Daniel Starr: The Latest Scorecard in Our Twelve-Front War

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May 27, 2005

The Latest Scorecard in Our Twelve-Front War

Usually "grand strategy" is something that happens over decades, but America's new grand strategy of spreading democracy seems to be going at tenfold time for both good and bad news. In just the last few weeks we've seen major good and bad news for democracy in a double handful of significant countries. Which should please you whether you're a Bush booster or a Bush critic, since in a twelve-front war, you're bound to always be winning somewhere and losing somewhere else. Here's just some of the biggest events of just this last month:

Uzbekistan had soldiers and police kill several hundred unarmed protesters along with a few armed rebels;
Egypt had pro-government thugs beat up protesters of the planned rigging of the upcoming presidential election;
Kuwait gave women the vote;
Lebanon is holding its first elections in decades without Syrian occupation;
Iran's Guardian Council, out of over 1,000 candidates who wanted to run for Iranian President, disqualified all but six, of whom the least hardline is two-term former "let's nuke Israel!" President Rafsanjani;
The terrorist-fundamentalist-reformist Palestinian organization of Hamas is turning ever so slightly away from terrorism, as its representatives, having been elected in Gaza to municipal office, are experimenting with currying favor with Palestinians by cleaning up sewage instead of blowing up Israelis.

And I'm leaving out the parliamentary crisis in Jordan, the besieged government of Bolivia, and more.

I think at this point it's hard to argue against the reality of the "domino effect" of the Bush Administration's aggressiveness in Iraq and Afghanistan and its loudly pro-democracy stance. On the other hand, I think it's also clear that the dominoes were ready to fall as soon as a hard push came, whether that push involved Iraq or not. And it's clear that while the "soft autocracies" like Kuwait are democratizing, the "hard autocracies", the secret-police bastions like Egypt and Uzbekistan, are fighting hard to stay dictatorial. Serious tyrants tend to succeed in crushing change.

But as John Lewis Gaddis observes in this brilliant (if possibly overoptimistic) speech on the Bush Administration's grand strategy, the overall odds are pretty heavily stacked in favor of more democracies in the world ten years from now.

Or, at this pace, ten months from now.

Posted by danielstarr at May 27, 2005 03:32 AM

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