According to the Peter Baker’s article “As Democracy Push Falters, Bush Feels Like a ‘Dissident’” in the Washington Post, Bush’s democracy promotion efforts have been hampered by the ole’ Washington bureaucracy. The first six paragraphs of Baker’s article set up the argument that Bush’s plan to “spread democracy around the world… has [been] bogged down in a bureaucratic and geopolitical morass.” Baker states that officials within the administration, including Cheney have “undermined” the president’s “grand project.” He describes the crux of the problem as translating “vision” into “thorny policy.” In conclusion, democracy promotion is tainted by its association with the Bush administration he suggests, citing a Republican presidential candidate’s response to whether he agreed with Bush’s vision: “Absolutely not, because I don’t think we can force people to accept our way of life, our way of government.”

Of course, democracy promotion has very little to do with forcing anyone to accept our way of life or our way of government. If it were, democracy promotion would be called democracy compulsion and that is not what it is or what it was meant to be. In fact, the above quotation has little to do with democracy promotion and a lot to do with regime change and the U.S.’s experiences in Iraq. But regime change is not democracy promotion, so let’s not help our friends in the Kremlin, other autocrats, and aspiring autocrats by perpetuating a myth that suggests otherwise.

The broader argument embraced by Baker suffers from a similar disease; rebroadcasting Bush’s foolhardy rhetoric. The introduction accepts Bush’s claim that he is a democracy promoter and friend of dissidents, if not a dissident himself. It should not be overlooked that Bush had the chutzpah to make such a claim to Saad Eddin Ibrahim (because Kennebunkport is exactly like an Egyptian prison…). Baker, rather than questioning, jumps on the bandwagon: “If [Ibrahim] needed more evidence, he would soon get it,” citing Bush’s pledge to create a fund to help “embattled human rights defenders.” Baker blames the State Department for not implementing Bush’s words, stating that “not a nickel has been transferred to the fund…” Of course, it’s easy to set up a fund without allocating any new money for it. It would have been helpful if Baker told us the source of this transfer money. After all, how are we to gauge whether Bush’s promise is meaningful? It’s easy to pledge money, but it’s much more difficult to actually “show” the money.

But this is not a story about bureaucracy poisoning a president’s visionary approach to foreign policy. Bureaucracy is bureaucracy and always will be. Most of the evidence proposed by Baker suggests that Bush poisoned his own democracy promotion efforts by championing a cause through rhetoric while pledging very different allegiances through deed. But how can I say such a thing when Bush has talked about democracy promotion a billion times, made it a centerpiece of his foreign policy, created the Millennium Challenge Account (MCA), etc. ???

Policy is not just about what you do do, but about what else you do (and ‘forget’ to mention), and what you do not do. As far as democracy promotion goes, one thing that Bush does not do is allow politics to take a back seat to policy. We have seen this with the MCA, which is intended to reward countries that govern well with money for programs that will help them govern well-er. But, the board of the Millennium Challenge Corporation which oversees the Account, makes the final decision as to which countries qualify for funding. While this setup is justifiable, in practice, the criteria that were supposed to determine who gets paid – political openness, rule of law, and corruption – have not mattered very much. How else could countries like Yemen receive MCA money? It’s certainly not through President Saleh’s embrace of democratic values.

Sticking with the theme of what you don’t do and what else you do do, I’ll draw on two statements from Baker’s article to question whether Bush really is a dedicated democracy promoter. According to Baker, Lorne W. Craner of the International Republican Institute has said: “‘I don’t think the bureaucracy was reorganized to follow up on the policy. The architecture has not yet been configured to realize the president’s promise.’” This is a very telling assertion because grand visions take grand mechanisms to carry them out. Go tell me how many people were added to USAID’s staff in the wake of September 11th. The answer is zero: which is a lot fewer than the amount of additional dollars that USAID was responsible for overseeing as part of its democracy promotion work. If Bush was dedicated to democracy promotion, he would have been eager to create real mechanisms to carry out his policies. Bush did give us MEPI, but he has also politicized nearly all of the major donor organizations and turned the U.S. badge into kryptonite.

The second piece of evidence from the Baker article suggesting that Bush isn’t really all that concerned with democracy comes from Richard A. Boucher, his Assistant Secretary of State. Boucher concedes that democracy promotion is just one element of a broader foreign relations effort: “We have to work on an overall relationship… The issue of democracy is not to be able to denounce people. The issue is to make progress.” Although an obvious statement, should we wonder if Bush is a dissident when he is working on these ‘overall relationships?’ Or is he just a dissident when he is talking to Saad Eddin Ibrahim? Because all this switching hats tends to sully one’s message after a while, and, just perhaps, this could be part of what has caused the “bureaucratic and geopolitical morass” that’s getting in the way of Bush’s real agenda.

In truth, the Bush team relies heavily on realpolitik in foreign policy with a façade of democratic ideological. Policy-wise, this has translated into spurning democratic rights at home and abroad in the name of national security. To be sure, democracy is about balancing rights and individual freedoms with competing values such as national security. But in practice, Bush almost always opts for security over democracy, rendering his dedication to democracy promotion just slightly questionable. Or perhaps Baker can ask Ibrahim and the rest of the world’s dissidents what they think. After all, they might suggest, if Bush were so attached to democracy why has he supported or tacitly supported several coups against democratic leaders? Why is Ayman Nour jailed (for a second time) and his health in question? Why did Laura Bush praise the Mubarak regime a week before it pushed through a sham constitutional referendum to thwart the only viable opposition in the country (and one that was playing by the rules)? Why, as Baker points out, has Bush cut the budget for democracy programs in a number of countries? Why does Dick Cheney prance around the world pledging support for oil-crats (Baker catches this one too)? How about our relationships with regimes such as that in Pakistan which signal to the real dissidents that we prefer the status quo to a democratic regime that doesn’t like us?

Behind Bush’s feigned dedication to democracy promotion is the very real fact, as Boucher notes, that foreign policy requires the use of a variety of tools to get other countries to work towards common goals. Sometimes, unfortunately, this means going against the grain of democracy. Bush, for example prefers to talk about democracy and throw money to whoever will help his “War on Terror” (just ask Egypt, Jordan, Pakistan, etc.) So just because you can list a bunch of seemingly good things that the administration has done to support democracy does not mean that an equally sizable list of things that the administration has done (or not done) to undermine democracy and democratic reform. I had the pleasure of listening to a State Department official in Morocco read a list of positives in a staunch monotone that underscored accurately how monotonous and frustrating the argument is that the Bush administration is dedicated to democracy. Bush’s policies and his with-us-or-against-us attitude have marginalized leftists and leftist democrats throughout the Muslim world who would like to be with us, but cannot gain traction on a pro-U.S. platform.

In short, I’m arguing that the Bush administration simply pretends to be ideologically wedded to democracy. However, democratic politics requires compromise, rending ideological obstinacy – even when the ideology is pro-democratic – antithetical to policy making in democratic polities and in international relations. If you need evidence that ideology is not all it’s cracked up to be, just ask any of the major non-violent Islamist political parties in the Middle East, practically all of which have swung to the center in the past 5 years and begun to work with U.S. government funded institutions.

Bush is a fair weather democrat, just like our Islamist counterparts. So why not put on the dissident hat for the next 13 months (but whose counting?) and try to give some meaning to the rhetoric?