There are two parallel dimensions here. We can’t grasp the issue without seeing both dimensions. In that blog entry I was only dealing with one dimension, the democratization. Bush has pushed it and his supporters have pushed it as the sole rationale for everything he is doing. That has had enormous consequences politically and in affecting people’s thinking and so we can’t simply dismiss the democratization rhetoric as a ploy.
At the same time, you are correct. The indications are increasingly that Bush doesn’t mean it. Either it is idealistic sloganeering designed (as a Bush supporter said to me recently) to inspire people and to garner support for us for our own advantage, or it is believed so shallowly that as soon as it (inevitably) turns into its own opposite (as in “democratic” Iraq adopting sharia constitution or “democratic” Gaza electing Hamas), the administration is ready to go along with these things that are the exact opposite of what they have been pushing.
Ironically, as I said to the Bush supporter today, whether Bush is pushing democracy because he really believes in it, or whether he is pushing it to gain political support to help advance our interests, BOTH PURPOSES HAVE BEEN A BUST. A Sharia-ruled Iraq and a Hamas-ruled Gaza and a PLO terrorist state in the West Bank represent a total failure both for “democracy” AND for our realistic national interests.
When I pointed out these things out to him, the Bush supporter, after having always defended the Bush policy to the max, did not evade the point. He said sharia in Iraq represented a total disaster. I saw signs of second thoughts in him.
I realize I haven’t resolved the question of what Bush’s motivation is, but I’m frankly not able to. Also, in terms of effects, as already suggested above, the question may be ultimately irrelevant.
Let’s suppose for the sake of argument that Bush only instrumentally believed in the global democracy thing, because he felt that he had to provide an “idealistic” rationale for his policy that will give people hope and make them like us. Even if that were the case, the idea of democratization STILL LED HIM DOWN THE GARDEN PATH. He set up things like democratic elections, saying our whole purpose was democracy, and so when sharia-rule or Hamas rule was the result of that, he had to go along with it.
You see? In this sense it makes no difference whether Bush is a true believer in global democracy, or only a manager who thinks you’ve got to offer people some kind of hopeful b.s. in order to gain their enthusiastic support. Either way, he thought global democracy was the only way to go, he adopted global democracy as his method and as his legitimizing rationale, and it has inevitably had the disastrous effects that it has had. It would have had those effects whether he sincerely believed in it, or whether he only used it as a managerial device.
Also, as has been pointed out in VFR discussions in the past, especially by our contributor Matt, the question of a political leader’s motivation isn’t really important. What’s important is the ruling ideas of an age. Political actors will subscribe (whether deeply or superficially) to the dominant beliefs of their society. Freedom and equality—democracy—is the sole legitimizing idea of late liberal society, it’s the ocean in which we swim, the only available rationale to which a politician may appeal. So when Bush embarked on the invasion of Iraq, he was compelled to make the spread of freedom and democracy the ultimate purpose of this invasion, for much the same reason that (say) the grotesque Liebeskind-designed replacement for the World Trade Center was named “The Freedom Tower,” and that Mel Gibson as he’s being tortured to death in the last scene in Braveheart cries out, like a modern liberal, “Freedom,” instead of “Scotland,” which would have been more in keeping with what the real William Wallace (died 1305) might have said at that moment. Freedom and democracy are our only organizing political concepts, our only tool for making sense of the political world. That is the real problem underlying Bush’s disastrous policy, whatever his personal motivations.