By Staff
For all the criticism of President Bush's policies, what credible alternative to democracy has been offered to stabilize the Middle East? Pre-9/11, the United States supported "friendly" dictators, from the Saudi royal family and Egypt's Hosni Mubarak to Yasser Arafat in the 1990s and the Shah of Iran in the 1970s.
Bush frames the war on terrorism as a challenge spanning generations, like the cold war, which the West wasn't given much chance of winning either in the late 1940s, when communism seemed to be flourishing like Islam today.
Our enemies then, China and the Soviet Union, were more powerful than alQaeda and Iran.
The Soviet empire imploded rather suddenly once the Berlin Wall fell. Who's to say the Middle East status quo won't likewise collapse, helped by one of its major countries being democratic?
Bush hoped it would be Iraq. Maybe it still will be. Or maybe it will be Egypt after Mubarak or Iran after the theocrats.
"The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world," Bush stated in his second inaugural address in 2005. It could be anyone who will show the Muslim masses a path to freedom different from 19 terrorists, four hijacked jets and nearly 3,000 killed between 8:45 and 10 a.m. under a bright blue sky on Tuesday, Sept. 11, 2001, at Ground Zero in New York, the Pentagon in Washington and in Shanksville, Pa.
The attacks drafted us into a new kind of war. Our murky enemies targeted not troops or military installations, but innocent civilians going about their business on flights and in offices. The heinous perpetrators even cloaked themselves in the very freedoms they supposedly deplore while plotting murder.
The "shock and awe" invasion with which we responded was unique, too – no draft, no war taxes to pay for it, no outright media censorship, no patriotic appeal at all except to shop the economy back to health.
Conventional warfare took a back seat to tedious intelligence work – monitoring telephone calls, tracking financial transactions and shadowing suspects to infiltrate terrorist cells.
Bush was not elected for his foreign policy acumen. Sept. 11 presented him opportunity as well as crisis. His gut instinct told him not merely to retaliate, but to replace the Middle East status quo with a democratic revolution.
While Bush's objective is not wholly unrealistic, execution of the war on terror left much to be desired when imposing democracy seemed to have the opposite effect of escalating violence.
Gen. Eric Shinseki turned out to be right with his assessment it would take several hundred thousand boots on the ground to stabilize post-Saddam Iraq instead of 135,000 soldiers, who were vulnerable to simple improvised explosive devices.
Public support faded below 50 percent even before the U.S. death toll in Iraq reached 1,000. Opinion polls indicated Iraqis preferred democracy to Saddam, but the administration wasn't helped any by groundless claims of Saddam ties to alQaeda and Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.
Ironically, terrorism thrived in new Middle Eastern democracies compared to toppled dictatorships. Terrorists mostly operated out of southern Lebanon and the Israeli-occupied territories of Gaza and the West Bank, where Hezbollah and Hamas won elections. America belatedly gave victory in the Iraq-Iran war to the fundamentalist regime in Tehran. Iran stood to gain much from a democratic Iraq since it feels a kinship to the Shi'ite majority. Iran is also committed to destroying U.S. ally Israel.
Our enemies hid in plain sight, plotting not in the Middle East, but in democratic America and Europe. The terrorists entered legally, traveled freely, took flying lessons, rented apartments, got driver's licenses, opened bank accounts and made airline reservations online. Some of those who bombed the London Underground in July 2005 were British born. That's another irony of the war on terrorism, that the most likely source of another spectacular attack is not the axis of evil, but America's closest ally.
Iran President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, faced with 19-percent inflation and 15-percent unemployment, seeks debate with Bush to distract attention from rising domestic discontent. He stokes the nuclear crisis with the west to divert attention from his economy.
Let's hope Iranians keep watching their illegal satellite dishes as Hezbollah doles out fat stacks of cash to displaced Shi'ites. This spending in Lebanon infuriates ordinary Iranians and feeds Persian chauvinism that Arabs are backward and uncultured.
Only time will judge the Bush Doctrine, but we shouldn't expect the immediate gratification we demand of everything else.
Remember, not only Americans are dissatisfied and hungry for change.