Democracy as an impossibly high hurdle

What does "democracy" mean to the Bush Administration? Is the Bush Administration being naively idealistic in seemingly equating the word "democracy" with sugar and spice and everything nice: not just majority rule, but also rule of law, protection of minorities, independent judiciary, federalism, human rights, settled distribution of property, in other words, the whole apparatus of civilized government.

Or is it being cynical? This broad definition of democratic allows it to declare any country's democracy glass to be half full ... or half empty.

Many of the Bush Administration's strategic concepts have come from Israel. Most famously, his recent obsession with "democracy" comes in large measure from reading Natan Sharansky's new book. Sharansky is a former housing minister of Israel, with strong ties to the settler movement. His book saying that the solution to the Israel-Palestine problem is for Palestine to become a democracy is widely seen as idealistic, but a more cynical interpretation is that Sharansky is trying to set the bar so high that Israel will never have to deal with the Palestinians and can continue their settlements in the West Bank indefinitely.

Along very much those lines, Ariel Sharon's closest advisor Dov Weisglass, who is Sharon's point man in dealing with the Bush Administration gave a fascinating interview to Ha'aretz newspaper in Israel last fall where he boasted:

"There will be no timetable to implement the settler's nightmare. I have postponed that nightmare indefinitely. Because what I effectively agreed to with the Americans was that part of the settlements would not be dealt with at all, and the rest will not be dealt with until the Palestinians turn into Finns... With the proper management we succeeded in removing the issue of the political process from the agenda. And we educated the world to understand that there is no one to talk to. And we received a no-one-to-talk-to certificate. That certificate says: (1) There is no one to talk to. (2) As long as there is no one to talk to, the geographic status quo remains intact. (3) The certificate will be revoked only when this-and-this happens - when Palestine becomes Finland. (4) See you then, and shalom."

Obviously, the Palestinians aren't going to turn into Finns, anytime soon, so the West Bank settlements aren't going anywhere. Even though the Palestinians recently held a moderately fair and free election of their new leader Abbas, they are still years, decades, centuries away from Finnish standards of democracy.

Similarly, the Bush Administration can use it's "democracy" crusade to define any foreign government it dislikes as illegitimate. Jim Hoagland writes in the Washington Post:

" Years of American fumbling for a workable approach toward the hostile theocratic regime in Tehran have yielded only a single sentence as agreed Bush policy. The sentence, which Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice delivered in fancy dress to the Europeans during her current travels, comes down to this: The United States will take no action that extends legitimacy to the ayatollahs in Iran."

Iran is not a terribly democratic country, but it's dramatically more democratic than many others that the Bush Administration is copacetic with, such as China. But that's not good enough for the Bush Administration, conveniently enough.