Spreading 'freedom and democracy'... Are you serious Mr. President?

Thus one would like to take heart when the president of the most powerful nation on earth articulates such noble thoughts. President Bush's inaugural speech, that was reportedly redrafted many times and lasted 21 minutes, mentioned the word 'freedom' or 'liberty' 42 times.

The substantive difference between his first inaugural speech and second is that four years ago he had devoted only seven sentences to foreign policy and the rest to issues of home and economy. This time he has devoted only six to domestic issues.

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However, the grave implications of President Bush's predicating the growth of freedom in the US and indeed its security, on the spread of freedom and democracy around the world, cannot escape the notice of even the casual observer. In fact the US president's speech was pegged entirely on the morals of 'democracy' of which 'freedom' and 'liberty' are the two critical adjuncts. It is not surprising that he chose to do so; with the rationale for the Iraq war transmuting constantly, it was inevitable. How else would one justify a folly except on twisted logic and deceptive arguments.

While to some the speech exposes that element of American nationalism that flourishes on moral conceit and military aggressiveness, even more palpable in it is the gap between thoughts and actions of not only the current US administration, but also of those that had preceded it.

At the very outset of his 2001 inaugural speech president Bush had said, "Through much of the last century, America's faith in freedom and democracy was a rock in a raging sea. Now it is a seed upon the wind, taking root in many nations."

On 20 Jan 2005 his words echoed 2001, this time with the conviction that his international policy has the endorsement of his electorate, prompting him to arrogate to the US the task of 'spreading freedom' in all the world and made so abunduntly clear to his international audience when he said' "The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world." While to the gullible it might sound innocuous and utterly simplistic, the whole notion of 'spread of democracy' and chastising tyrants will actually give president Bush the excuse to invoke his faulty and rather misplaced policy of preemptive strikes and unauthorised intervention to which he has attempted to provide an ideological prop by lumping together America's 'vital interests with our deepest beliefs.'

As for exporting democracy, for the many years before and after the end of the Second World War and into the Cold War, legitimate regimes in Asia, the Middle East and Latin America, elected by the free will of the people, were toppled through US' covert and overt intervention, because those regimes were perceived to be against US interests. No wonder some critics have been moved to comment that, 'America cares whether the world's leaders support its interests, not whether they have been freely elected'.

Undemocratic regimes and loathsome dictators were propped up to supplant democratic regimes. In a glaring illustration of US love for democracy the Turkish military was denounced by the US for failing to intervene to overturn the decision of their parliament, which, alive to the Turkish people's near-unanimous opposition to war in Iraq, refused to let U.S. forces deploy fully from Turkey.

While majority of the Americans feel that spreading democracy is essential to US' security, even they are sceptical about ending tyranny in the world. No one could agree more. Some of the greatest tyrants were sponsored by the US administration in the last century. Some of the most oppressive dictatorial regimes in Central and South America, in Asia and the Middle East, were abetted by the US administration only because they helped serve America's national interest. The most despicable apartheid regime in South Africa were supported by the Reagan administration and even Nelson Mandela's African National Congress was labeled a notorious terrorist organization. US marines were used to 'racketeer for capitalism' as confessed by General Smedley Butler, who led the Marines into Nicaragua in 1935.

Even Saddam in 1991 was preferred to other local leaders since Washington and its allies held the "strikingly unanimous view (that) whatever the sins of the Iraqi leader, he offered the West and the region a better hope for his country's stability than did those who have suffered his repression," according to a report in the New York Times.

As for freedom, one would also like to ask what freedom is Mr. Bush talking about? Is it the freedom that the Palestinians are fighting for and are being constantly denied? Is it the freedom to choose the form of government freely, like the Algerians did; yet the US looked the other way when their military negated the free will of the people by scrapping the 1991 election results? Fred Kaplan echoes the sentiments of most of the freedom loving world when he says, 'But what if the freely expressed view of some downtrodden people happens to collide with our views or interests? Does "freedom" always mean a Western-style, or pro-American, democracy?"

Thus, the question is, given the history of disparity between the deeds and the words of the successive US administrations, how does one go about implementing this policy, short of use of force, and, whether the US is indeed qualified to 'export' democracy, as is the purported aim of the US president?

While no one can take issue with the underlying hopes of the US president, one cannot see it being fulfilled if the policy of double standards is not eschewed, if the meaning of freedom and liberty is applied selectively, and if national aspirations to freedom is seen as the exclusive rights of only those that are in accord with US views, and that security is seen not only as the ability to protect oneself from aggression but also to acquire means to deter it.

If freedom and democracy are rights ordained by God then selectivity and relativism have no place in the equation. If policies are divested of principles and justice, rhapsodic thoughts will merely become rhetoric and the motivations guiding those policies bear resemblances to those that guided world events of his day which led Thomas Jefferson to characterise those in the following words. "We believe no more in Bonaparte's fighting merely for the liberties of the seas than in Great Britain's fighting for the liberties of mankind. The object is the same, to draw to themselves the power, the wealth and the resources of other nations."

The author is Editor, Defense and Strategic Affairs, the Daily Star