The WP's Peter Baker missed a few important insights in its piece on why Bush's democracy vision has stalled. The two biggest: Bush's vision of overturning tyranny and bringing democracy to Iraq has been dashed in massive sectarian bloodshed, loss of life, turmoil, insurgency, uncertainty and heartbreak and a massive devotion of US resources that might have gone to promoting grand things lots of places, and secondly, that in many targeted countries, promoting democracy would mean allowing Islamist groups, some designated as terrorist groups by the Bush administration, to prevail. The piece left out so many big examples of the contradictions -- Musharraf/Pakistan, Saudi Arabia whose corrupt royal family is so close to the White House and Cheney's office, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt -- of where Bush has decided he isn't quite sure he really wants democratic realities to be realized, and he just may prefer the tyrant, as Cheney openly does in Kazakhstan and Saudi Arabia. While the piece would seem to promote a few voices blaming the stalling of Bush's grand vision on the bureaucrats in the U.S. government, it also tried to save itself from total ingratiation with the White House by naming responsible the office of the vice president's "little-girl crush on strongmen." But how did it miss how corrupted and stalled and conflicted is the vision at the very top of the U.S. government -- with the president himself -- and the realities the president has found himself confronting? Bush is now using all the Sunni tyrants, the autocrats, royals and propped up, hardly a two of them democratically elected, to counter Iran, for instance. Bush have a hard time with the policy? Congress may be interested to know due to the $30 billion in military aid to those states it's being asked to approve by the Bush White House.

The U.S. government may be in serious trouble if and when Pakistan's military dictator falls. Same the hideously corrupted Saudi royal family, so personally close with Bush and Cheney. They don't seem to have too much use for democracy when it comes to their friends, the corrupt autocrats. It's hard to understand how the piece skipped such big glaring points and contradictions, as if Bush's pure longing for democracy in the world had not been sabotaged by nothing so much as conflicts of interest going to the very top, and U.S. national security interests defined by the very top. How would we know if Bush were really serious about democracy? If he told Riyadh to stuff it. That's never going to happen, so we can rest assured that Bush is quite content to live with the art of the possible, with a very high degree of realism, and any griping about the bureaucrats is something journalists should know better than to accept as more than a wink-nod excuse for the president's own decisions to compromise his vision of promoting democracy.

Update: Comments reader DT: "I agree that Peter Baker could have said more about Pakistan and Saudi, about Islamist groups (Hamas in the piece might be taken as representative of the species), perhaps about wink-nod (but Bush really seems to _believe_ that stuff, including Sharansky -- he just can't grasp the contradictions), and Iraq. I may have missed a few things. Baker still accomplishes a lot, and on page one. He gets Cheney nicely. The influence of Sharansky is news to me. The damage to 'color revolutions' by American support is made clear. Iraq is an obvious failure, perhaps so obvious Baker didn't spend much time on it (he does mention it). So overall, I'm very glad this piece got published. Maybe I'm in a minority -- this could well be -- but I did not take it as ingratiating to the White House, which turns out to look pretty incompetent and compromised (e.g. the mention of Bush's neglect of the deposed Thai at the UN, plus the general ham-fistedness of the Bush staff ('Gerson, Bartlett, Karl Rove, Peter Wehner'). I don't think this is pleasant breakfast reading for 43. But I'm willing to accept that the article is a rorschach test for all of us. Myself, I'm glad to have it, and hope Fred Hiatt reads it for breakfast."

Correspondent D: "I think Bush doesn't know the difference between democracy and legitimation. He wants the latter with as little as of the former as necessary to establish the latter, and he conceives it as something strictly electoral, sentimental and abstract. ... Bush turns over control of the bureaucracy to the vice president and then denounces the bureaucracy because he can't control it. It's like he read Sharansky and suddenly believed he was president. Meanwhile, those who run the empire on a daily basis roll their eyes and go back to work. ... Baker probably saw a way to ingratiate himself and get back in the door. The people are so tiresome."

Posted by Laura at August 19, 2007 11:41 PM