The Trouble with Saving the World
	When President Bush says he wants to spread peace and democracy around the globe, he deserves to be taken seriously. One cautionary note: we've been here before
	By Michael Elliott

Posted Sunday, December 22, 2002; 4:31 a.m. EST
The American President stood for those things that had come to define his nation. Its armed forces were the best equipped and most disciplined in the world; their fighting spirit had just been the decisive factor in ending a war. The American economy was the largest and most technologically advanced on the planet, brimming with broad-shouldered vitality. Perhaps above all, the President thought big; he had grand, expansive ideas of how the world might be ordered to increase human security and happiness, and he cast these thoughts not in terms of some narrow set of American interests but as universal truths applicable to all nations and all problems. In international affairs, he lived by a clear identification of what was good and what was evil, and he believed in inclining American policy so that it supported the former; he was a great believer in moral clarity.

All of which, to many of those who had to deal with him, made him a royal pain. The British Prime Minister thought the President behaved like a heathen come to rescue the missionaries. The French Prime Minister, exasperated by the President's airs, said that talking to him was like talking to Jesus Christ. Europeans found the President ignorant; he was, said the leading public intellectual of the time, not just "ill-informed" but "slow and unadaptable." The central problem, this observer believed, was that the President's "thought and his temperament were essentially theological not intellectual, with all the strength and the weakness of that manner of thought, feeling and expression." It was not George W. Bush he was describing but Woodrow Wilson. When Wilson set off for the peace conference in Paris at the end of World War I, he was, said John Maynard Keynes (the source of the waspish comments above) endowed with a "prestige and a moral influence throughout the world unequaled in history."

Conventional wisdom holds that he wasted these assets. As Margaret MacMillan documents in her new history, Paris 1919, Wilson's commitments to self-determination, democracy and nation building (although the phrase was not then in vogue) were frequently frustrated at the peace conference by Europeans interested mainly in land grabs. After he returned from Paris, writes Michael Mandelbaum in his recent book, The Ideas That Conquered the World, Wilson's negotiations with those Senators who thought that membership in the League of Nations would endanger American independence were "a masterpiece of political incompetence." Among the more hard-nosed realist practitioners of American statecraft—the sort of folk who have found a natural home in the Bush Administration—it has long been fashionable to deride Wilson as a fuzzy dreamer. In a January 2000 article in Foreign Affairs, Condoleezza Rice, who would become Bush's National Security Adviser, sniffed, with obvious disapproval, that there were "strong echoes" of "Wilsonian thought" in the Clinton Administration.

Yet here's the odd thing. Nearly 80 years after his death, it is Wilson's belief in peace, democracy and prosperity through trade and free markets that has come to define the aspirations of humankind. Communism and fascism, once rivals to liberal democracy, now seem no more than horrifying museum pieces. Even more surprisingly, a sort of muscular Wilsonianism has found a welcoming home in the White House. Bush, like Wilson, wants to remake the world.

In a series of speeches since Sept. 11, 2001, the President has shaped a "Bush doctrine" that commits the U.S. to do everything it can—including unilateral, pre-emptive military action—to eradicate international terrorism, reform the nations that support it and neutralize rogue states that seek to possess weapons of mass destruction. Much commentary on the Bush doctrine has stressed its toughness—the way, for example, that the Administration claims the right to take military action on its own, without U.N. sanction. All of this is said to be of a piece with the Administration's supposed arrogance in international affairs, with its claims that the Kyoto accord on global warming or the treaty on the International Criminal Court should not apply to the sole superpower.

Yet in the grand sweep of history, Bush's ambition is Wilsonian, motivated by high ideals. He has called for an independent, democratic Palestine, the first American President ever to do so; he has said he wants Iraq to be a model democracy for the Middle East. In his speech to the graduating class at West Point last June, Bush made his case explicitly. "Our nation's cause," he said, "has always been larger than our nation's defense. We fight for a just peace—a peace that favors human liberty. We will defend the peace against threats from terrorists and tyrants. We will preserve the peace by building good relations among the great powers. And we will extend the peace by encouraging free and open societies on every continent." Wilson could not have put it better.

