"We don't want a President Hamlet, publicly rehearsing his doubts ..."

[dajoki]

WP
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/02/AR2006030201217.html?nav=rss_opinion/columns

Bush's Self-Evident Certitude

By Michael Kinsley
Friday, March 3, 2006; Page A17

The case for democracy is "self-evident," as someone once put it. The case for the world's most powerful democracy to take as its mission the spreading of democracy around the world is pretty self-evident, too: What's good for us is good for others. Those others will be grateful. A world full of democracies created or protected with our help ought to be more peaceful and prosperous and favorably disposed toward us.

<<snip>>

Yet the case against spreading democracy -- especially through military force -- as a mission of the U.S. government is also pretty self-evident. American blood and treasure should not be spent on democracy for other people. Or, short of that absolute, there are limits to the blood and treasure the United States should be expected to spend on democracy elsewhere, and the nature of war makes that cost hard to predict and hard to limit. Furthermore, the encouraging discovery that free elections are possible in unexpected places has a discouraging corollary: If tolerance and pluralism and suchlike Western values are not essential preconditions for democratic elections, they are not the necessary result of elections either.

<<snip>>

Recent news has left us awash in examples: the triumph of Hamas in the Palestinian elections; the emergence of a similarly attractive group, the Muslim Brotherhood, as an electoral force in Egypt; and above all the result of the American-sponsored election in Iraq, which seems to be just about the opposite of the lion-and-lamb tranquility that democracy enthusiasts had hoped for. But if these developments gave President Bush any pause about his aggressive democratization project, he showed no sign of it Wednesday during his surprise drop-by in Afghanistan. From Bush's description, that legendarily bloodthirsty land has been transformed into something like Minnesota. It's a place where "men and women are respected" and "young girls can go to school" and "people are able to realize their dreams." We shall see.

<<snip>>

We don't want a President Hamlet, publicly rehearsing his doubts as he leads the nation into battle. But the men and women risking their lives for democracy in Iraq deserve at least a tiny sense that the president who sends them there has considered the evidence against his policy and has some sense of why he rejects it.

[madeline_con]

1. This...

"... the men and women risking their lives for democracy in Iraq ..."

is danged moot, isn't it? That's NOT why they're there. DUH-bya couldn't give a rat's ass if Iraqis vote.

[dajoki]

2. no kidding!! n/t