GLOBAL FREEDOM AND DRUNK COAL MINERS

Notice how quick President Bush’s father was to explain to the press that we don’t have to take seriously what his son said at his second inaugural about “ending tyranny in our world”? Thanks for sharing, Dad. What you really made clear is why you never had a second inaugural yourself.

The speechwriter who wrote Bush the Elder’s first and only inaugural address (where he pledged to achieve a “kinder and gentler nation,” and Nancy Reagan exploded in anger, whispering to her husband, “Kinder and gentler than what?”), Peggy Noonan whined once again in the Wall Street Journal today about GW’s “overweening” idealism, and that his speech had no “historical context.” I guess Peggy, like her former boss, didn’t pay much attention to the news last year.

Perhaps the most important story of 2004 was the achievement of democracy in so many countries. Afghanistan, a tribal collection more than a real country that many thought could not possibly be ruled democratically, had its first elected government in history. Indonesia, the world’s largest Moslem nation, passed an even greater test of genuine democracy – a peaceful electoral transfer of power from one party to another.

Georgia, the former Soviet colony, had its “Rose Revolution.” Democracy now has a chance to supplant the corrupt gangsterism of Arafat among the Palestinians, and is about to achieve a stunning triumph in Iraq. And then there is the great creation of freedom in Ukraine. How much context does Peggy want?

Every “realist” squish in Washington has the vapors over GW’s suddenly becoming a radically dangerous Lone Ranger cowboy – when what’s really happened is he’s acting on the old political adage that if you discover a parade that’s going where you want, get out in front and lead it.

GW wants to lead the Global Parade of Democracy because of an intensely interesting geopolitical theory called democratic pacifism. In its most extreme version it asserts that no two democracies have ever fought a war and never will. Critics scoff by pointing out exceptions such the US Civil War and World War I. The debate over whether the Confederacy or Kaiser Germany were actual democracies (yes for the former, iffy on the latter) is nonetheless irrelevant.

Imagine you have a list of every war fought in the last hundred years. It would be a long list, hundreds and hundreds of wars. If you look down the list, you will be very hard-pressed to find one single war between two genuine democracies. You can argue all day long about this or that exception out of the hundreds of non-exceptions. You can claim that no plausible mechanism or cause has been discerned to explain this. You can maintain that this is no way proves that democracies won’t fight in the future. What you can’t disagree with is this:

Such a list, such a history, provides profound evidence that, at the very least, if two countries are real democracies the odds of them going to war against each other are small, very small. History gives no guarantees for the future. But if you want a peaceful world – a world without war and terrorism – then your absolute best chance is to replace tyrannies with freely elected constitutional governments.

GW’s second inaugural address was the Vision Statement regarding this goal. What is needed now is the Business Plan, how the vision is to be actually implemented. For an insight into Bush’s Business Plan for Ending Tyranny, we can look at the drunk coal miners of Donetsk.

Ukraine’s Orange Revolution overthrew an incredibly corrupt regime of ex-Soviet apparatchiks without violence – but not by luck and chance. When hundreds of thousands of Yushchenko (and thus democracy) supporters converged on Independence Square in Kiev, suddenly there were blankets, tents, sleeping pads, stoves, food and medicines that materialized out of nowhere.

When Nazi skinheads and government secret police were sent in as agents provacateur to incite the crowd to violence, they were ignored. Non-stop rock concerts – literally rock-around-the-clock – were spontaneously organized. Yushchenko had survived his poisoning (performed by the Ukrainian KGB, the SBU, at the direction of Gleb Pavlovskiy, a top advisor to Russian President Putin), and there seemed to be no stopping him as he rallied the crowd. So the SBU and Pavlovskiy decided to call in the miners.

Eastern Ukraine is heavily ethnic Russian. The main industry is coal. The miners are rough, tough, and hate Yushchenko for wanting to take Ukraine away from Russia and towards the West. It was arranged for more than a thousand of them to be taken from Donetsk, the capital of the coal-mining region, by bus and train to Kiev, where, armed with clubs and blunt tools, they would physically beat up the Orange Revolutionaries. Such mass violence was not only to disperse the demonstrators but serve as an excuse for the government to declare martial law, suspending the Ukrainian Parliament (the Rada) and elections indefinitely.

When the miners got on their buses and trains, they found to their joy case after case of vodka – just for them. When they arrived in Kiev, trucks awaited them filled with more cases of vodka – all free provided by “friends” of the Donetsk coal miners. Completely soused, they never made it to Independence Square. Too hammered blind to cause any violence at all, they had a merry time, passed out, and were shipped back to Donetsk.

And just who were the miner’s friends that had the vodka for them? The same folks who had all the supplies for the democracy demonstrators: teams of Porter Goss’s CIA working with their counterparts in British MI6 intelligence.

Just take a moment and reflect on how stone-cold brilliant this was. The forethought and planning it took, the innovative thinking. Bush doesn’t send the Marines – he sends the vodka! – and achieves a democratic revolution. This is the sort of thinking, these are the sorts of tactics, that are going to be applied now for “ending tyranny in our world.” Military force will be used only as a necessary resort.

When Ronald Reagan announced what the press called the Reagan Doctrine of support for anti-Soviet freedom movements (Stingers for the Afghan Mujahaddin, fax machines and cash for Poland’s Solidarity), he got the same hysterical opposition from “realists” in the media and his own Administration. But he understood that freedom for any one Soviet colony was more achievable if you launched a structural assault, with rhetorical and material support, on the entire phenomenon of Soviet imperialism.

That is the key parallel between the Reagan Doctrine and the Bush Doctrine. Bush is launching a structural assault on the entire phenomenon of oppressive unelected governments – which makes it much easier to get rid of any one of them in particular.

No, he won’t try to get rid of them all, will only focus on those whose riddance will be in our most urgent interests, but will move quickly to take advantage of suddenly favorable circumstances. He will be selectively pro-active.

For Bush has had an epiphany on democracy’s achievability: Far more often than not, democracy has to be imposed from the outside; it rarely comes wholly from within. Fidel Castro has been in power for 36 years. The Cuban people will never rise up and get rid of him all by themselves. The people of Zimbabwe are the same with Robert Mugabe. It took nothing less than the full might of the American military to get rid of the Taliban and Saddam Hussein.

Afghans went to the polls in droves. Iraqis will do the same this Sunday. But we had to give them the chance to do so. Japan and Germany are genuine democracies – but only because we enabled them to be. With all four it was done militarily. With Ukraine it was done with guile. Perhaps it will be a combination in Iran and Syria – for they are next.

How will Bush and his team – Porter, Condi, and Rummy – do it? Well, we know it won’t be with vodka. Iran’s nuclear facilities will more likely be destroyed through quiet sabotage than public bombing. Syria’s Kurds, who are the majority in the third of Syria east of the Euphrates, will be emboldened to secede and join a successful autonomous Kurdish Iraq. Iran’s smoldering population that hates their mullah masters will be ignited.

For make no mistake: Bush talked of global freedom, and bringing democracy to the world – but in truth his speech was directed at the Middle East, to the Moslem seed-beds of terrorism. His vision is breathtaking, a Crescent of Democracy from Afghanistan to Iran to Iraq to Syria. Yet… yet, does his vision dare to extend to the ultimate source of Islamofascism, the Wahabbis of Saudi Arabia?

The demand for freedom and democracy in Saudi Arabia will be the ultimate test of the Bush Doctrine. It won’t come until Bush has done what he can with the Iraqis, Iranians, and Syrians. The most interesting show of all will be to watch what he does with the Saudis.