is a common misperception that Arab regimes and their Islamist opponents are sworn ideological enemies. It is perhaps more appropriate to think of them in Biblical terms, as brothers with slightly different temperaments who are fighting for a limited resource, power. This is especially the case in Egypt, where both parties’ anti-American and anti-Israel rhetoric has dominated political discourse for over 50 years. Islamists have always been a part of the political process here, a sort of bipartisan dynamic that has allowed Egypt to foreclose any other possible alternatives to the regime’s Arab nationalism.

“The regime looks at the liberals as their real rivals, which is why it doesn’t give them any chance to grow,” says Hala Mustafa. “By nature, they can include a host of political trends, even the Islamists, though on different terms. And liberals can communicate with the West, which also hurts the regime, since the regime insists that they are the only ones the West can talk to.”

Without Arab liberals, the Bush administration’s Middle East democratization program would have fallen on deaf ears, and it was they who, insofar as they were able, exerted internal pressure on the regimes. Washington can keep Mubarak’s feet to the fire by demanding he empower liberals, not by playing Bre’r Rabbit and asking him to integrate Islamists.

“The infrastructure of the regimes needs to be rearranged,” says Mustafa, “especially in the media. There has to be space for other voices, liberal voices, to be heard.”

As much as he tried, however, Muhammad wasn’t able to make his voice heard this time around. (When the votes were tallied, Mubarak won 89% of the vote on 23% turnout.) But he’ll have another chance in two months time to vote in parliamentary elections. If Mubarak is serious about the promises he’s made these last few weeks—promises that he should have fulfilled decades ago—then the November parliamentary elections are his first test in proving his accountability. The mechanisms for ensuring a free and honest election are now in place, and the Egyptian people, perhaps caught by surprise this time around, have shown that they want to express their various political opinions openly.

Lee Smith is writing a book on Arab culture.

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What Hamas teaches us about Islam, Iraq, and democracy (townhall.com, 060201)

by Ben Shapiro

This week, the terrorist group Hamas won an overwhelming electoral victory in the Palestinian Arab parliament election. Hamas, an organization that pledges to seek the destruction of the State of Israel, now holds 76 out of 132 seats in the relatively powerless legislative body.

This election gives the lie to two fallacious yet extremely influential ideas upon which American foreign policy has been based. First, the Arab/Israeli dispute remains intractable not because Palestinian Arab leadership is corrupt or evil (though it is), but because Palestinian Arabs, like their Muslim brethren across the globe, hate Israel and want the Jews thrown into the sea.

For decades, we’ve seen blame cast on Yassar Arafat, his Fatah movement, and the Israelis. The one group that has by and large escaped criticism is the Palestinian Arab population. We would prefer that the large mass of Palestinian Arabs be peace-loving, open-minded human beings who wish only to see their children grow and prosper in a society that values coexistence, education, and liberty. Unfortunately, that hope has blinded us to a larger truth: the Palestinian Arabs, as a people, are not peace-loving. They support terrorism because they think it right, not because they are desperate or hopeless. They support the annihilation of the State of Israel not because they have been misled, but because they truly – and religiously — believe that Israel must be wiped off the map.

It is difficult to misread Palestinian Arab hatred for the West and for Jews in particular, but somehow we have deliberately ignored all the evidence in favor of more palatable motivations. It’s about economic discontent, we tell ourselves. It’s about supposed Israeli occupation of formerly Arab-occupied lands. It’s about this or that. It’s never about simple hatred, and it is never about Islam.

Of course, that is precisely what the Arab/Israeli conflict is about: simple hatred, and Islam. That is what the War on Terror is about: a clash between Islamic theocracy and Western liberalism. The same week that the Palestinian Arabs waved Hamas green, Iran continued its program to build nuclear weapons with the express purpose of attacking Israel. The same week that Hamas emerged victorious in the Palestinian Arab elections, Muslims throughout the Middle East went ballistic over a cartoon in a Danish newspaper. That cartoon depicted Koranic author Muhammad wearing a turban shaped like a bomb with a lit fuse. Saudis beat two Danish workers; the Danish Red Cross has been forced to evacuate two employees from Gaza and another from Yemen after threats of violence; Iraqi terrorists may have targeted a Danish-Iraqi patrol near Basra; Muslims have threatened massive boycotts of Danish companies; Egypt’s parliament refused to discuss a $72.5 million loan by Denmark to Egypt. United Arab Emirates Minister of Justice and Islamic Affairs Mohammed Al Dhaheri described the cartoon as “cultural terrorism, not freedom of expression,” then ominously warned, “The repercussions of such irresponsible acts will have adverse impact on international relations.”

It is ironic that Muslims protesting the Danish cartoon in the Middle East prove the very point the contested cartoon attempts to make: Islamist values are in direct conflict with democratic principles like freedom of speech and political thought. Islamist values are in perfect concert with a far more blunt political instrument: the lit bomb.

Which brings us to the second fallacious yet widely believed principle upon which American foreign policy has been based: democratic institutions mean nothing as long as the people who operate that machinery despise democratic values. Elections are only as good as the people who vote in them. Elections do not, by themselves, guarantee freedom, economic liberalism, or peace. If people prefer violent theocracy to democratic liberalism or kleptocracy to accountable government, that is what democracy will bring.

We must rethink our Iraqi policy in light of Hamas’ victory; we must ensure that the Iraqis do not value terrorism over liberty or violent Islam over its more peaceful counterpart. The Iraqi Constitution’s pledge to overturn any law contradicting “the universally agreed tenets of Islam” is a dangerous pledge. Perhaps Iraqis are more democratically-minded than the Palestinian Arabs; perhaps not. Doubt about the nature of the Iraqi people must breed caution, not mindless confidence in the power of ballots.

Democracy is not a bromide to be prescribed at the first sign of violence. Cancer cannot be cured with a sleeping pill. Democracy can flourish only in a society with democratic values. The Palestinian Arabs do not have those values, nor do they wish to cultivate them. We should be more optimistic about the Iraqi people, but no less suspicious. The future of the West rests on our jealous guardianship of democratic values, not blind faith in democratic institutions.

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Democracy is more than voting (townhall.com, 060130)

by Jack Kemp

Since the surprising victory by Hamas in the Palestinian parliamentary elections, there has been a significant measure of schadenfreude on the part of the media and Bush administration critics. Pointing out that the administration has based its foreign policy largely on the thesis that spreading democracy throughout the Middle East is both doable and desirable, an article in the aftermath of the Palestinian elections posted at Salon by Juan Cole, professor of modern Middle East and South Asian history at the University of Michigan, asked sarcastically, “How do you like your democracy now, Mr. Bush?”

Formerly known as the Islamic Resistance Movement and designated as a terrorist group by the United States government and the European Union, Hamas declares itself opposed to the very existence of Israel and has claimed responsibility for dozens of suicide bombings. Beyond the sheer political embarrassment, Hamas’ victory places the United States in a dicey diplomatic and legal situation.

Under U.S. law, the government may not have contacts or official dealings with any state or organization on the State Department’s official terrorist list. Yet the Palestinian elections were urged by the administration in spite of the fact that Hamas had not disarmed nor had it renounced its intention to drive Israel off the face of the Earth. By every indication, the elections were fair and legitimate, and Hamas has the right to form a government.

The short answer to the gloaters and the basis for crafting a policy to deal with the situation is there is more to democracy than simply voting. Elections without the accompanying institutions of democracy - the rule of law, individual liberty and civil rights, private property, civil society, functioning government institutions - is “all sail and no rudder.” The political system scuds along at a frightening pace in whatever direction the wind is blowing, but it lacks any institutional steering mechanism to drive the system into the political winds to reach its ultimate destination of security and efficient delivery of government services.

The common-sense observation that democracies do not spring fully formed was confirmed by a United Nations University study that concluded premature or inadequately designed elections in a volatile environment may fuel violence, magnify chaos and lead to authoritarian regimes, thereby retarding - and sometimes reversing - progress toward democracy.

