A Few Words about the Export of Democracy

It is not only the loss of the war in Iraq and the economic fiasco that come to mind when one speaks about the American defeats over the past eight years. There is also another hard-to-admit defeat. The 43rd President of the United States of America said in his inauguration speech that he would be concentrating on the promotion of his vision of democracy. A fifty-page document came off the presses with the catchy title of National Security Strategy, confirms his words. George W. Bush was the first President of the United States to see national security as a by-product of ideology. 

Because they felt they had a messianic role to play, the Bolshevik leaders of 20th century Russia spent decades and uncountable sums of money in vain efforts to preach Communism to the rest of the world. But, the political leaders and ideologues of today’s America learned no lesson from the tragic experience of the messianic endeavours of 20th century Russia. Their aim is to replace the export of revolution with the export of democracy. Being conceited, self-centred, and narrow-minded, today’s American policy-makers believe they enjoy an exclusive right to the understanding of true and genuine democracy. President Bush and the men under his command see their efforts to promote and impose democracy as a necessary condition for the safe existence of the United States. 

The unavailability of their sort of democracy in Iraq, which allegedly threatened the United States, was the formal excuse for the military invasion of that sovereign country. But, although they have left thousands of American soldiers wounded and dead, the five years of the multi-billion dollar war in Iraq have brought chaos, instead of the promised democracy, to the banks of the old Tigris and Euphrates rivers. The economy of Iraq lies in ruins and Iraq is about to fall apart. The forcible promotion of American democracy in Afghanistan has yielded as little result. It is only in the capital city of Kabul, if there, that the situation is controlled by a pet government of the United States. Even the US media are reluctant to speak of a triumph of democracy in Afghanistan. Terrorist groups that protect the biggest of the proclaimed enemies of America, Osama bin Laden, are based on the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Washington pinned its hope on the democratisation of Pakistan, but, that country has proved to be the wrong place for an attempt to transplant American-style democracy. The assassination of Benazir Bhutto in the course of her American-style electoral campaign demonstrated the futility and danger of attempts to grace that country with a foreign code of conduct and some strange stereotypes. 

The policy-makers of today’s America pay no attention to the history, mentality, and traditions of the objects of their messianic endeavours, peoples who are the offspring of ancient civilisations, of countries that inherited ancient behavioural patterns and non-American systems of values. Some hatchling nations are products of the break-up of colonial empires. They have yet to break the shell of feudalism and tribal relations of the pre-colonial period, and it is impermissible, not to mention dangerous, to rape history in a bid to saddle a nation with the rules of a strange game. Dangerous it is, even from the point of view of democracy, which gets discredited when it is forced down someone’s throat. The painful defeats of the years that have gone by since the export of democracy was proclaimed the cornerstone of the foreign policy of the Bush Administration prove beyond any doubt that the attempts to export American democracy are doomed to failure. 

A statesman must be able to make conclusions and draw lessons from his own mistakes. The leaders of today’s America seem to lack this ability and little time is left for the correction of their mistakes. Those who will enter the White House next January can fare better than the outgoing Administration. Will they, though?

30 May 2008

Valentin Zorin

A View from Moscow

Voice of Russia World Service

http://www.ruvr.ru/main.php?lng=eng&q=27750&cid=170&p=30.05.2008 (in English)

Editor’s Note:

Do notice the parallel that Mr Zorin is drawing being the Bushie neocons and the Red Bolshies… that is, their motivations and methods are IDENTICAL. This is what America has sunk to. No wonder the Bushies support neo-Nazi regimes in Croatia, the Ukraine, and the Baltics, and they uphold Muslim terrorists in Albania, Bosnia and Kosovo. Our grandparents would hurl at the sight. Nazism was defeated in 1945, rightly so. Let’s not support its successors today. Otherwise, you spit in the face of every veteran of World War II and you desecrate the grave of every hero of that war (as the Estonians did recently).

Let Russia and America stand together, in amity, not in hatred. Don’t listen to bitter nationalists. They don’t care if Americans die; they only care for their fanciful dreams of an imaginary past and a delusionary future. Such haters of peace, good-will, sanity, and good-sense should be given short shrift.

Let there be peace.