A common argument heard from defenders of the president's policies in the Middle East is that we need to spread democracy there. There are two flaws with this: first, democracy already exists in Turkey without the attendant effects claimed of achieving democracy in Iraq; second, the administration hasn't pushed for democracy among allies in the war on terrorism.

The New Republic reports:

[A] basic contradiction--that this administration promotes democracy least where the war on terrorism matters most--runs throughout Bush's foreign policy. Consider U.S. behavior toward two of the countries closest to terrorism's frontline: Uzbekistan and Pakistan. Uzbekistan's secular dictator, Islam Karimov, nicely illustrates the Bush administration's argument that repression fuels terrorism. His regime jails, and often tortures, anyone who seems excessively religious--and thus, Uzbekistan's once largely peaceful Islamist movement is turning violent. ... In Pakistan, the story is depressingly similar. In October 2002, General Pervez Musharraf, having taken power in a coup, rigged elections for Pakistan's reconstituted parliament. ... Asked about America's unwillingness promote Pakistani democracy, Representative David Dreier, a Bush administration ally, recently told National Journal, "Our number one priority is winning the war on terror"--as if democracy were irrelevant to that goal.

In theory, perhaps one could reconcile the president's democratic rhetoric with his anti-democratic policies. Faced with a similar contradiction during the cold war, conservative intellectual Jeane Kirkpatrick famously distinguished "traditional," or pro-American, autocracies from "revolutionary," or anti-American, ones--defending support for the former as a means of preventing the latter. Kirkpatrick argued that pro-Western dictatorships like the Shah's Iran or Anastasio Somoza's Nicaragua were more benign, and more capable of democratic change, than the anti-American regimes that followed them.

It is not clear how one would update that logic to distinguish, say, proAmerican Saudi Arabia, which has no democratic mechanisms whatsoever, from anti-American Iran, which has regular, partially free elections. But it remains a theoretical question because Bush officials don't grapple with the intellectual contradiction underlying their war on terrorism--they ignore it. On the stump, the president relentlessly touts what he called, in a recent speech in Colorado, his "steady, consistent, principled leadership." Bush's key foreign policy selling point--in contrast to "flip-flopper" John Kerry--is his moral consistency. And his supporters don't want to undermine that claim by acknowledging that, in fact, his conduct of the war on terrorism rests upon a giant moral inconsistency.

There is in fact very little of either morality or consistency in George W. Bush's foreign policy — or domestic policy, for that matter. This doesn't matter, though, because his supporters have been able to construct an image of him as being consistent and resolute. Thus it doesn't matter how many times he changes his mind on how many positions (which, contrary to Republican talking points, isn't inherently a bad thing — only idiots treat a change of mind as something worthy of condemnation in and of itself), Bush will continue to be viewed as "resolute." When fact conflicts with belief and image, most people tend to go with the comforting belief rather than admit that perhaps they were mistaken.

Which, if you think about it, has been one of Bush's most prominent problems. In this he is very much like the rest of America — which may be why he continues to be so popular with so much of the rest of America. So long as we continue to have people who buy into the myth of promoting democracy in Iraq when the administration shows no interest in promoting democracy anywhere else, then there will always be someplace for politicians like Bush to get elected. As they say, we get the rogues and knaves representing us that we richly deserve.

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