If there is one bedrock conviction underlying President BushÂ’s foreign policy, it is that freedom is the desire of every human heart. Bush repeats the phrase at every opportunity, and it is the premise of his push for democracy in the Middle East and elsewhere: Given a free choice, it is assumed, people will choose freedom and the political system best suited to foster it.
The problem with BushÂ’s freedom rhetoric is that it appears to not be true. Hezbollah and Hamas, and the populations that support them, desire the destruction of Israel above all, and are willing to endure warfare and dysfunctional societies to bring it about. The Sunni insurgents in Iraq want power more than anything else, and are willing to kill and maim to gain it. The Shia militias, in turn, desire revenge against the Sunni.
| Don't confuse the evil of a few, and their people to induce delusion in others, with the yearning for freedom. And let's define freedom in this context: the wish to be left the hell alone. Ahmadneijad, Nazrallah, Kimmie and others have no love for freedom, but put a bullet in each of them and there's a decent chance that the rest of the folks suffering under them would certainly want to be left alone. |
An evangelical Christian, Bush couches his belief in the universal hunger for freedom in religious terms. He often says that freedom is GodÂ’s gift to humanity. But it sometimes seems that he neglects what, for a Christian, is a central event in understanding human motivation, the Fall. Pride and hatred and fear are as likely to drive human behavior as any hunger for freedom.
And while, all things being equal, people surely prefer to live in freedom than under a dictatorship, culture ensures that things are never equal. Someone living in a tribal or traditional culture will view the world differently, and have different values, than an atomized individual in the West. He might value sexual purity more than freedom, thus insisting on the repression of women. He might value his religious conviction that all of the Levant should be Muslim-controlled over freedom and life itself. He might hate the dishonor of foreign occupation more than he loves anything.
| Different cultures value different things, and failing to understand what a particular culture desires can lead to many policy disasters. However, people said much the same thing about South America thirty years -- wasn't ready for freedom and would never be, and that the combination of repressive Catholicism, indigenous culture, Spanish authoritarianism, and backwards economies would forever doom them to authoritarian regimes. Best you could do is let enlightened commies run the place. Today? All but a couple countries are representative, democratic republics. And even if the people elect goofs we don't particularly like (e.g., in Brazil or Chile), it's their decision and they have the ability to change it. Not ready for freedom? Seems like they were, when they were finally given the ability to choose. |
For all these reasons, Hezbollah seems to have a better understanding of human hearts, at least in its part of the world, than the president of the Unites States does. This doesnÂ’t mean that Bush should abandon the liberalizing thrust of his foreign policy. A democratizing Middle East offers the best alternative to the violent, dictator-plagued region of today. But his administration would be well served to focus on the particular instead of the universal, and talk more of the messy compromises and disappointments that are inevitable on the path to a better Middle East, even if we eventually get there.
| So the writer agrees with the Bush administration on the strategy, he just doesn't like the tactics. My suggested tactic is decapitate Hezbollah, wreck the present Syrian regime and permit a series of unexplained, unfortunate accidents to happen in the gasoline refineries serving Iran. Wonder how fast Lebanon would get her freedom then? |
It would be nice if James Madison were by default the world’s favorite political philosopher. He’s not, because the human heart is more complicated — and twisted — than President Bush acknowledges in his rhetoric. |