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| Kathmandu, Sunday November 16, 2003 Kartik 30, 2060. |
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The limits of eloquence
By Michael Kinsley
America’s proper role in promoting democracy and freedom
in the world was a big issue in the 2000 presidential election. One of the candidates was
a Wilsonian idealist, arguing that the prestige and even the military strength of the
United States should be used to remake other governments in our image. The other candidate
was contemptuous of this woolly-minded notion, saying that U.S. blood and treasure should
be spent only in humanitarian emergencies or to protect our own narrowly defined
self-interest.
The idealist won the election, in the opinion of many. But
the skeptic took office. And then, guess what? The skeptic became a woolly-minded
idealist. Democracy’s a funny thing.
President Bush’s recent speech committing the United
States to a “forward strategy of freedom,” declaring that “the advance of
freedom is ... the calling of our country,” and that “freedom is worth fighting
for, dying for, and standing for” (an odd anticlimax, by the way) is being heralded
as eloquent. Which it is. Some of the finest eloquence that money can buy. A beautiful
endorsement of an activist foreign policy that goes beyond protecting our interests to
advancing our values.
The eloquence would be more impressive if there were reason
to suppose that Bush thinks the words have meaning. One test of meaning is the future:
what the words lead to. As even some admirers of the speech point out, the details of this
“forward strategy of freedom” are missing, except for pursuing our current
military adventure in Iraq—which was sold to the country on totally non-Wilsonian
grounds. But meaning can also be tested by looking at the past. Eloquence is just a hooker
if it will serve as a short-term, no-commitments release for any idea that comes along.
In 2000 Bush said that the Clinton-Gore administration had
been reckless in overcommitting the United States, and the military in particular, to
exercises in “nation building.” By that he meant trying to establish
institutions of democratic government and civil society. The intervention in Somalia, for
example, begun by Bush’s father, “started off as a humanitarian mission and it
changed into a nation-building mission and that’s where the mission went wrong.”
Just as with his current, nearly opposite philosophy, Bush stated the principle in the
categorical terms of someone who has adopted it and checked it off his list without diving
for subtleties. Preventing starvation: good. Overthrowing the occasional dictator: well,
okay. Nation-building: bad. ‘‘Maybe I’m missing something here. I mean, we’re
going to have kind of a nation-building corps from America? Absolutely not. It needs to be
in our vital interest, the mission needs to be clear, and the exit strategy obvious. I’m
not so sure the role of the United States is to go around the world and say this is the
way it’s got to be. I think the United States must be humble ... in how we treat
nations that are figuring out how to chart their own course.” One way to show your
respect for democracy is to state your beliefs when running for office and then apply
those same beliefs when you’re elected. Nevertheless, it can be quite noble for a
politician to change his or her mind. It can demonstrate courage, integrity,
open-mindedness. Has Bush changed his mind on America’s role in the world? Or is it
all just words—was there no mind to change?
One simple test of a change of mind is whether it is
acknowledged and explained. In his eloquent speech this month, Bush made a gutsy reference
to “sixty years of Western nations excusing and accommodating the lack of freedom in
the Middle East.” This was taken as a near-explicit criticism of his own father,
among others. But there is every reason to suppose that our current Bush also supported
this approach for most of those 60 years, including his entire adult life until a few
months ago when Iraq started going bad. What caused the scales to fall from his eyes?
A man who sincerely has changed his mind about something
important ought to hold his new views with less certainty and express them with a bit of
rhetorical humility. There should be room for doubt. How can your current beliefs be so
transcendentally correct if you yourself recently believed something very different? How
can critics of what you say now be so obviously wrong if you yourself used to be one of
them? But Bush is cocksure that active, sometimes military, promotion of American values
in the world is a good idea, just as he was, or appeared to be, cocksure of the opposite
not long ago.
If you’ve really been thinking about a Big Question
recently, you ought to be taking recent evidence into account. But Bush’s eloquent
speech is stuck in 1989. In Europe and Asia and “every region of the world, the
advance of freedom leads to peace,” he declared. We used to think like that, before
Bosnia and Kosovo. These episodes taught us that free people will sometimes vote for
bloodshed that the previous government was able to suppress. This doesn’t undo the
case for democracy and freedom, but it complicates that case. Acknowledging and addressing
such complications is another way to demonstrate that your change of mind is sincere.
And what should you do if you are a supporter of a politician
who changes his mind on one of the fundamental questions of democratic government? George
W. Bush’s powers of persuasion are apparently so spectacular, at least to some, that
almost all the pro-Bush voices in Washington and the media have remained pro-Bush even
when “pro-Bush” means the opposite of what it did five minutes ago. The
Comintern at the height of its powers, in the 1930s, couldn’t have engineered a more
impressive U-turn. If places like Fox News and the Wall Street Journal editorial page had
been as enthusiastic about nation-building back in 2000 as they are now, Al Gore might be
president today. Wait a minute. Maybe he is.
Courtesy : LA Times-Washington Post
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