On SOTU
The president's SOTU address the other night was extraordinarily striking on a few levels. As I observed, during the domestic policy portion of the speech, Bush was smiling from ear-to-ear a great deal. I guess he should be smiling, given the momentous event in world history that he precipitated. On top of that, he also made the entire "doubting Thomas" bloc of the American (and world) intelligentsia look positively foolish. (I must confess that I'm still very wary of where things will go in Iraq's new government, for the the prospects for ethnic and tribal strife are still great. I'm hopeful they'll be ironed out, but "cautious optimism" is the watch-phrase.) By my observations, I'm pretty sure Cheney was having a hard time containing a smirk during SOTU as well. Hell, this has been some three months, never mind week. After having everything hurled at them, the guys at the top of this administration are still standing. That's an achievement in and of itself.
The most impressive part of Bush's speech (and at this point his expression became more of a scowl than a smirk) was the foreign policy outline. BY NAME, Bush ticked off the following nations, admonishing them for their lack of democratic freedoms, or worse yet, their indulgence in terrorism: Iran, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon (occupied by 30,000 Syrian troops; used by Hezbollah as a training and staging area), Egypt, North Korea, and Saudi Arabia. Mind you, he didn't lump all of the above into one excrable grouping. Iran, Syria, and North Korea had the most forceful language thrown in its direction, and rightly so, for they are by far the most odious and threatening republics in the world right now. But the lack of democratic expression in Jordan, Egypt, and particularly Saudi Arabia is also noteworthy. How long can this game of "blame America/blame Israel" cover up for the internal corruption and failed governance within these nations? How long can the state-controlled government paper over governmental shortcomings endemic to regimes where the people have no say at all? And the key question here is, how much do the citizens of these odious republics (and kingdoms) realize this? My guess is that they realized this a long time ago, and they stopped caring a long time ago, because no one cared about their plight. How long will dissidents be jailed, tortured, or executed for voicing their dissatisfaction and unhappiness? No job prospects for degreed citizenry, governments that could care less about said citizenry, and bloated autocrats getting fat off the foreign aid and oil revenues....not a recipe for long-term viability. Two nights ago, the president recognized their collective plights and singled their governments out by name. Mark my words, the effect will be seismic.
Words Matter
It is virtually impossible to correctly gauge the Bush Administration's approach to foreign policy without reading Natan Sharansky's The Case for Democracy. The Bush agenda of "export democracy" is clearly motivated by the key points within the book, the most salient of which is that you cannot make peace with governments that wage war on their own people. Bush, like Reagan before him with the Soviet Union, singled out by name the most repressive regimes in the Middle East and Asia. Like Reagan before him, Bush's rhetoric has been dismissed as unecessarily inflammatory and counter-productive. However, Bush...again like Reagan before him, understands that the populations within these repressive nations are willing receptors for this kind of rhetoric, and might just take his rhetoric and turn it into action. Sharansky, who was jailed for nine years as a Soviet dissident, outlines the impact of Reagan's "evil empire" speech as thus:
One day, my Soviet jailers gave me the privilege of reading the latest copy of Pravda. Splashed across the front page was a condemnation of President Reagan for having the temerity to call the Soviet Union an "evil empire". Tapping on the walls and talking through toilets, words of Reagan's "provocation" quickly spread through the prison. The dissidents were ecstatic. Finally, the leader of the free world had spoken the truth-a truth that burned inside the heard of each and every one of us.
Reagan's "evil empire" speech was given in 1982. Sharansky would be released three years later, and the Berlin Wall and the entire Soviet bloc would crumble in 1989. Such things do not happen in a vacuum. Reagan's rhetoric was provocative, incendiary, and did cause tensions to rise. Why shouldn't they have? A nation that pays no attention to the basic civil rights of its citizenry could care a whit about the rights of people outside of its governmental aegis, much less live up to treaties with external governments. But it undoubtedly emboldened those repressed souls behind the Iron Curtain. In particular, the Iranian citizenry have shown time and again that they hate the mullahcracy. Time and again, the government brings in hired thugs from outside the country to break up demonstrations, as Iranian police and military are too much of a risk to join with the demonstrations. They torture and murder dissidents, and have even gone as far as jamming farsi speaking television stations that are beamed into Iran vis-a-vis satellite. (The broadcasts originate from Los Angeles; the jamming originates from none other than Cuba.) I'm hard pressed to believe that Bush's pronouncement that he stands with the Iranian dissident movement will fall on deaf ears. Time and again it has been shown that the pronouncements of solidarity with oppressed peoples by the leader of the free world have deep impact and move those repressed populations to action. If you don't think so, think back to November of 1989.
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