In theory the Palestinian democracy may have cast off too soon in such stormy seas, but in practice it is an accomplished fact, and the question is, can some political rudder be installed with Hamas at the helm? The first practical problem that Europe and the United States must address is how a Palestinian government controlled by Hamas will be funded. The Palestinian Authority’s annual budget is $1.6 billion, the majority of which comes from Europe, which has indicated it won’t continue to finance a Palestinian government controlled by Hamas. Clearly, the United States government shouldn’t, either, which means the $150 million in aid scheduled to go the Palestinian Authority in development projects cannot now occur.

Bush was right when he said of Hamas, “I don’t see how you can be a partner in peace if you advocate the destruction of a country as part of your platform. And I know you can’t be a partner in peace if your party has got an armed wing.”

That said, what policy should the U.S. government pursue now?

One option is to withhold any funding until Hamas either renounces its use of violence and its intention to destroy Israel or its government collapses. The problem with this option is that there may be undesirable sources of money, i.e., Al-Qaida, Iran and others within the radical Islamic movement willing to fund a Hamas-controlled Palestinian government. If we allow a Hamas government to struggle and collapse for lack of revenue, we may only increase the likelihood that the Palestinian Authority will implode into a failed experiment in democracy and become a breeding ground for terrorism.

The good news is that in spite of Hamas’ continued anti-Israel rhetoric and its refusal to disarm, there has existed a yearlong cease-fire - the product of a complicated four-way negotiation between Israel, the Palestinian Authority, Egypt and Hamas - that actually has been observed better than the cease-fire between Israel and Fatah. If Hamas is not to suffer the same fate as Fatah at the hands of voters, it will need to do what Fatah could not - provide security, end corruption, deliver day-to-day services and advance negotiations with Israel toward final establishment of a Palestinian state. Hamas has every incentive now to maintain the cease-fire.

Perhaps this same back-channel mechanism that gave rise to the imperfect cease-fire with Hamas can also be used and expanded to convince Hamas to begin to accept the state of Israel as a fait accompli. Now is clearly the time for creative diplomacy.

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Freedom Tour (townhall.com, 060201)

by Jennifer Biddison

Imagine you and I dropped everything and went on a trip right now – a tour of economic freedom throughout the world. Where do you think we’d begin? The United States? Europe? No, we’d leave the Western world behind and start our journey in East Asia.

Surprised? You shouldn’t be. Hong Kong and Singapore have been the leaders in economic freedom for all twelve years that The Heritage Foundation and The Wall Street Journal have been publishing the annual Index of Economic Freedom. Though the recently-released 2006 version found that although the two Asian nations still top the list, it also shows that the world as a whole is economically freer than it was a year ago. And since economic freedom is directly related to prosperity, that’s good news for many.

What is economic freedom? The Index defines it as “the absence of government coercion or constraint on the production, distribution, or consumption of goods and services beyond the extent necessary for citizens to protect and maintain liberty itself.” For those who haven’t studied economics, this means that “people are free to work, produce, consume, and invest in the ways they feel are most productive.”

Every year, the Index grades each nation on the basis of 50 independent economic variables related to categories such as trade policy, fiscal burden of government, government intervention in the economy, wages and prices, property rights, and regulation. It then ranks nations based on the final outcomes.

And even though the grades are based on economic indicators, it didn’t surprise me that many of the nations with the worst economic freedom scores were also those with little political freedom. For instance, the three nations with the worst Index scores (North Korea, Iran, and Burma) also made PARADE magazine’s 2006 list of nation’s with “The World’s Worst Dictators.” After all, the brutality and excessive control that makes these dictators infamous also tends to stifle their nation’s economies.

Nations with dictators and economic unhealthiness are usually not much fun for carefree tourism either, which is why I suggested an economic freedom trip, and not an excursion through economic misery. So let’s rejoin the tour.

We’ve just missed Chinese New Year, but that doesn’t mean the fun is over in Asia. In Hong Kong, we can marvel over the lack of trade barriers, over the mixture of Western and Asian elements, and over how such a strong capitalist system sits mere miles from –- and is now once again a part of -– the largest Communist nation in the world.

In Singapore, we’ll observe one of the world’s best commercial law systems. We can also learn about feng shui and have our outdated stereotypes of opium dens and caning of foreigners put to rest.

Next, we head to our first English-speaking destination: Ireland. Despite a history of revolution, the nation is now soaring economically, thanks to one of the world’s most pro-business environments. Ireland’s corporate tax rate is less than half of the EU average, so it’s no wonder that the nation receives one-third of America’s EU investments. The rolling green hills and delightful tunes and accents make me want to invest some tourism dollars here too. (You can keep the Guiness though.)

The tiny European nation of Luxembourg is next, boasting one of the world’s highest GDP income levels. It has a fair regulatory structure, a skilled workforce, and a well-developed infrastructure. It also has several castles and wineries for us to explore.

While we’re in Europe, let’s head to the United Kingdom for some British humor. Margaret Thatcher’s influence still pays dividends for the nation’s economy, which is now the fourth largest in the world. A strong rule of law also doesn’t hurt. While we’re enjoying the economic blessings, let’s take in some Shakespeare, enjoy high tea at Harrod’s, and pay homage to the poor wives of Henry VIII at the Tower of London.

In case you’re a bit homesick at this point for the U.S., you shouldn’t hold your breath. The United States is in a three-way tie for 9th place in the Index of Economic Freedom, and we’re only halfway there. We still need to make stops in Iceland, Estonia, and Denmark before we visit the ninth-place finishers (U.S., Australia, and New Zealand).

How can the United States be so far behind? One devastating decision last June by the U.S. Supreme Court didn’t help; the Kelo v. City of New London ruling on eminent domain was a huge black mark for our property rights score. Massive government spending and protectionist trade tendencies also haven’t helped our ranking.

However, since the United States was in twelfth place last year, we can be thankful for at least some overall improvement. It’s pretty embarrassing that the so-called “Leader of the Free World” wasn’t even listed in last year’s economic freedom Top Ten. Let’s hope our score continues to improve, as Townhall readers and conservatives in Congress fight for smaller government, lower taxes, and less government spending.

The day The Heritage Foundation released the 2006 Index of Economic Freedom, my husband’s beloved grandfather Roger “Happy” Hetzner passed into eternity. Happy loved to travel, set an incredible example of financial stewardship, and was a faithful supporter of The Heritage Foundation. He would have loved to take this tour of economic freedom with us, and thus I dedicate this column to him. Bon Voyage, Hap.

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Restraining Democracy (National Review Online, 060215)

William Buckley, Jr.

Our love affair with democracy is here and there unrequited. Sixty years ago the essayist Albert Jay Nock remarked that if you freeze a frame on a member of the American clerisy you will find his mouth open having uttered the syllables “demo.” In the second frame, he’ll have closed his mouth on the syllables “cracy.” In a desperate attempt retroactively to challenge the election of January 25, we are now contending that it was not really pure democracy, because voters were confused by the presence of third-party candidates and partnerships, all of which had the effect of augmenting the Hamas vote, etc. etc. etc.

But the hard fact of the matter is that next Saturday, the new government of Palestine will take charge, and the majority of votes in that Authority’s legislature will be those of Hamas. This is an event of colossal importance in the sinuous path toward livable arrangements in the Near East. Something has to happen. Either Hamas has to be castrated, or it has to be stopped. By military action? God save us, the U.S. and Israel have come up with a military solution in drag.

The idea is to starve the Palestine Authority into undoing the results of its election by declining frontier payments to Palestine from Israel (they yield about $55 million a month). Simultaneously, you suspend all U.S. contributions to Palestine, leaving the Authority with a mere $100,000 in monthly cash from supporters abroad. This is nickels and dimes, and in a matter of weeks, Palestine would not be able to pay the salaries of 140,000 employees critical to the maintenance of civil order.

Where do we go from there?

Well, it just happens that the French and the Russians (they make up two actors in the Quartet of which the U.S. and the UN are members) hove in over the weekend. The rule had been, since the January election, that Hamas would need to reform its charter, which calls for the elimination of Israel. Something less than that, say the French and the Russians: If Hamas will just agree to enter into conversation with the west, without exactly renouncing its pledge to destroy Israel, that will be enough for a start. What we need is jaw jaw, to avert wah wah, as Churchill counseled in 1954.

