House of Paine

ignatz part one

As Thomas Jefferson lay dying 
at his hilltop estate, Monticello,
 in late June 1826,
 he wrote a letter 
telling the citizens 
of the city of Washington 
that he was too ill 
to join them 
for the 50th-anniversary celebrations 
of the Declaration of Independence.

 Wanting his letter to inspire 
the gathering,
 he told them that one day 
the experiment he 
and the founders started 
would spread to the whole world. 

''To some parts sooner, 
to others later, 
but finally to all,'' 
he wrote, 

the American form of republican
 self-government would become 
every nation's birthright.
 Democracy's worldwide triumph 
was assured, 
 because 
''the unbounded exercise 
of reason and freedom of opinion'
' would soon convince all men 
that they were born 
not to be ruled 
but to rule themselves in freedom.' 


It was the last letter he ever wrote.

 The slave-owning apostle of liberty,
 that incomparable genius and moral scandal,
 died 10 days later on July 4, 1826,
 on the same day as his old friend 
and fellow founder, John Adams. 

It's impossible to untangle 
the contradictions 
of American freedom
 without thinking about Jefferson 
and the spiritual abyss 
that separates his pronouncement
 that ''all men are created equal''
 from the reality of the human beings
 he owned, 
slept with
 and never imagined 
as fellow citizens. 


American freedom aspires 
to be universal,
 but it has always been
 exceptional
 because America 
is the only modern democratic experiment
 that began in slavery. 

From the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 
to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, 
it took a century 
for the promise of American freedom
 to even begin to be kept. 

Despite the exceptional character 
of American liberty, 
every American president 
has proclaimed America's duty 
to defend it abroad 
as the universal birthright of mankind.

 John F. Kennedy echoed Jefferson when,
 in a speech in 1961,
 he said that the spread of freedom abroad 
was powered by 
''the force of right and reason''
 but, he went on, in a sober and pragmatic vein,
 ''reason does not always appeal
 to unreasonable men.'' 

The contrast between Kennedy
 and the current incumbent 
of the White House is striking.

 Until George W. Bush,
 no American president -- 
not even Franklin Roosevelt 
or Woodrow Wilson -- 
actually risked his presidency 
on the premise that Jefferson might be right.

 But this gambler from Texas 
has bet his place in history 
on the proposition,
 as he stated in a speech in March,
 that decades of American presidents'
 ''excusing and accommodating tyranny,
 in the pursuit of stability''
 in the Middle East 
inflamed the hatred 
       of the fanatics
 who piloted the planes
 into the twin towers on Sept. 11. 

If democracy plants itself 
in Iraq and spreads throughout
 the Middle East,
 Bush will be remembered 
as a plain-speaking visionary.
 If Iraq fails, 
it will be his Vietnam,
 and nothing else will matter much 
about his time in office.

 For any president,
 it must be daunting to know already
 that his reputation depends
 on what Jefferson once called
 ''so inscrutable [an] arrangement
 of causes and consequences in this world.'' 

The consequences are more likely
 to be positive if the president 
begins to show some concern 
about the gap between 
his words and his administration's performance.

 For he runs an administration 
with the least care for consistency 
between what it says
 and does of any administration 
in modern times. 

The real money committed to
 the promotion of democracy 
in the Middle East is trifling.

 The president may have doubled 
the National Endowment for Democracy's budget
 but it is still only $80 million a year.

 But even if there were more money, 
there is such doubt in the Middle East 
that the president actually means
 what he says 
-- in the wake of 60 years
 of American presidents cozying up
 to tyrants in the region -- 

that every dollar spent on democracy
 in the Middle East
runs the risk of undermining 
the cause it supports.
 Actual Arab democrats recoil 
from the embrace of American good intentions.
 Just ask a community-affairs officer
 trying to give American dollars away
 for the promotion of democracy 
in Mosul, in northern Iraq, 
how easy it is to get anyone 
to even take the money, 
let alone spend it honestly. 

And then there are the prisoners,
 the hooded man 
with the wires hanging from his body,
 the universal icon 
of the gap between
 the ideals of American freedom 
and the sordid
 -- and criminal -- 
realities 
of American detention 
and interrogation practice.

 The fetid example
 of these abuses makes American talk 
of democracy sound hollow.
 It will not be possible
 to encourage the rule of law 
in Egypt 
if America is sending Hosni Mubarak
 shackled prisoners to torture. 
It will be impossible to secure 
democratic change in Morocco 
or Afghanistan
or anywhere else 
if Muslims believe 
that American guards desecrated the Koran. 
The failure to convict anybody 
higher than a sergeant 
for these crimes
 leaves many Americans
 and a lot of the world wondering 
whether Jefferson's vision 
of America hasn't degenerated into
 an ideology of self-congratulation,
 whose function is no longer 
to inspire but to lie. 

