Is democracy for Middle East an over reach?

Danial Henniger:

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It is getting harder to distinguish between animosity toward George Bush and animosity toward the entire American enterprise beyond the nation's borders. As Norman Podhoretz delineated in the September issue of Commentary, columns and articles in journals of foreign policy are equating the tsunami of negativity rolling over Iraq with repudiation of the Bush Doctrine in toto.

One might have expected most of the disagreement to center on the doctrine's assertion of a right to pre-emptive attack. Instead, Iraq's troubles have been conflated with a general repudiation of the U.S.'s ability to abet democratic aspiration elsewhere in the world.

It is certainly possible that the Iraq effort will, in some obvious sense, "fail." Henry Kissinger now says "victory," defined as an Iraqi government gaining political control over the entire country, is not possible. But we might want to think some before we toss out the infant Bush Doctrine with the Iraqi bathwater.

As stated, the doctrine's strategy is "to help make the world not just safer but better." Some conservatives have denounced the "better world" part as utopian overstretch. Beyond that, the document lists as its goals the aspirations of human dignity, strengthening alliances to "defeat" terrorism, working with others to defuse regional conflicts, promoting global growth through free markets and trade and "opening societies and building the infrastructure of democracy."

It is mainly the latter--the notion of the U.S. building the "infrastructure of democracy" that now, because of the "failure" in Iraq, attracts opposition across the political spectrum--from John Kerry to George Will and on out to neoconservatives confessing loss of faith in the Bush team to the unforgiving ear of Vanity Fair.

No doubt each of these has declared unfealty to the Bush effort for more or less honorable reasons. But someone ought to step back and consider the cumulative political effect of what of late has turned into an unrestrained gang-stomping of the sort normally seen at Miami-Florida International football games. We are ensuring that no future president, of either party, will project military power anytime soon short of retaliation for a nuclear attack. Every potential presidential candidate, including John McCain, has to be looking at the Bush administration's experience and concluding there is simply no political upside in doing so. We are backing the country's political mind into the long-term parking lot of isolationism, something fervently wished for at opposite ends of the U.S. political spectrum.

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Our real problem in Iraq has been a timetable that has pushed too many Iraqis into an example of the Peter Principal. They have quickly risen to their level of incompetence, and keep demonstrating it on a daily basis. Before the turnover to the new Iraqi government, the insurgency was visibly losing badly. In fact the insurgents have still written off their campaign in almost all of Iraq. They are maintaining visibility by continuing to kill non combatants mainly in Baghdad where the media ads incentive to their campaign by giving them the attention that the strikes are intended to achieve.

If there were no media coverage of these events there would be no military reason to engage in mass murder. What coverage there is should be directed toward the wickedness of the enemy and his blatant violations of the Geneva Conventions. Have you seen one word about these violations in any story on mass murder in Sadr City on Thanksgiving? No, all the stories follow the enemy script of tut tutting the Iraqi government and the US for not being able to stop the murders without even a hint of criticism of the wickedness of the al Qaeda bombers. The compliant media is al Qaeda's best ally.