March 22, 2006

Everyone's Back to Normal Now, Except the President

September 11 supposedly ushered in a new normal and changed all of us. But it appears increasingly like no American was changed more profoundly and permanently than the one in the Oval Office. If he is presently finding it more difficult to get Americans behind his agenda, it may be because the rest of us have largely changed back to our old, pre-9/11 selves – and he hasn’t.

While much of America seems to wonder when all this war stuff will be over, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that Bush is racing against time to prevent a doomsday-type scenario that will make 9/11 look like a neighborhood warehouse fire. And he believes that fundamentally transforming the world is the only way to do it.

The most recent evidence of this dichotomy may be found in the Bush Administration’s recently updated National Security Strategy document – and the predominant reaction to it. Most of the headlines concerned the president’s re-affirmation of the doctrine of pre-emption, which is supposedly controversial. A few focused on his identification of Iran as America’s gravest security threat.

All well and good, but the real meat of the document is the overriding principle of Bush’s foreign policy – his enduring belief that the global spread of democracy must be America’s primary international priority. Nothing has changed here since Bush’s second inaugural address, when he bewildered liberals and discomforted many conservatives with his declaration that America would henceforth seek to spread democracy everywhere.

Bush has believed this since 9/11. He has enunciated it consistently throughout his second term. And he has left no doubt that he sees the spread of democracy – not border security or port inspection – as the lynchpin of the war on terror.

What’s more, as the strategy makes clear, the promotion of democracy is not just for the purpose of freeing people from bondage – although that is a worthy endeavor all its own – but also to protect the free world from nuclear annihilation.

Put simply, the document declares: “We are committed to keeping the world’s most dangerous weapons out of the hands of the world’s most dangerous people.” These most dangerous people, in the view of the administration, are radical extremists who manage to get their hands on weapons, power or both. And the strategy notes that these folks don’t do this in democratic nations:

“Governments that honor their citizens’ dignity and desire for freedom tend to uphold responsible conduct toward other nations, while governments that brutalize their people also threaten the peace and stability of other nations. Because democracies are the most responsible members of the international system, promoting democracy is the most effective long-term measure for strengthening international stability; reducing regional conflicts; countering terrorism and terror-supporting extremism; and extending peace and prosperity.”

Let’s cut to the chase. Bush recognizes that nuclear proliferation is a genie that cannot be put back in the bottle. And while the national security document goes on at length about inspection regimes and control of fissile material, one senses a certain resignation to the fact that nuclear proliferation will only accelerate.

So if the spread of nukes can’t be stopped, and nukes in the hands of dangerous regimes will inevitably lead to nuclear holocaust, what is the world to do? Bush seems to believe the free world’s only hope is to expand democracy and leave as few tyrannical dictatorships as possible around the globe.

This would appear to be his essential answer to one of the left’s most often repeated criticisms of the Iraq invasion – that you can’t invade every country ruled by a tyrannical regime. True, Bush understands, so you had better find some other way to get rid of those regimes. That way, maybe you can invade the few who remain before they get nukes. (Or, perish the thought, nuke them first if they do.)

Few could deny that Bush seems a little detached from prevailing American sentiment these days – which usually leads to the predictable criticism that Bush is “out of touch.” But maybe he’s the one who’s in touch after all – with reality. In the aftermath of 9/11, most of us faced a sober moment in which we had to wrestle with the possibility that the unthinkable might indeed be thinkable. We no longer felt free to shrug off worst-case scenarios as too unlikely to worry about.

It’s been four-and-a-half years. We haven’t been attacked again. No one will say it’s OK to let our guard down, but most of us have done just that.

Bush, by contrast, seems firmly entrenched in the 9/12/01 state of mind – envisioning a far more ominous fate for America than the worst we have already seen, and acting on the belief that the establishment of as many democracies as possible, as quickly as possible, is our only chance.

An increasingly unserious nation howls because Bush is “eavesdropping” on phone conversations. Perhaps we should ask, instead, what he is hearing. Then again, if we knew what he knows, we might be forced to adopt a level of seriousness for which we show no sign of being ready.

This is Column # DC25. Request permission to publish here.