Hypocrisy in sowing democracy

THE SPREAD OF democracy, especially in the undemocratic Middle East, is one of the cornerstones of President Bush's foreign policy. ``It is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world," he said in his second inaugural address.

Few would deny the nobility of this goal. Bush was following in the footsteps of George Washington who, in his inaugural address, spoke of ``the preservation of the sacred fire of liberty, and the destiny of the republican model of government . . . entrusted to the hands of the American people."

Woodrow Wilson, when asking Congress for a declaration of war against Germany, said: ``The world must be made safe for democracy."

But as Richard Haass, formerly of the State Department and now president of the Council on Foreign Relations, has said: ``Democracy is difficult to spread and impossible to impose." It is one thing to seek to promote democratic values worldwide, in fact to persuade, and quite another to think that this can be accomplished by force of arms.

Nor are elections a panacea for democracy. In his book ``The Opportunity," Haass wrote that ``as a rule, `electocracy' should not be confused with democracy." Just because a country has an election -- even a free and fair one -- does not guarantee democracy which, at bottom, entails a willingness to share power. Without constitutional checks and balances, elections can lead to a dictatorship of the majority. Worse, it can lead to ``one man, one vote, one time."

When Saddam Hussein's connections with Al Qaeda turned to chimera, and when his weapons of mass destruction turned out not to be there, a remaining rationale for war was that Iraq could be transformed into a democracy that would, in turn, transform the region. Haass argues that, no matter how laudable a goal, invading Iraq for the sake of democracy ``simply does not constitute a valid rationale, given the human and financial costs of doing so, the uncertain prospects for success, and the availability of alternative tools to promote democratic change."

To base a policy on promoting democracy leads to hypocrisy because in the real world there will always be a need for allies who are not candidates for the parliament at Westminster or Capitol Hill. The Bush administration has found that Hosni Mubarak in Egypt and Pervez Musharraf in Pakistan are simply too important as allies to denigrate, even though democracy in their countries is not ideal.

The Bush administration once said that a mistake in the past was to back undemocratic governments in the interests of stability, and no doubt that was true in some cases during the Cold War. But hypocrisy reached record heights when it was revealed that the Bush administration was secretly backing Somalia's warlords in the hopes that they could keep an Islamic government from power.

The struggle of our time is against Islamic extremism, but here again, as Harvard's Jessica Stern has pointed out: ``Democratization is not necessarily the best way to fight Islamic extremism. Most states that attempt to transition from autocracy to democracy get stuck in a kind of in-between state. Electoral democracy does not necessarily imply liberal democracy, especially in the Islamic world."

Forty-five years ago, the now- late King Hussein of Jordan wrote in his autobiography: ``There are in the free world different interpretations of the term democracy. In the Arab world we have learned that to copy one system of government or another completely, and to attempt to apply that to a newer state with a different background and history, is unwise, even dangerous."

To his credit, Bush has stressed that democracy must come to undemocratic countries wrapped in, and shaped by, the culture and mores of that particular society. But, as King Hussein wrote, some countries in his part of the world had ``so-called democratic parties, but many of these groups, for reasons of selfishness or subversion, link themselves with elements outside their country. In such cases the party system embodies the reverse of democracy." He wrote that nearly half a century ago, but it could serve as a warning about Iraq today.

It is too early to judge whether Iraq's nascent democracy will succeed, fail, or fall into Stern's ``in-between state." But, for the moment, democracy in Iraq is pretty much limited to the Green Zone, and the world is, sadly, no safer.

H.D.S. Greenway's column appears regularly in the Globe.