Now: journalists are wisely trained to take such phrases with a healthy dose of skepticism. Silver-penned speechwriters can put any sentiments they like into their master's voice. Plenty of people, in the U.S. and outside it, think Bush's fine words about liberty and openness are lies; the war against terrorism and the contest with Iraq, they think, are all about oil, or protecting Israel, or completing his Dad's unfinished business. Suggestions that the Administration is genuinely committed, say, to building democracy in the Middle East, are treated as a bit of a joke. And it is an open secret that this Administration is split. Even if Bush believes that nation building and extending a "just peace" is a priority, it is not clear that all his colleagues do. Here's one measure: the Pentagon seems so little concerned about supporting the new Afghan government that it handed off its contract to provide security to President Hamid Karzai—who was nearly assassinated in September—to DynCorp Inc., a private firm in Virginia. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld once spoke of the land in the West Bank and Gaza Strip on which Bush wants to see a Palestinian state as the "so called" occupied territories. Vice President Dick Cheney has always given the impression he believes that the world, far from being ready for Jeffersonian democracy, is a dark and threatening place, as if he carried a misanthropic scar from his Wyoming past like a character in a Sam Shepard play.

But Bush himself deserves to be taken seriously. It would have been perfectly defensible, after Sept. 11, 2001, for him to justify American policy by means of a narrow definition of the need to protect the nation from an external threat. But in speech after speech, the President has cast his goals in much broader terms. A European diplomat who has often seen Bush speak to other world leaders says, "He has a sense of mission that good should triumph over evil. He really believes in bringing democracy to the Middle East; he thinks he can make a real historical difference there."

The Bush Administration did not come into office intent on changing the world. "There is nothing wrong with doing something that benefits all humanity," wrote Rice in her Foreign Affairs article, with the air of a martinet schoolmarm lecturing her students, "but that is, in a sense, a second-order effect." Bush himself, when a candidate for the presidency, seemed leery about pushing American values on other countries. His Administration, he said in a 2000 presidential debate, would not "go around the world saying, 'We do it this way, so should you.'" But Sept. 11 changed everything. The attacks on that day underscored how some nations had resisted the seductive call of peace, democracy and freedom—and that we had paid for the resistance. The Administration, says Mandelbaum, "has decided that the cause of Sept. 11 lies in the failure of our ideals to take root in the Arab world."

That failure is stunning. The Arab lands lie at the heart of an arc of crisis from Marrakech to Bangladesh. Autocracies, often dynastic, remain the principal form of government; economies are stagnant; violence is a common way of resolving political debate. Last summer the U.N. Development Programme commissioned a panel of regional experts to write an Arab Human Development Report. It was perhaps the most important volume published in 2002. "The wave of democracy that transformed governance in most of Latin America and East Asia in the 1980s and Eastern Europe and much of Central Asia in the late 1980s and early 1990s," the report stated, "has barely reached the Arab states. More than half of Arab women are still illiterate. Only 0.6% of the population uses the Internet. The quality of public institutions is low. One out of every five people lives on less than $2 per day. Poor or unavailable health care or opportunities for a quality education, a degraded habitat: all are widely prevalent in Arab countries."

What the report did not say—though it should have—was that others were now being hurt, killed, as a consequence of the Arab world's self-inflicted wounds. It would, after all, have been possible to write a similarly gloomy tome on Central Africa. The Arab world's failure is noteworthy not because of its scale, but because on Sept. 11 it spilled out of its natural confines and into metropolitan America. With no legitimate channels for political discourse, Arabs have suffered from what Queen Rania of Jordan calls a "hope gap." For some, that gap has been filled by a passionate commitment to a superfundamentalist strain of Islam, one that visits no sanction against indiscriminate violence in its name. To hope to combat the threat from such violence, it is not enough to toughen up the defense of the American homeland. What is needed, rather, is a Wilsonian project to assist the development of peace, democracy and prosperity in the Middle East. And that is what Bush has promised.

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