Editorial hint

I get the opinion journal Foreign Affairs in the mail every other month or so. Not quite sure why I do – I’m certainly not paying for it – but I suspect it’s somehow tied into my Economist subscription. One of those “send him free copies for six months and then bill him” schemes, perhaps.

You’ve probably seen them laying about in offices – look more like staid gray booklets than magazines, containing submissions by sundry and various Well Educated People on the Important Topics of the Day. Very rarely does anyone actually read anything within the magazine, I suspect. Oh, we pick it up, flip a few pages, put it down somewhere conspicuous. Where the neighbors might see it, like.

Every once in a great while, someone will write something that peeks above the target audience at State or in the Poly Sci departments of state colleges throughout the country, and is highlighted, seized, shaken vigorously and then beaten to death. March/April 2006 was the chance for former CIA bureaucrat and current Georgetown University professor Paul Pillar to allege, three years after the war started and one year after he retired from “The Company” that the administration had politicized the use of intelligence prior to the war to support their hidden policy of overturning the Saddamite regime Because.

Articles like this are trumpeted probably because they appeal to the preconceptions of one or another cohort of the perpetually aggrieved set, who raise and wave it as a bloody sheet before their natural opposition bestirs themselves to pooh-pooh it all as so much self-serving stuff.

Does look good on a resume though. Contrasted to, “Yeah. Pre-war intelligence was the important thing my team and I were ever involved in and we pretty much porked it away.”

Which as a general rule, open to exceptions, is not the way to gain teaching posts at prestigious universities.
I only bring all of that up as a prelude to another article I started to read and put back down again, having finished the third paragraph with a sigh. The subject was “The Backlash Against Democracy Promotion,” by one Thomas Carothers.

This is an issue I have some concern about. To those of us convinced that democracy is the least worst form of government possible, and that, generally speaking, democracies don’t make war upon each other, we’d like to also believe that the move towards greater self-rule in the last fifty or so years is part of a moving train that has several forward gears, no reverse and ineffective brakes. But to do so would be to confuse our personal preferences with encoded inevitability, and there’s no historical reason to believe that this must be so, and some reason to be concerned that it might be false.
Carothers starts,

THE AUTOCRATS PUSH BACK

In January, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed into law a controversial new bill imposing heightened controls on local and foreign nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) operating in the country. The new legislation, which requires all NGOs in Russia to inform the government in advance about every project they intend to conduct, is another marker of the country’s dispiriting slide back toward authoritarianism.

Which is a development I believe we can all look upon with dismay, wondering all the while at the confluent events of history and personality which lead us to this moment, whether it be in post-Soviet Russia, Uzbekistan or Zimbabwe. Not to worry though, we’ll soon discover through Mr. Carothers graces the reasons why autocrats push back against diminution of their personal power – and it has little to do with forces of action and reaction apparently.

No. It’s actually the fault of – wait for it – George W. Bush.

The recent “color revolutions” in Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan and the widespread suspicion that U.S. groups such as the National Democratic Institute (NDI), the International Republican Institute (IRI), Freedom House, and the Open Society Institute played a key behind-the-scenes role in fomenting these upheavals have clearly helped trigger the backlash. Politicians from China to Zimbabwe have publicly cited concerns about such events spreading to their own shores as justification for new restrictions on Western aid to NGOs and opposition groups. Yet there is something broader at work than just a fear of orange (Ukraine’s revolution came to be known as the Orange Revolution). The way that President George W. Bush is making democracy promotion a central theme of his foreign policy has clearly contributed to the unease such efforts (and the idea of democracy promotion itself) are creating around the world. Some autocratic governments have won substantial public sympathy by arguing that opposition to Western democracy promotion is resistance not to democracy itself, but to American interventionism. Moreover, the damage that the Bush administration has done to the global image of the United States as a symbol of democracy and human rights by repeatedly violating the rule of law at home and abroad has further weakened the legitimacy of the democracy-promotion cause.

(My emphasis)

Note to Mr Carothers – If you write an article which intends to illuminate some issue, with the hope of persuading other people who might read it of your point of view, it’s useful to remember that not everyone takes it as read that the President of the United States of America is busily trampling the rule of law left, right and center. There are other defensible – not mention actually operant – schools of thought which hold that the president’s actions, whether they be incarcerating unlawful combatants in Guantanamo, knocking over threatening dictatorial regimes abroad or intercepting conversations between known terrorists and their interlocutors regardless of location are aimed at defending democracy rather than endangering it.

An ounce of tact and a pinch of skill could potentially lead people to accept his eventual, and no doubt strongly held conclusions, rather than drive them to put it all aside, and wish in vain for greater intellectual honesty among those who would look to influence opinion.

Perhaps it’s more fun to preach to the converted.