Peter Baker of the Washington Post Does It Again
Kevin Drum directs us to Laura Rozen on the Washington Post's Peter Baker:
The Washington Monthly: 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?
Why oh why can't we have a better press corps?
Here are selections from Peter Baker:
As Democracy Push Falters, Bush Feels Like a 'Dissident': By the time he arrived in Prague in June for a democracy conference, President Bush was frustrated. He had committed his presidency to working toward the goal of "ending tyranny in our world," yet the march of freedom seemed stalled. Just as aggravating was the sense that his own government was not committed to his vision.
As he sat down with opposition leaders from authoritarian societies around the world, he gave voice to his exasperation. "You're not the only dissident," Bush told Saad Eddin Ibrahim, a leader in the resistance to Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. "I too am a dissident in Washington. Bureaucracy in the United States does not help change. It seems that Mubarak succeeded in brainwashing them."
If he needed more evidence, he would soon get it. In his speech that day, Bush vowed to order U.S. ambassadors in unfree nations to meet with dissidents and boasted that he had created a fund to help embattled human rights defenders. But the State Department did not send out the cable directing ambassadors to sit down with dissidents until two months later. And to this day, not a nickel has been transferred to the fund he touted.
Two and a half years after Bush pledged in his second inaugural address to spread democracy around the world, the grand project has bogged down in a bureaucratic and geopolitical morass, in the view of many activists, officials and even White House aides. Many in his administration never bought into the idea, and some undermined it.... The story of how a president's vision is translated into thorny policy is a classic Washington tale of politics, inertia, rivalries and funding battles -- and a case study in the frustrated ambition of a besieged presidency....
Bush did not wait long after reelection in November 2004 to begin mapping his second term. Relaxing from the burdens of the campaign, he leafed through galleys of a book given to him by Tom A. Bernstein, a friend and former partner in the Texas Rangers. The book, "The Case for Democracy," was a manifesto by Natan Sharansky, the Soviet refusenik, Israeli politician and favorite of neoconservatives.
Bush found it so riveting, he asked aides to invite Sharansky to visit. The next day, nine days after the election, the author was ushered into the Oval Office. He and Bush talked about the nature of democracy and how to advance it. Bush was struck by a metaphor in the book comparing a tyrannical state to a soldier pointing a gun at a prisoner until his arms tire, he lowers the gun and the captive escapes. "Not only did he read it, he felt it," Sharansky said last week.
Within weeks, according to several aides, Bush called his chief speechwriter, Michael J. Gerson, to discuss using his second inaugural address to "plant a flag" for democracy around the world.... Such sweeping rhetoric might have generated objections from the professional diplomats at the State Department who normally review presidential addresses. "That's why you don't show them the speech," Bartlett explained....
Defiance of Bush's mandate could be subtle or brazen. The official recalled a conversation with a State Department bureaucrat over a democracy issue. "It's our policy," the official said. "What do you mean?" the bureaucrat asked. "Read the president's speech," the official said. "Policy is not what the president says in speeches," the bureaucrat replied. "Policy is what emerges from interagency meetings."...
Less than two months later, Vice President Cheney went to Lithuania to deliver the toughest U.S. indictment of Putin's leadership. But the next day, Cheney flew to oil-rich Kazakhstan and embraced its autocratic leader, Nursultan Nazarbayev, with not a word of criticism. The juxtaposition made the talk of democracy look phony and provided ammunition to the Kremlin....
"If the president was announcing a grand strategy, it doesn't look like his goals are being attained," Zelikow said...