The hulking monster in the background of all this is Iran. The mullahs there could finance the basic requirements of a Hamas-dominated Palestine with one’s day’s pumping of oil. This development truly horrifies the diplomats. The annexation of the Hamas’s program by the implacably hell-bent Iran would be a long step in the realization of nightmare.

And with only Iraq and Jordan in between, we are in Egypt. And there, lively in the political womb, is a bumptious child bursting to celebrate the birth of democracy in Egypt.

We are dealing with a movement that decades ago was illegalized by the Egyptian government. But the Muslim Brotherhood persisted and in the parliamentary election last fall showed their gathering strength. Accordingly, on the same weekend in which Hamas faced economic ostracism, Mubarak announced a postponement by two years of scheduled local elections. This was a visible sign of fright, that democracy was on the move, and that a religious organization which has engaged in violent activities, and is banned, threatens the plans of Mubarak, which were to hand Egypt over to his son. Observers with minimal liberal sensibilities welcome most moves against Mubarak, but not any move against him, because he has stayed outside the clutches of the Islamic totalists and because his country was the first Mideast power to acknowledge and to respect Israeli independence. The prospect of the Muslim Brotherhood overwhelming Egypt and collaborating with the mullahs’ Iran reminds us of the risks that democracy can bring.

It is a bitter pill to swallow, to see the United States and Israel forthrightly attempting to subvert democracy in Palestine. But the first law in this sermon is that democracy’s fruits sometimes need either to be stillborn or else to be resisted.

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Democracy in the Middle East (Washington Times, 060221)

From Baghdad to Gaza, democratic elections are changing the Middle East. One by one, dictatorships and regimes rife with corruption are being thrown out of power. However, those coming to power with the shake-up of the status quo are far from what the United States and other democratic nations of the West expected.

It would be a major mistake to view Hamas’ victory in the parliamentary elections only in the Palestinian context — a mistake that could threaten America’s national security and the strategic investment it made by toppling Saddam Hussein. Hamas’ victory illustrates the trend in the Middle East of radical Islamists gaining legitimacy through democratic means.

What’s more, the visit of Khaled Mashaal, Hamas’ exiled political leader, to the Turkish capital of Ankara was even more surprising. Turkish Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul says the Turkish government was merely accepting a visit by democratically elected officials. Yet the United States and many others consider Hamas a terrorist organization. Ankara used to do so, too. The group hasn’t accepted either the president’s or the Israelis’ call to put down their arms, recognize Israel and continue peace negotiations. Ankara accepted Hamas before it committed to any of the above — the first post-election sign of legitimacy.

Mr. Gul says the fact that there was a visit is not important, and that the message Turkey gave Hamas is to put down arms, accept Israel’s existence and continue the peace process. But he should know better. Muslim societies sometimes pay more attention to symbols than substance. Turkish media is flooded with reports about whether or not the Foreign Ministry knew of Hamas’ visit; the speculation is that Ahmet Davutoglu, the prime minister’s chief foreign affairs adviser, came up with the idea, and didn’t tell the Foreign Ministry about it until the very last minute.

If Ankara thought it was getting a strategic gain with this visit, the way it told the public made it hard to believe it was coordinated with Western governments. Turkey seems to be shooting itself in the foot. There is no justification for allowing this visit; it doesn’t protect the country’s interests or help to make it a regional power. If Ankara wants to be a player in the Middle East, it needs Washington on its side. Ambassador Ziad Asali, the head of the American Task Force for Palestine, says Palestinians should know the truth: America has no intention of talking to Hamas, directly or indirectly. Ankara has stepped into a big game — and it appears to have done so with little preparation.

It’s essential to understand why Hamas and the Justice and Development Party succeeded. The 2001 economic crisis had tested Turkish people’s patience; they were fed up with corrupt officials who weren’t interested in the country’s needs. Unfortunately, pro-American and pro-Israel officials were the worst offenders, creating a terrible perception that the West was against anything decent for the people. Poverty bred resentment, and people turned to religion. They thought those who claim to be more faithful than the so-called “Western” Muslims should have been honest about ending corruption. But even in that atmosphere, the Justice and Development Party won less than 35% of the national vote.

It is the same with the Palestinians. People are tired of living without hope for their future. Those who ruled for years and worked with the West were the most corrupt. The Palestinians didn’t elect Hamas to change the future of their society in terms of Islam. But they had no alternative if they wanted to democratically teach their elected officials a lesson.

The pattern was repeated in Egypt. Last December, the Muslim Brotherhood scored massive electoral gains, making it the main opposition to President Hosni Mubarak’s ruling National Democratic Party. In Morocco, an Islamic Party, the Parti de la Justice et du Development, took third place in its legislative elections.

So the question is: What point are Turkey’s elected officials trying to make? From the day Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan was elected, his intentions have been unclear. Hamas’ visit to Ankara may be the first real clue about whether Mr. Erdogan wants to take Turkey to the European Union or the Muslim Middle East. At a time when people’s faith has been tested in the West through the Muhammad caricatures, the feeling that Turkey’s service as a NATO member has never been really appreciated, or that it’s still difficult for Turkey to be accepted as part of Europe, Mr. Erdogan can focus on being part of the Muslim Middle East.

That would seal the failure of the first revolution in which a Muslim nation became secular. That is what is at stake. And it’s why the West should not lose any ground for the people who want to stay as secular democracies.

Tulin Daloglu is the Washington correspondent and columnist for Turkey’s Star TV and newspaper. A former BBC reporter, she writes occasionally for The Washington Times.

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Jean-Francois Revel — Death of a Philosopher (Mohler, 060503)

Jean-Francois Revel, one of Europe’s greatest defenders of human liberty, died Saturday in Paris, at age 82. As a younger man, Revel had been attracted to Marxism and socialism. Like a generation of his fellow French philosophers, Revel thought America to be decadent and repressive. Yet, when he actually visited the United States, he found a very different reality. He was never uncritical of the United States, but he saw America as the shape of the future, even as he saw Europe losing faith in democratic values.

Revel was one of the first to see the deep evil of the Soviet Union, and he called on the great democracies to defend liberty in an increasingly dangerous world. His death marks the passing of a generation of leading European intellectuals who had been shaped by the cataclysmic events of the twentieth century. To mark his death, here is an article I wrote in Revel’s honor in 2003:

“Democracy may, after all, turn out to have been a historical accident, a brief parenthesis that is closing before our eyes.” With those words, French philosopher Jean-Francois Revel sounded an alarm as the ramparts of democratic conviction were under attack by the political left. Revel, one of the most important conservative thinkers in France, saw European intellectuals and the political left in America undermining the very foundations of democracy.

“Democracy tends to ignore, even deny, threats to its existence because it loathes doing what is needed to counter them,” explained Revel. “It awakens only when the danger becomes deadly, imminent, evident. By then, either there is too little time left for it to save itself, or the price of survival has become crushingly high.”

To any insightful observer of the European scene in the early 1980s, Revel’s analysis was prophetic. Leftist intellectuals were pointing to the United States as the source of all oppression in the world, while praising the Soviet Union as the liberator of human kind. In How Democracies Perish, Revel aimed his sights at the self-destructive hypocrisies of liberal thought. As he knew, the very intellectuals who should have been supporting the United States were instead hoping for its downfall. “What we end up with in what is conventionally called Western society is a topsy-turvy situation in which those seeking to destroy democracy appear to be fighting for legitimate aims, while its defenders are pictured as repressive reactionaries.”

As Revel lamented, at times the democracies seemed to find strange comfort in calls for their own destruction. As he observed, “Democratic civilization is the first in history to blame itself because another power is working to destroy it.” Were democracies doomed to self-destruct?

Jean-Francois Revel is well known as a shining light of reason in the French academy. Long a columnist, editor, and director of L’Express, Revel is also the author of a multi-volume history of philosophy. He sprang to Western attention with the publication of his controversial book, Without Marx or Jesus. Revel’s later volumes would include The Totalitarian Temptation and Democracy Against Itself.

