Democracy Does Not Guarantee Freedom

One of the most humbling realizations to come about in the years following 9/11 is that Democracy does not necessarily guarantee freedom, nor does it produce governments sympathetic to the U.S. In fact, many of the governments that are seemingly our most critical allies in the Middle East are such dictatorial governments as Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt, and Pakistan, all of whom experience massive anti-Western demonstrations on their city streets weekly. In Egypt alone, the government supports hostile civilian campaign ads against the West, sometimes allowing its civilians to erect large billboards that show burning American flags.

Yet, to be fair, as Foreign Affairs Gregory Gause III has pointed out, "There is no evidence that states ruled by dictators produce more terrorists or more terrorism than democracies." Though note that 17 out of the 19 highjackers on 9/11 were from Saudi Arabia, our "ally." And yet, to be even more fair, the U.S. has bred its own share of homegrown terrorists, Timothy McVeigh and Ted Kaczynski, among many others.

However, what much of this exposes is America's hypocritical foreign policies, being that although we promote democracy all over the world and feel it is the only pathway toward freedom, we don't mind dictators as long as they do what the U.S. wants. Now, I know I'm running the risk of sounding extremely left, but this isn't necessarily a left or right issue. It is a matter of realizing the dangerous game we are playing in the Middle East that is giving rise to a new generation of terrorists that will come to idealize the U.S. as nothing more than a nation of evil imperialists. The National Intelligence Estimate released on September 26, 2006 states as much.

And that alone scares me, especially in the nuclear age.

During a 1997 Southern California stop at Chaffey College, I had the chance as a then nascent reporter for the Chaffey Breeze to talk with president Clinton about his thoughts on the first Trade Center bombings. I asked the president what scared him most about that day. His response was, "What scares me most is America's vulnerability to acts of terrorism. We never thought this could happen on U.S. soil." It is America's vulnerability that is so enticing to terrorists, and as long as we remain a free society, and our foreign policies in the Middle East continue on the destructful path they are heading, America will never be safer. Thus, everything the Bush administration has done over the last five years, everything they claim has made us safer, is bogus. We are just as vulnerable today as we were in 1993, 1998, 2000, and 2001, and there is nothing the Bush administration, or any administration at that, can do that will keep us safe.

However, as Gary Hart has pointed out in his book the Fourth Power, the U.S. can be a very attractive country. As he theorized, it may be possble to win the world over by using our most critical weapon, American virtues. America means something by virtue of its distinct democratic, tolerant and egalitarian values which should be the basis of American foreign policy, not fabricated wars to force democracy down the throat of a people hostile to the U.S. Although ostensibly naive as Hart's view is, it is a healthy alternative to a "War on Terror" that has no end in sight, and has become the white elephant that is draining the U.S. economy, and killing and maiming thousands of American soldiers.