II. 
And yet . . . and yet. . . . 
If Jefferson's vision were only an ideology of self-congratulation, it would never have inspired Americans to do the hard work of reducing the gap between dream and reality. Think about the explosive force of Jefferson's self-evident truth. First white working men, then women, then blacks, then the disabled, then gay Americans -- all have used his words to demand that the withheld promise be delivered to them. Without Jefferson, no Lincoln, no Emancipation Proclamation. Without the slave-owning Jefferson, no Martin Luther King Jr. and the dream of white and black citizens together reaching the Promised Land. 

Jefferson's words have had the same explosive force abroad. American men and women in two world wars died believing that they had fought to save the freedom of strangers. And they were not deceived. Bill Clinton saluted the men who died at Omaha Beach with the words, ''They gave us our world.'' That seems literally true: a democratic Germany, an unimaginably prosperous Europe at peace with itself. The men who died at Iwo Jima bequeathed their children a democratic Japan and 60 years of stability throughout Asia. 

These achievements have left Americans claiming credit for everything good that has happened since, especially the fact that there are more democracies in the world than at any time in history. Jefferson's vaunting language makes appropriate historical modesty particularly hard, yet modesty is called for. Freedom's global dispersion owes less to America and more to a contagion of local civic courage, beginning with the people of Portugal and Spain who threw off dictatorship in the 1970's, the Eastern Europeans who threw off Communism in the 90's and the Georgians, Serbs, Kyrgyz and Ukrainians who have thrown off post-Soviet autocratic governments since. The direct American role in these revolutions was often slight, but American officials, spies and activists were there, too, giving a benign green light to regime change from the streets. 

This democratic turn in American foreign policy has been recent. Latin Americans remember when the American presence meant backing death squads and military juntas. Now in the Middle East and elsewhere, when the crowds wave Lebanese flags in Beirut and clamor for the Syrians to go, when Iraqi housewives proudly hold up their purple fingers on exiting the polling stations, when Afghans quietly line up to vote in their villages, when Egyptians chant ''Enough!'' and demand that Mubarak leave power, few Islamic democrats believe they owe their free voice to America. But many know that they have not been silenced, at least not yet, because the United States actually seems, for the first time, to be betting on them and not on the autocrats. 

In the cold war, most presidents opted for stability at the price of liberty when they had to choose. This president, as his second Inaugural Address made clear, has soldered stability and liberty together: ''America's vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one.'' As he has said, ''Sixty years of Western nations excusing and accommodating the lack of freedom in the Middle East did nothing to make us safe -- because in the long run stability cannot be purchased at the expense of liberty.'' 

It is terrorism that has joined together the freedom of strangers and the national interest of the United States. But not everyone believes that democracy in the Middle East will actually make America safer, even in the medium term. Thomas Carothers of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, for one, has questioned the ''facile assumption that a straight line exists between progress on democratization and the elimination of the roots of Islamic terrorism.'' In the short term, democratization in Egypt, for example, might only bring the radical Muslim Brotherhood to power. Even in the medium term, becoming a democracy does not immunize a society from terrorism. Just look at democratic Spain, menaced by Basque terrorism. 

Moreover, proclaiming freedom to be God's plan for mankind, as the president has done, does not make it so. There is, as yet, no evidence of a sweeping tide of freedom and democracy through the Middle East. Lebanon could pitch from Syrian occupation into civil strife; Egypt might well re-elect Mubarak after a fraudulent exercise in pseudodemocracy; little Jordan hopes nobody will notice that government remains the family monopoly of the Hashemite dynasty; Tunisia remains a good place for tourists but a lousy place for democrats; democratic hopes are most alive in Palestine, but here the bullet is still competing with the ballot box. Over it all hangs Iraq, poised between democratic transition and anarchy
And yet . . . and yet. . . . More than one world leader has been heard to ask his advisers recently, ''What if Bush is right?'' 

III. 
Other democratic leaders may suspect Bush is right, but that doesn't mean they are joining his crusade. Never have there been more democracies. Never has America been more alone in spreading democracy's promise. 