Throughout his career, Revel has been known as a stalwart defender of democracy. He does not take this matter lightly, for he understands all too well that the basic structure of government determines the achievement or loss of human freedom within a society. In Democracy Against Itself, Revel argued that “every society which has worked more or less well, which achieved any sort of viability, and which produced civilizations men found tolerable, have been—or are—societies that in some sense are democratic.”

Of course, the alarm sounded by Revel in How Democracies Perish was overtaken by history with the fall of the Soviet Union and the remarkable events of 1989 and 1990. As Revel later reflected, the good news revealed in the fall of the Soviet Union was the fact that its internal weaknesses were even greater than the self-hatred of the secular left in Western democracies.

Now, twenty years after How Democracies Perish, Revel looks to the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terrorists attacks and asks the fundamental question: Why do so many Europeans hate America?

This is not a question of merely academic interest. Revel senses that something fundamental is revealed in the way the European Left has responded to America’s status as the world’s only super power.

Revel is blunt. The ascendancy of the United States, set over against the relative decline of Europe, has given birth to an intense hatred in some European corridors. Most particularly, Revel locates the root of this poisonous anti-Americanism in France. As he comments, “It is in France that this loss—real or imaginary—of great-power status engenders the most bitterness.”

The virulent anti-Americanism that erupted on the streets of Europe in the aftermath of America’s military action in Afghanistan and Iraq did not emerge from a vacuum. Revel’s interest in anti-Americanism is rooted in his own experience as an French intellectual who actually visited the United States. When Revel first visited America in 1969, he discovered a land very different from what he expected. Having planned to write a book on the problems of the United States, Revel instead wrote a treatise criticizing the irrational anti-Americanism of the European Left. Now, he has done it again—and this new book may be even more important.

In Anti-Americanism, just released by Encounter Books, Revel considers this toxic pattern of European hatred towards the United States. He identifies one core issue as a sense of European loss. Revel cites Hubert Vedrine, the French minister of foreign affairs, who rejected the word “superpower”, and instead substituted a term of his own invention: “hyperpower.”

As Revel notes, since the Greek prefix “hyper” has exactly the same meaning as the Latin “super,” Mr. Vedrine is merely seeking to score political capital in his own nation and in the larger European neighborhood. As Vedrine stated, “We cannot except a politically unipolar and culturally homogenized world, any more than the unilateralism of the single hyperpower.” Exactly what Mr. Vedrine meant by this, no one seems to know. Nevertheless, it is an example of French hyperventilation posing as foreign policy.

Revel sees the problem as much worse than hyperbole. If America is dominant, Revel asks, then why is this so? He will not allow Europeans off the hook. “Europeans in particular should force themselves to examine how they have contributed to that preponderance. It was they, after all, who made the twenty century the darkest in history; it was they who brought about the two unprecedented cataclysms of the World Wars; and it was they who invented and put into place the two most criminal regimes ever inflicted on the human race—pinnacles of evil and imbecility achieved in a space of less than thirty years.”

The United States is far from perfect, Revel acknowledges. Nevertheless, he suggests that any criticisms should be directed at real problems, and should not take the form of irrational rantings.

According to Revel, the European Left enjoys its fantasy of America as “the worst society that ever was.” According to this cartoon of reality, America is a society that is entirely under the control of money-grubbing plutocrats. Everything is for sale and the entire culture has been commodified. The problem is not just George W. Bush, for the European Left is convinced that every recent American president “has been in the pockets of the oil companies, the military-industrial complex, the agricultural lobby or the financial manipulators of Wall Street.” But, in the French view, George W. Bush is just the worst of the lot—at least as yet.

The European Left is also convinced that America is primarily marked by poverty. As Revel describes the Leftist fantasy: “Hordes of famished indigents are everywhere, while luxurious chauffeured limousines with darkened windows glide through the urban wilderness.” These same thinkers are convinced that violence reigns throughout the United States, and that gunshots commonly ring through even the most peaceable neighborhoods. As Revel acknowledges, European rants about America’s lax gun laws would have more credibility if the same weapons were not easily available for purchase through the black market in virtually every European city.

If this picture of America is true, the pattern of immigration from Europe to the United States throughout the twentieth century was absolutely irrational. “If the picture of American society drawn everyday by the European press is accurate, then we must believe that those tens of millions of immigrants from all parts of the world, and especially those who came from Europe between 1850 and 1924, were all deluded fools. Otherwise, why did they insist on staying in the American capitalist jungle with all its evils and not return to the lands of peace, plenty, and liberty they came from? Lost in a hellish cultural wasteland, why at least didn’t they write to their families and relations basking in the paradises of Ukraine, Calabria and Greece warning them not to come to America?” Clearly, Revel does not mince words.

This virulent anti-Americanism is not a matter of mere sociological interest. As Revel understands, this explains why the United Nations Security Council has become so ineffectual and why the United States has been forced to act unilaterally. As he explains, “Europeans’ voluntary blindness with regard to these radical changes renders any American attempts at dialogue fruitless; as a result, America has no other option but to make unilateral decisions. How can you discuss a problem with people who deny its very existence?”

Jean-Francois Revel is a brave man who has lived through some of the most tumultuous decades of human history. Though a realist, he is not without hope. He has sounded the alarm more than once, only to have the Left ignore his cries. Anti-Americanism is Revel’s latest attempt to call the trendsetting intellectuals of Europe back to sanity. Good luck, Professor Revel. This is no easy task.

Revel’s prescient warning to the European Left should also serve to educate thoughtful Americans about the challenge we face in Europe, which may be as daunting a challenge as that posed by Islamic terrorism. Something sick lies at the heart of Western civilization. The democracies that will surely perish will be those who cannot tell the difference between good and evil, survival and ruin, freedom and tyranny. Or, perhaps more to the point, the greatest danger faced by democracy are those who deny that there is any real difference after all.

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Spreading the seeds of freedom (townhall.com, 060508)

by Sen. Rick Santorum

In nations like China, Iran, and Saudi Arabia, state-sponsored religious persecution often infects other areas of civil society and stifles other personal freedoms. The case of Hao Wu in China demonstrates this reality.

On February 22nd, the Chinese government arrested Mr. Wu, a filmmaker who, after spending twelve years in the U.S. — including a few years in my state as a legal permanent resident — recently returned to his native China to create a documentary on the underground church movement. Although Chinese officials have not given any explanation for his detainment, it seems clear from his ongoing detention that his film project was an irritant to the Chinese government, the same government the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom recently recommended be kept on the State Department’s list of “Countries of Particular Concern” (CPCs): nations whose human rights records are particularly execrable and warrant particular attention.

Beijing officially recognizes only state-approved churches and permits only them to meet in public. Recognition of non-sanctioned churches or religious groups comes in the form of arrests, beatings, and persecution of Christians, Buddhists, the Falun Gong, and in some cases, similar treatment for their family members as well. What makes Mr. Wu’s case unique is that he is not a member of any religious community, sanctioned or not.

Recently the President of China visited the White House, where President Bush said, “China can grow even more successful by allowing the Chinese people the freedom to assemble, to speak freely, and to worship.” President Bush understands that religious freedom is intimately connected to other personal liberties: freedom of expression, freedom of the press, and the right to a fair trial. Chapters two and three of the Bush administration’s 2006 National Security Strategy outline the president’s commitment to encouraging freedom of religious expression throughout the world.

While I share President Bush’s commitment to international religious freedom, I believe our government needs to rethink its understanding of religious freedom in relation to our foreign policy strategies. And by supporting international religious freedom through every avenue available to us, we may begin to stem the tide of religious persecution that washes over far too much of our world.

As former State Department Deputy Undersecretary for International Religious Freedom Thomas Farr points out in a recent issue of First Things, the United States must no longer allow religion to be consigned to the realm of the irrelevant by our diplomatic corps; the “secular myopia” that prevails within the diplomatic community must be abandoned. If we are to understand nations and peoples defined by religious identification, we must stop behaving as if religion is the pastime of the unenlightened.

