Mark Phillips: The American Question

11/06/03: Neoconservativism and the GDR.

Wounded Iraqi demonstrator, 8/10/03.

President Bush today articulated at length a new narrative situating the War on Islam within a broader context.

President Bush today portrayed the war in Iraq as the latest front in the "global democratic revolution" led by the United States. The revolution under former president Ronald Reagan freed the people of Soviet-dominated Europe, he declared, and is destined now to liberate the Middle East as well.

In a speech to the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) described as a major policy address by the White House, Bush avoided issues such as preemptive attack, weapons of mass destruction and "gathering" dangers to the United States. Rather, he put the war in a broader context of the "2,500-year old story of democracy," in the same tradition as the "military and moral" American commitments to restoring democracy to post-War Germany, to protecting Greece from Communism during the Cold War and combating communist domination in Latin America, Europe and Asia, including, he said explicitly, Vietnam.

Bush's NED speech reflected the views of a generation of neo-conservative thinkers and government leaders, who support U.S. activism in spreading democratic government and free markets to those parts of the world that have yet to adopt them.

This narrative inherently contradicts itself. Democracy is not something which can be imposed at bayonet point.

Does self-contradiction diminish its power?

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