The reticence extends even to those nations that owe their democracy to American force of arms. Freedom in Germany was an American imperial imposition, from the cashiering of ex-Nazi officials and the expunging of anti-Semitic nonsense from school textbooks to the drafting of a new federal constitution. Yet Chancellor Gerhard Schroder can still intone that democracy cannot be ''forced upon these societies from the outside.'' This is not the only oddity. As Thomas Kleine-Brockhoff of the German weekly Die Zeit points out, the '68-ers now in power in Germany all spent their radical youth denouncing American support for tyrannies around the world: ''Across the Atlantic they shouted: Pinochet! Somoza! Mubarak! Shah Pahlevi! King Faisal! Now it seems as though an American president has finally heard their complaints. . . . But what is coming out of Germany? . . . Nothing but deafening silence!'' 

The deafening silence extends beyond Germany. Like Germany, Canada sat out the war in Iraq. Ask the Canadians why they aren't joining the American crusade to spread democracy, and you get this from their government's recent foreign-policy review: ''Canadians hold their values dear, but are not keen to see them imposed on others. This is not the Canadian way.'' One reason it is not the Canadian way is that when American presidents speak of liberty as God's plan for mankind, even God-fearing Canadians wonder when God began disclosing his plan to presidents. 

The same discomfort with the American project extends to the nation that, in the splendid form of the Marquis de Lafayette, once joined the American fight for freedom. The French used to talk about exporting Liberté, Egalité et Fraternité, but nowadays they don't seem to mind standing by and watching Iraqi democrats struggling to keep chaos and anarchy at bay. Even America's best friend, Tony Blair, is circumspect about defining the Iraq project as anything more than managing the chaos. The strategy unit at 10 Downing Street recently conducted a study on how to prevent future international crises: debt relief, overseas aid and humanitarian intervention were all featured, but the promotion of democracy and freedom barely got a mention. European political foundations and overseas development organizations do promote free elections and rule of law, but they bundle up these good works in the parlance of ''governance'' rather than in the language of spreading freedom and democracy. So America presides over a loose alliance of democracies, most of whose leaders think that promoting freedom and democracy is better left to the zealous imperialists in Washington. 

The charge that promoting democracy is imperialism by another name is baffling to many Americans. How can it be imperialist to help people throw off the shackles of tyranny? 

It may be that other nations just have longer memories of their own failed imperial projects. From Napoleon onward, France sought to export French political virtues, though not freedom itself, to its colonies. The British Empire was sustained by the conceit that the British had a special talent for government that entitled them to spread the rule of law to Kipling's ''lesser breeds.'' In the 20th century, the Soviet Union advanced missionary claims about the superiority of Soviet rule, backed by Marxist pseudoscience. 

What is exceptional about the Jefferson dream is that it is the last imperial ideology left standing in the world, the sole survivor of national claims to universal significance. All the others -- the Soviet, the French and the British -- have been consigned to the ash heap of history. This may explain why what so many Americans regard as simply an exercise in good intentions strikes even their allies as a delusive piece of hubris. 

The problem here is that while no one wants imperialism to win, no one in his right mind can want liberty to fail either. If the American project of encouraging freedom fails, there may be no one else available with the resourcefulness and energy, even the self-deception, necessary for the task. Very few countries can achieve and maintain freedom without outside help. Big imperial allies are often necessary to the establishment of liberty. As the Harvard ethicist Arthur Applbaum likes to put it, ''All foundings are forced.'' Just remember how much America itself needed the assistance of France to free itself of the British. Who else is available to sponsor liberty in the Middle East but America? Certainly the Europeans themselves have not done a very distinguished job defending freedom close to home. 
During the cold war, while most Western Europeans tacitly accepted the division of their continent, American presidents stood up and called for the walls to come tumbling down. When an anonymous graffiti artist in Berlin sprayed the wall with a message -- ''This wall will fall. Beliefs become reality'' -- it was President Reagan, not a European politician, who seized on those words and declared that the wall ''cannot withstand faith; it cannot withstand truth. The wall cannot withstand freedom.'' 

This is why much of the European support for Bush in Iraq came from the people who had grown up behind that wall. It wasn't just the promise of bases and money and strategic partnerships that tipped Poles, Romanians, Czechs and Hungarians into sending troops; it was the memory that when the chips were down, in the dying years of Soviet tyranny, American presidents were there, and Western European politicians looked the other way. 

It is true that Western Europe has had a democracy-promotion project of its own since the wall came down: bringing the fledgling regimes of Eastern Europe into the brave new world of the European Union. This very real achievement has now been delayed by the ''no'' votes in France and the Netherlands. Sponsoring the promotion of democracy in the East and preparing an Islamic giant, Turkey, for a later entry is precisely what the referendum votes want to stop. So who will be there to prevent Islamic fundamentalism or military authoritarianism breaking through in Turkey now that the Europeans have told the Turks to remain in the waiting room forever? If democracy within requires patrons without, the only patron left is the United States