Diplomatically, we must galvanize the Internal Religious Freedom Act; see religious freedom as a non-negotiable cornerstone to any fledgling democratic state; insist that our allies protect the religious rights of all citizens, regardless of whether their beliefs comport with the state’s or not (e.g., Copts in Egypt); ask that U.S. officials, when meeting with leaders of “Countries of Particular Concern,” name and inquire about the status of prisoners of conscience; and do more than merely issue reports on the incidences of religious freedom abuses worldwide.

It further means keeping religious freedom concerns on the forefront of any legislative agenda and to the extent we are able, supporting indigenous religious freedom movements worldwide. To this end, I founded and lead the bicameral Congressional Working Group on Religious Freedom, which updates members of congress, their staff, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) on incidences of religious persecution, and works to keep the promotion of liberty and freedom in the minds of my congressional colleagues.

Concerning Mr. Wu, I wrote to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on April 27th and urged her to do all she can to work toward his release. I have also sent a letter of inquiry to the Chinese Ambassador seeking answers as to why Mr. Wu is being held, and what the Chinese government intends to do with him.

Ronald Reagan once said, “Given the freedom to choose, people choose freedom.” We know this to be true from the recent elections in Iraq and Afghanistan. And while we recognize that the first fruits of electoral freedom might sometimes be distasteful or even unacceptable, as in the case of Abdul Rahman in Afghanistan, we recognize that our opportunity to spread the seeds of freedom is the calling of our time.

America is great because we are free, and we long for the day when people in every nation, including China, will realize the greatness true freedom brings. Freedom for all people, in all places, at all times is our goal, and for freedom’s triumph we will toil.

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China Syndrome: Capitalism does not necessarily lead to democracy. (Weekly Standard, 060529)

China’s Trapped Transition: The Limits of Developmental Autocracy

by Minxin Pei

A MAN WALKS INTO A BAR. At first, he finds nothing unusual about the noisy, convivial atmosphere, but then he realizes something is a little different. Numbers are being called out, one at a time, eliciting laughter from the patrons. “Seventeen,” says one man. Laughter. “Fifty-six,” another says, to great amusement. “What’s going on?” he asks the man next to him, who replies: “Everyone knows all the jokes already so we assigned numbers to them. Saves a lot of time.”

Policy debates about China often seem like this: an inane repetition of policy one-liners lacking facts or persuasive argument. In this new book, Minxin Pei demolishes the frequently uttered, and facile, pronouncement that China’s economic development will bring about political liberalization. He shows that China does not conform to this, or other, theories that overlook crucial features of China’s economic development and political system, especially the incentives and motives driving the leaders of its one-party political monopoly.

Pei, a political scientist who directs the China program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, does not dispute the significance of China’s dramatic post-Mao development, including rapid economic growth, greater access to information and personal mobility, the decline in the state role of the economy, and its integration into the global economy. But he points out that the causal link often assumed between economic development and the achievement of democracy, or political liberalization, has failed to operate in China. Reluctant to reject the theory that a threshold per-capita GDP is necessary for democratization (advanced by Samuel Huntington), Pei suggests it is possible that China may not yet be wealthy enough.

This is a half-hearted nod to Huntington, however, to whom the book is dedicated. Pei devotes the rest of China’s Trapped Transition to arguing that the lack of political reform can be explained by examining the choices leaders of China’s quasi-totalitarian state have made, and why.

China has stalled in a “trapped transition,” Pei argues, because its Communist leaders insist on maintaining power and taking a gradual approach to market reforms. This is not part of a strategy for political liberalization; instead, China’s leaders have been at pains to shore up their monopoly on power. The dividends of economic reform are used to “strengthen their repressive capacity and co-opt potential opposition groups, especially counterelites.” Seeing even limited erosion of their political power causes them to “intensify their efforts to maximize current income while maintaining a high level of repression to deter challengers.”

Pei’s attention to the attitudes of China’s rulers is important, given the general disregard for their thinking and behavior in American and European debates about China policy. We tend to interpret political and economic decision-making from a Western, democratic perspective, frequently projecting onto Chinese leaders attitudes and objectives they simply do not share. Pei challenges the self-deluding notion that Chinese leaders can be prevailed upon to see political reform as in their interest. He makes it clear that they see no such thing.

Chinese leaders’ choices do make sense, however, according to their own agenda. Decisions about which sectors to liberalize (typically the smaller, less valuable ones) and who to let into the booming economy (sometimes foreign companies rather than domestic, sometimes the other way around) and who to lend to are politically motivated. Overall, he says, China lags behind other former state-socialist economies that began reforms later.

While Pei is generous to the intellectual adherents of the gradualist economic theory, he argues that favorable assessments are distorted by the failure to consider “the greatest constraint on economic reform: an authoritarian regime’s fear of losing power during reform.” Such fear prevents the ruling elites from making “accompanying reforms that restructure the key political institutions that define power relations and enforce the rules essential to the functioning of markets, such as the security of property rights, transparency of government, and accountability of leaders.”

It’s not for nothing, Pei writes, that authoritarian regimes do not follow the “big bang” approach to economic reform.

Yet China’s elites are motivated by more than just the desire to maintain power. They recognize the uncertainty in the delicate balance they have created, and respond to the enormous incentive to cash in on the benefits of power before the enterprise collapses. According to Pei, the widely accepted belief that East Asia’s “strong government authority + pro-market policies = superior economic performance” neglects the crucial point, that a strong state can just as easily be a “grabbing hand” as a “helping” one; that is, be a “predatory state.” The results, he writes, are “dire.” The belief that economic development under such conditions could lead to democracy is “wishful thinking because the predatory state and economic development are, logically, mutually exclusive.”

One might say that, in the predatory state Pei describes (specifically, a decentralized one), all hell breaks loose. This is not theoretical. Pei documents massive corruption, a bloated state apparatus that fails to perform its functions, the sapping of revenues by local governments, and, ultimately, the inability to control officials. Ideological commitment to communism long abandoned, these officials are increasingly preoccupied with their own exit strategies, which involve getting foreign passports and transferring money abroad. Whereas China’s Communist elite were long known to exhibit the “fifty-nine phenomenon”—accelerating their self-dealing as they approached retirement age—Pei shows that the age of those engaging in corrupt activities is getting lower and lower. At the most extreme, Pei writes that officials collude with criminal organizations, resulting in “local mafia states,” and he provides details of dozens of such cases.

Needless to say, the preoccupation of officials with preserving power while planning how to get out leaves a lot of responsibilities unmet, or what Pei calls “governance deficits.” Some evidence of this deterioration of governance is “mundane but telling,” such as the incidences of traffic deaths, workplace injuries, and even accidental poisonings. The quality of education and public health care is declining.

Indeed, the Communist party itself has atrophied. It no longer commands mass allegiance or has legitimacy, reflected in a decline in rural recruitment, the loss of party members through layoffs of those employed by state-owned enterprises, and the failure to attract members from the private sector.

Yes, but what about the political reform that China has already embarked on, and which is frequently presented as proof that China’s economic development is, in fact, leading to liberalization? “It is worth noting,” Pei writes,

that all the important institutional reforms in the political system—such as mandatory retirement of government officials, the strengthening of the National People’s Congress, legal reform, experiments in rural self-government, and loosening control of civil groups—were all conceived and implemented in the 1980s—before China’s economic take off. [emphasis added]

As for those reforms, the results are poor. The national and local parliaments serve the executive or party’s agenda, and are unable to provide independent oversight, an outcome Pei says was “fully predictable” as the party never intended such reforms to work. Legal reform, too, is “tactical in nature,” set in motion to “serve the party’s overall strategy of maintaining its political monopoly through economic reform.”

Pei seems encouraged by the existence of village elections, in spite of his devastating assessment of how the party manipulates them and prevents them from exercising power. At least, as Pei says, “rural residents are politically sophisticated enough to tell real elections from phony ones.” A serious problem arises when outsiders mistake them for real reforms rather than a symptom of a party in decay that should be pressed harder to give up power, not praised for novel ways of managing local affairs. Worse, bogus reforms are a trap for ordinary people who step into the small opening that has been created only to be crushed when it closes. Pei could have included any number of examples of brutal treatment of lawyers, legal workers, activists, and villagers who dared to try to make village elections truly democratic.

