Promoting Democracy, Bush Style

By Scott Horton

We learned in Bush's immortal Second Inaugural Address—the one in which the words “freedom” and “liberty” or permutations thereof appeared 32 times in less than five minutes—that Bush's foreign policy focuses on the spread of democracy. An objective observer would find that there is some evidence to support Bush's claims (for instance, United States engagement in Afghanistan, in parts of Africa and the former Soviet Union), but there is an awful lot of evidence that shows that democracy is not a priority (for instance, in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan). And then we come to the supposed showcase, Iraq, about which I would be tempted to say—if this is democracy, then most Iraqis are by now praying for a tyrannical dictatorship. But the fundamental point to be made is this: democracy is not a destination at which one arrives, it is a process. So Bush Administration conduct in “promoting democracy” is well worth special scrutiny. With that in mind, I focus on two incidents which seem very revealing of what Bush means by “democracy.”

The Washington Post's Dana Milbank reports on a meeting of the Department of State's “Advisory Committee on Democracy Promotion,” chaired by Undersecretary Paula Dobriansky. Milbank writes:

Those wondering why the Bush administration has failed to spread democracy across the globe might find a clue in yesterday's meeting of the State Department's "Advisory Committee on Democracy Promotion."

About a third of the way through the meeting, and not long after Undersecretary Paula Dobriansky boasted to the television cameras that "our entire session today is open to the public" and attended by the press, State Department officials ordered reporters to leave. "This is the way they wanted it to happen, and this is the way it's going to be," explained department spokesman Gonzalo Gallegos. "They seem to have wanted you all out."

And let's consider a free press. To most Americans, the first amendment notion of a free press is an essential pillar on which our democracy rests. Tyrannical governments are characterized by their intolerance of a free press; indeed, by their desire to control the press. So today, as the accounts of the Pulitzer Prize awards circulate, let's remember that one of the 2004 Pulitzer winners—Associated Press photojournalist Bilal Hussein—remains in prison in Iraq, under U.S. custody. He's been there over a year. His crime is that he took photographs, reproduced in newspapers all across the United States, that the Pentagon didn't like. And then let's look at this incident in Afghanistan, in which U.S. Forces demonstrate the same un-American hostility to the press. It was reported at the time getting little attention. Then the Afghanistani Human Rights Commission looked at the story, and verified AP's account. Editor & Publisher's Greg Mitchell reports:

Gaining much less coverage are the report's comments on a nearly-forgotten aftermath of the apparent crimes, carried by E&P and other media outlets at the time: the U.S. military's forced "deletion" of images taken by Associated Press cameramen and others. A freelance photographer working for The AP and a cameraman working for AP Television News said then a U.S. soldier deleted their photos and video showing a four-wheel drive vehicle in which three people were shot to death about 100 yards from the suicide bombing. The AP lodged a protest with the American military.

The military defended their action in a letter to the AP later, stating that images gathered by “untrained people” might “capture visual details that are not as they originally were." But the Afghan commission concluded that there were "not sufficient grounds to justify the substantial curtailment of the right to freedom of expression, especially as the loss of information caused by these actions was directly harmful to the successful undertaking of a genuinely impartial investigation."

It looks like the Bush Administration has a different understanding of freedom of press from most of us, and it's understanding of the term “democracy” also seems suspect at this point.