DEMOCRACY DEMOTION….Peter Baker has a big article in today’s Washington Post suggesting that the failure of George Bush’s democracy promotion agenda is largely due to resistance from bureaucrats in the State Department and elsewhere. Laura Rozen is decidedly unimpressed:
The piece left out so many big examples of the contradictions — Musharraf/Pakistan, Saudi Arabia whose corrupt royal family is so close to the White House and Cheney’s office, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt — of where Bush has decided he isn’t quite sure he really wants democratic realities to be realized, and he just may prefer the tyrant, as Cheney openly does in Kazakhstan and Saudi Arabia.
….How would we know if Bush were really serious about democracy? If he told Riyadh to stuff it. That’s never going to happen, so we can rest assured that Bush is quite content to live with the art of the possible, with a very high degree of realism, and any griping about the bureaucrats is something journalists should know better than to accept as more than a wink-nod excuse for the president’s own decisions to compromise his vision of promoting democracy when it suits him.
Serious enough for you?