Yet even the “golden age” of political reform in the 1980s was never intended to lead to democracy or an end to party rule. Pei explains that neither Deng Xiaoping nor Zhao Ziyang—who fell from power for failing to back Deng’s crackdown at Tiananmen—envisioned anything but continued party rule. Not only did the 1990s fail to advance further meaningful reform, but the discussion and debate within party circles, which Deng encouraged, was cut off under Jiang Zemin.

Having refused to adopt serious political reforms, which could manage China’s economic growth and other social pressures, the Communist party pursues sophisticated selective repression, relying on networks of informants, improved methods of dealing with large protests, a massive effort to police the Internet, and an effective campaign to co-opt China’s elites. These measures must be taken seriously, as a distinct phase of Communist party rule; otherwise, debates about China’s human rights record will remain stale and unproductive.

It is not enough to argue that there have been no more Tiananmen massacres, and that China is in a post-Mao era in which mass campaigns, such as the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, are in the past. We are seeing something new. Pei argues that the current crackdown on the Falun Gong reflects a new phenomenon, related directly to the decay of the party. Under Mao, he writes,

[T]he CCP could have easily mobilized its loyal supporters, such as workers and peasants, to contain and even destroy a nationwide social network like Falun Gong without resorting to the use of police. . . . The CCP could not mobilize a single social group to support its crackdown. In the end, it was the application of brute force, not the mobilization of the masses that enabled the CCP to destroy the movement inside China.

The “trapped transition” is not sustainable. Democracy may come, not led willingly by the Communist party, but, says Pei, “more likely as the result of a sudden crisis brought on by years of corruption, mismanagement, and institutional decay.” It is not a criticism to say that Pei doesn’t offer much in the way of policy recommendations. He offers an indictment of the claim that economic development will lead to democracy, rebuking the premise upon which U.S. policy toward China has been based under presidents of both parties.

Having stayed out of policy throughout the book, Pei is a bit clumsy in describing the players in the China debate, suggesting that the “fizzle” of China’s rise will disappoint both the “liberal engagers,” who want democracy, and the “hard-nosed realists obsessed with the potential threat” from China, who hunger for big defense budgets. This lacks the subtlety and insight that distinguishes the rest of the book.

Of course, Pei is a political scientist, relying on abstract terms that will not be familiar to general readers. But he more than compensates with a profound argument, richly documented with anecdotes, statistics, and studies, including a wealth of sometimes jaw-dropping information from official Chinese sources. China’s Trapped Transition will make future debate more rigorous, and more relevant. Anyone who wishes to participate in that debate must read it.

Ellen Bork is deputy director at the Project for the New American Century.

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Preserving “Liberty’s Best Hope” (townhall.com, 080306)

By Rebecca Hagelin

Listening to more than a few liberals, you’d think that the biggest problem in the world today is the United States. The “blame America first” crowd also foolishly wants us to give up our sovereignty, our security and our heritage. It’s nauseating.

“Liberty’s Best Hope,” a new book by Kim Holmes, vice president for foreign policy at The Heritage Foundation, boldly proclaims the truth: The United States and our republican democracy is the only true hope for the oppressed nations in the world. If we don’t step up to the plate and accept the responsibility that comes with the many blessings we enjoy as a free nation, then our future — and indeed that of peace-loving people around the world — is bleak, at best.

To fully understand where America fits into the “global community,” it’s helpful to hear from an experienced observer and statesman such as Holmes. A former Assistant Secretary of State for International Organization Affairs, he has directed The Heritage Foundation’s foreign policy research for nearly two decades. From the need for comprehensive missile defense to protect our nation and our allies, to the sorry state of the United Nations, to warning of dangerous, rogue regimes that pose a real threat around the world, Holmes addresses the vital issues of our day with the voice of authority.

As Holmes explains, a fundamental question should frame the debate over all U.S. foreign policy, including our role in Afghanistan, Iraq and the wider War on Terrorism: What’s the purpose of American leadership? Is it merely to remain the big kid on the global block, as our detractors — both at home and abroad — would have us believe? As Holmes boldly proclaims, the overriding mission of American leadership must be the defense and promotion of liberty.

It’s part and parcel of our character. The United States, in the words of former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, “is the most reliable force for freedom in the world, because the entrenched values of freedom are what make sense of its whole existence.” If we fail to lead, we fail the cause of liberty.

The title of Holmes’ book comes partly from Thomas Jefferson’s first inaugural address, where our third president called our form of government the “world’s best hope.” Why? Because it’s designed to preserve and protect freedom.

Imbued with this mission, we need to take a clear-eyed look at home and abroad to decide what needs to be done to keep the United States strong and the cause of liberty alive. Here “Liberty’s Best Hope” proves particularly valuable. Holmes takes us on a tour of the world’s hot spots and leading actors — one you’ll never get just watching the evening news. Consider his unflinching take on Russia and China:

“They talk a great internationalist game but are not averse to threatening their neighbors (China against Taiwan), allowing genocide (China in Sudan), or scuttling peace efforts in the Balkans or the Mediterranean (e.g., Russia backing Serbia and Cyprus in the U.N.) when it suits their national interests. China and Russia are not what they pretend to be.”

Those who think the solution is to work out our differences at the United Nations will get a much-needed education from Holmes. Despite the fact that the U.N. charter calls for the expulsion of member nations that fail to uphold basic human rights, the U.N. is home to some of the world’s most repressive regimes, which routinely work to subvert the actions of freedom-loving nations. Yet we keep trying to make it work. The result? “Through countless efforts to work with the U.N., Washington has unwittingly fallen into the trap of conferring more legitimacy on the United Nations than it deserves,” Holmes writes.

The fact is, you sometimes have to play tough in a dangerous world — you have to confront evil head on — if goodness is to survive. And if this makes some nations unhappy, so be it. Because of the global nature of America’s interests, we’re always going to be ruffling some feathers, Holmes points out:

“The only way around it is for the U.S. president and his cabinet to understand at times they will have to endure some bad feelings and controversies from friends and allies. … Other countries drive hard bargains because they believe in their own values and interests. China and Russia are ready examples. We should do the same without apology. If tone and style matter, then do it with a smile and without bluster. By all means, learn other customs and be sensitive to them, but be no less forthright in the assertion of our interests than other nations are.”

“Liberty’s Best Hope” reminds us that America truly is the beacon of hope for the world, as President Reagan so eloquently said. Our grandchildren and their grandchildren, and the offspring of people we will never meet living in far away places around the world, are depending on us to be true to our sacred calling.

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The kingdom is dead, Nepal’s republic is born (Paris, International Herald, 080529)

KATMANDU, Nepal: Hundreds of Nepali protesters demanding that the dethroned king, Gyanendra, immediately leave his palace clashed with the police Thursday, a day after the abolition of the monarchy. More than 25 people were hurt in the fighting.

Hundreds of stone-throwing demonstrators tried to storm the palace and the police beat them back with bamboo sticks.

“Gyanendra, thief, leave the palace!” protesters shouted.

The clash came hours after the royal standard was lowered from the palace in Katmandu, as Nepal celebrated its first day as a republic following the abolition of its 239-year-old Hindu monarchy.

A special assembly elected in April voted to abolish the monarchy and gave Gyanendra two weeks to vacate the sprawling pink palace, which will be turned into a museum.

That vote was a key condition of a 2006 peace deal with the Maoist rebels who ended their decade-long civil war and joined mainstream politics.

“Vive la République,” read a banner headline in The Katmandu Post.

“A hope is born,” said The Himalayan Times newspaper.

The authorities said the national flag would be raised in place of the royal standard.

About 500 people shouting “This is the people’s victory!” marched in celebration of the new republic.

