Each Vote Strikes at Terror
The teleprompter providing President Bush with his second inaugural address had scarcely gone blank before American and European commentators turned to dismissing his calls for a "war against tyranny" and progress toward universal democracy as naive, dogmatic, overstated and a recipe for chaos in U.S. foreign policy.
The White House sought to meet these objections by pointing out that a statement of values was not a straitjacket and that U.S. foreign policy would promote these values in a nuanced, flexible and strategic way. So the criticism shifted. Bush was no longer a feckless naif: He was an arch-cynical hypocrite. Clearly, this president can't please some of the people any of the time, but beyond Bush's PR problems lie some bigger questions.
Does democracy matter in a war on terrorism? Is democracy gaining or losing ground in the world today? Can it work everywhere, or does it work only in certain cultures and regions? Can U.S. foreign policy make significant contributions to democracy's spread? On the whole, the answers support the idea that, whether or not the Bush administration knows how to do it, the promotion of democracy abroad can be a positive and practical element of U.S. foreign policy.
Let's start with the relationship between terrorism and democracy -- a complex one. Weimar Germany, after all, was a democracy before Adolf Hitler took power, and political assassinations and terror attacks roiled that unhappy society. Election violence in countries such as Jamaica (not to mention Iraq) suggests that, under some circumstances, democracy becomes a focus for terrorism as armed groups try to affect the outcome of elections. The IRA in Ulster and the Basque terrorists in Spain show that terrorism can infest even well-established democracies. Closer to home, Timothy McVeigh's attack in Oklahoma City and the history of the Ku Klux Klan suggest that democratic societies are not immune to homegrown terrorism.
Still, the signs point to a significant connection between tyranny and terrorism. According to one study, 70% of all deaths because of terrorism from 1999 to 2003 were caused by terrorist groups from nondemocratic countries. Other researchers have similar findings, and although, as economist Jeff Faux points out, "if you torture a statistic long enough, it will confess to anything," these studies are at least straws in the wind.