“I feel really honored,” said a 27-year-old university student, Dev Raj Bhatta, standing in sweltering heat outside the palace gate earlier Thursday. “The end of the monarchy has made me a proud Nepali citizen.”

U.S. officials, meanwhile, were meeting Thursday with former Maoist rebels now in top positions in the new government.

The U.S. government still classifies the Maoist group as a terrorist organization, and Evan Feigenbaum, the U.S. deputy assistant secretary of state, said Thursday in Washington that the degree to which the United States would work with the Maoists depended on how well they stayed away from violence.

But Feigenbaum said that the United States was now working with them to try to encourage a stable, democratic and peaceful country. He traveled to the country this week.

The Maoists, who won 220 seats in the 601-member assembly in elections last month, are expected to head the new government. But they must fulfill tremendous expectations in one of the world’s poorest countries.

Thousands of former Maoist fighters are still confined to camps.

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Romanians vote in shadow of financial crisis (Paris, International Herald, 081130)

Romania’s opposition Social Democrat Party (PSD) appeared to have won Sunday’s parliamentary election, according to exit polls, reducing chances for a revival of EU-mandated anti-corruption reforms if it manages to form a government.

The PSD tapped into many Romanians’ fears about the impact of the global financial crisis and wealth disparities to make a last-minute comeback after itself suffering sleaze scandals. It promised welfare handouts and tax cuts for the poorest.

Two exit polls, one by private Realitatea TV and one by the public TVR 1, showed the PSD, heirs to Romania’s communist regime overthrown in a bloody 1989 revolt, capturing 36-37% of the vote.

Another opposition group, the Democrat Liberal Party (PD-L), a centrist grouping linked to President Traian Basescu, won 30-31%, while Prime Minister Calin Tariceanu’s Liberal Party (PNL) was third on 20%.

To form a government, the PSD will have to wrestle with the PD-L, which benefits from close links with the president, who nominates the prime minister under Romanian law.

Sunday’s win boosts its chances of returning to power after four years in opposition; but a coalition between the Democrats and Liberals, who have majority together, is also possible.

“Everybody is going to play hardball so we may see a lot of instability ahead,” said Alina Mungiu Pippidi of the Romanian Academic Society think tank.

“There is quite an important chance the PSD will get into the next government. For fighting corruption, the situation is pretty bad,” she said.

The PSD government in 2000-2004 was widely accused of allowing corruption to fester. Several of its top politicians have been indicted on graft charges but trials have been blocked by parliament or mired in court proceedings.

TOUGH COALITION TALKS

The prospects of tough coalition talks and a PSD government also bode ill for efforts to insulate its economy from financial crisis, economists said.

They say both main parties see higher government spending as a way out, although the centrist PD-L is less likely to allow the debt burden to balloon.

The European Union has criticised continued corruption and organised crime in Romania, a country of 22 million which joined the bloc along with neighbouring Bulgaria in 2007. The European Commission has called for stronger courts and efficient administrative systems to combat the problem.

Bucharest has undertaken some reforms but critics argue they are far from sufficient to tackle the scourge of corruption in business and political life.

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Dubious vote as Turkmen elect a new Parliament (Paris, International Herald, 081214)

ASHGABAT, Turkmenistan: Voters in Turkmenistan cast ballots Sunday in a parliamentary election hailed by the government as an exercise in democracy but dismissed by critics as a sham.

It was the first parliamentary election since the death of the autocrat Saparmurat Niyazov two years ago, which kindled hopes the Central Asian country would introduce greater freedoms.

The government of his successor, President Gurbanguli Berdymukhamedov, had cast the election as an important step in the development of democracy, but opponents claimed it was meant to appease Western countries eager to win access to its natural gas reserves but critical of its record on human rights.

A statement on the government Web site said the vote was held in “an atmosphere of openness” and reflected “the full depth of the democratic reforms being conducted in the nation.”

While all 125 Parliament seats up for grabs in the election Sunday were contested - unlike previous elections, in which many candidates ran unopposed - only one political party is legally registered in Turkmenistan. Government opponents have no foothold in politics.

The vast majority of the 288 candidates represent the pro-presidential Democratic Party of Turkmenistan, with the rest drawn from state-approved civic groups. All appear to have run on a platform of support for the president.

“Since all the cards were pro-government, regardless of whom people voted for, it will be the authorities who win,” Tadzhigul Begmedova, director of the Turkmenistan Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights, said by telephone from Bulgaria. “These scripted elections prove only that there will be another round of dictatorship,” she said.

The vote follows changes that nearly doubled the number of seats in Parliament and increased its powers, abolishing the People’s Council - a 2,507-member assembly that was once the country’s highest legislative body.

Although there was little campaigning and minimal campaign coverage on state-run television, the official turnout figure - just under 94% of the 2.8 million eligible voters - was high.

Election workers organized Turkmen folk music concerts at several polling stations to create a festive spirit, but even some local officials suggested the choice of candidates was limited.

“In our district, all the candidates are all practically the same,” said Orazgeldy Dzhumageldyev, chairman of a polling station in Gyami, near Ashgabat.

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Turkmenistan reveals results of election (Paris, International Herald, 081222)

ASHGABAT, Turkmenistan: Turkmenistan unveiled on Monday a list of deputies elected in a Dec. 14 parliamentary election that Western rights groups said had deprived voters of genuine choice.

Ninety percent of candidates were members of the Democratic Party led by President Gurbunguly Berdymukhammedov. A few independent candidates represented state-controlled groups.

A list of 123 winners, published in the official media Monday, said nothing about their party affiliation, but the new 125-seat Parliament is widely expected to echo the official line. The list included the first secretary of the Democratic Party, the only party registered in Turkmenistan, as well as tax officials, teachers and other civil servants.

The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe chose not to monitor the poll, saying the country’s laws did not provide for genuine competition. Human Rights Watch criticized the vote for offering voters no real alternatives.

Western governments, eyeing the gas-rich Central Asian country as a potential source of energy for Europe, have yet to offer their assessment of the vote.

More voting on Dec. 28 and Feb. 8 will elect the remaining two candidates.

The former Soviet republic has been emerging from isolation since its absolute leader, Saparmurad Niyazov, died in 2006 after ruling for 21 years. The new president, Berdymukhammedov, has vowed to press ahead with liberalizing the country’s laws.

The election was the centerpiece of his government overhaul plan, which aims to create a more powerful Parliament. The new leader has also dropped all references to Niyazov from the national anthem and promised to open the country to foreign investment.

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Burma Opposition Leader to Stand Trial Again (Paris, International Herald, 090514)

RANGOON, Burma - Burma's Nobel Prize-winning pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi faced new charges Thursday less than two weeks before her house arrest was due to end after an American man swam across a lake to sneak into her home, her lawyer said.

Supporters accused the military government of using the incident to keep her in detention in the country, also known as Myanmar, ahead of general elections scheduled for next year.

Suu Kyi, whose detention was set to end May 27, could face a prison term of up to five years if convicted, said lawyer Hla Myo Myint. The trial is scheduled to start Monday at a special court at Rangoon's notorious Insein Prison, where she was arraigned Thursday.

She is accused of breaking the terms of her detention by harboring the visitor for two days, even though he was uninvited and unwelcome.

The junta appears eager to ensure that general elections scheduled for next year are carried out without any significant opposition from pro-democracy groups that say the balloting will merely perpetuate military rule under a democratic guise.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton told reporters at the U.S. State Department that she was deeply troubled by Burma's "baseless charge" against Suu Kyi. She said the government is looking for a "pretext" to place further unjust restrictions on her.

Human rights groups said they feared the trial would be used to justify another extension of Suu Kyi's yearslong detention despite international demands for her release. The 63-year-old Nobel Peace Prize laureate has already spent more than 13 of the last 19 years - including the past six - in detention without trial for her nonviolent promotion of democracy in Burma, also called Burma.

The motives of the American, John William Yettaw, 53, remained unclear. State television on Thursday said he had served two years in the military and listed his occupation as "student, clinical psychology, Forest Institution."

"I know that John is harmless and not politically motivated in any way," his stepson, Paul Nedrow, wrote in an e-mail to The Associated Press. "He did not want to cause Suu Kyi any trouble."

Nedrow said he was concerned over his stepfather's health because he was a diabetic and the ailment "could cause him to become disoriented and confused and be unable to make wise choices for himself."

Kyi Win, another lawyer for Suu Kyi, said the opposition leader did not invite the man to her home and in fact told the man to leave. He said the incident was merely a breach of the normally tight security authorities impose on Suu Kyi.

"Everyone is very angry with this wretched American. He is the cause of all these problems," Kyi Win told reporters. "He's a fool."

In the past the junta - which regards Suu Kyi as the biggest threat to its rule - has found reasons to extend her periods of house arrest, bending the letter of the law.

"The Burmese regime is clearly intent on finding any pretext, no matter how tenuous, to extend her unlawful detention. The real injustice, the real illegality, is that she is still detained in the first place," said British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who wrote a chapter about her in his book "Courage."

Australian Foreign Minister Stephen Smith described Suu Kyi's arrest as "gravely concerning" and urged her immediate release.

Yettaw, who was arrested last week, was charged at Thursday's hearing with illegally entering a restricted zone, which carries a maximum penalty of five years in prison, and breaking immigration laws, which is punishable by up to one year in jail, said Hla Myo Myint.

U.S. Embassy spokesman Richard Mei said Yettaw had no legal representation at his arraignment but that the embassy was trying to find him an English-speaking lawyer.

The National Coalition Government of the Union of Burma, which describes itself as the country's government-in-exile, said the junta was using the incident to extend Suu Kyi's detention.

"It is nothing more than a political ploy to hoodwink the international community so that it can keep (Suu Kyi) under lock and key while the military maneuvers its way to election victory on 2010," the group's prime minister, Sein Win, said in a statement.

Suu Kyi has recently been ill, suffering from dehydration and low blood pressure. Her condition improved this week after a visit by a doctor who administered an intravenous drip, said Nyan Win, the spokesman for her National League for Democracy party, who is also part of a team of three lawyers hoping to represent her.

"Please tell them (reporters) I am well," Kyi Win quoted Suu Kyi as saying. But he added: "I am very concerned about Suu Kyi's health, even though she said she is well."

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Myanmar Allows Diplomats and Press at Activist's Trial (Paris, International Herald, 090520)

BANGKOK - Facing widespread condemnation for the arrest of the pro-democracy leader Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, the government of Myanmar said Wednesday that it would allow some diplomats and locally based journalists inside the courtroom.

Embassies were told that they could send one diplomat to the trial and apparently offered them the chance to meet afterward with Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi, who is on trial following the intrusion into her compound of an American who swam across an adjacent lake, according to reports from inside Myanmar. The British ambassador, Mark Canning, who attended the hearing on Wednesday, said that Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi, 63, appeared "composed, upright, crackling with energy" and "very much in charge of her defense team," the BBC reported.

The hearing lasted about an hour, and a police officer testified for the prosecution, he said. Afterward, Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi - who has been in ill-health - spoke briefly to diplomats to welcome their presence and say she hoped she would meet them in better times, the BBC said.

She then left for a separate meetings with Singapore's ambassador and representatives from Russia and Thailand, Mr. Canning was quoted as saying.

Mr. Canning said that while he welcomed the decision to allow a group of journalists and diplomats into the courtroom, he did not have any confidence in the outcome. "I think this is a story where the conclusion is already scripted," he was quoted as saying.

On Tuesday, in addition to familiar criticisms from Western nations, Myanmar's neighbors in Southeast Asia issued an unusually strong message of condemnation.

"With the eyes of the international community on Myanmar at present, the honor and credibility of the government of the Union of Myanmar are at stake," said the message, released by the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations, of which Myanmar is a member.

Analysts say the case against Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi, 63, is intended as a legal pretext for extending her house arrest, which would otherwise expire later this month. Myanmar plans to hold a general election early next year to cement the control of the military under a nominally civilian administration.

Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi is charged with receiving an unauthorized visitor after the American, John Yettaw, swam across a lake two weeks ago and entered the compound where she has been held under house arrest for 13 of the past 19 years.

Her lawyers say that she did not invite Mr. Yettaw's actions and asked him to leave, but that she let him stay the night when he complained of exhaustion and leg cramps. Her two housekeepers are on trial with her on similar charges, which could bring prison terms of up to five years.

Mr. Yettaw, who is also a defendant in the trial, faces up to six years in prison for breaking security and immigration laws.

In Washington, a State Department spokesman, Ian Kelly, said the charges against Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi were unjustified and demanded her release, along with that of an estimated 2,100 other political prisoners. Last week, in response to her arrest, the United States extended harsh economic sanctions against the ruling military junta, although the American government had said it was reviewing the effectiveness of this policy.

Other condemnation came from around the world, including from the United Nations and the European Union.

On Monday, nine Nobel Peace Prize laureates released a statement condemning the arrest of Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi, who won the prize in 1991. "We are outraged by the deplorable actions of the military junta against Suu Kyi and strongly encourage challenging this obvious harassment of our fellow Nobel laureate," the statement read.

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Myanmar Again Closes Trial of Democracy Activist (Paris, International Herald, 090522)

BANGKOK - As international outrage grew over the prosecution of the Nobel Peace Prize laureate Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, the military government in Myanmar on Thursday again closed her trial to foreign diplomats.

The authorities opened the proceedings <http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/21/world/asia/21myanmar.html> to 29 ambassadors and a handful of local reporters on Wednesday. But court officials again barred all visitors and observers on Thursday.

Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi, the pro-democracy leader, is being tried on charges that she violated the terms of her current six-year house arrest. The new charges have drawn widespread scorn, and the British ambassador called the case "a show trial."

"You have got all the legal trappings today going on," said the ambassador, Mark Canning, in a BBC Radio 4 interview after watching Wednesday's proceedings. He added, "But there is little doubt that the end of the story is probably already scripted."

Many analysts say the charges are a pretext for extending Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi's house arrest before elections next year in Myanmar, formerly Burma; the ruling generals may fear that her popularity could sway the vote against them.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton assailed the junta during a Senate budget hearing on Wednesday, saying it was "outrageous that they are trying her, and that they continue to hold her because of her political popularity."

Shown on local television, Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi, 63, appeared confident and in good spirits on Wednesday. "I hope to see you in better days," she said as she was being taken back to her cell at Insein Prison <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/3006922.stm> . The trial is being held in a courtroom inside the prison, which is near Yangon, formerly known as Rangoon.

Afterward, Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi was allowed to meet briefly with the ambassadors of Singapore, Russia and Thailand. A report from Singapore's government quoted its ambassador, Robert Chua, as saying that Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi "expressed the view that it was not too late for something good to come out of this unfortunate incident."

The latest charges were brought against her after an American swam across a lake in central Yangon and spent a night at the waterfront villa where she has spent 13 of the last 19 years under house arrest. The terms of her detention prohibit foreign guests or overnight visits without permission.

According to the government mouthpiece, The New Light of Myanmar, an official testifying at the trial on Wednesday said the police had found a strange collection of items that the swimmer - John Yettaw, 53 - had left behind in her home.

They included "two black chadors usually worn by Muslim women, two black scarves, two long skirts, one red torch light, six color pencils in a plastic bag, three pairs of sunglasses, two signal lights, a pair of swimming glasses, one two-pin plug, two pieces of circuit wire, one recharger, a black bag with a zip in it that was used to keep the apparatuses, a plastic bag with a zip in it, two pairs of gray stockings, five parts of an English book, and a bag with pieces of torn paper sheets in it."

The paper quoted a witness, a police captain named Tin Zaw Tun, as testifying that Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi had signed a search form accepting responsibility for the items. "Asked why Mr. John William Yettaw left two chadors, she replied that he left them as gifts for her," the paper said.

No explanation has been given for why Mr. Yettaw, of Falcon, Mo., swam to her home on May 3. He is also standing trial, along with two women on Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi's household staff.

"Everyone is very angry with this wretched American," said U Kyi Win, a lawyer for Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi. "He is the cause of all these problems. He's a fool."

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