Bush must face reality of force-fed democracy

[AGENDA21]

Spreading democracy around the world has become the Bush administration's manifest destiny.

That's the doctrine oozing from the scrap heap of reasons the president has given for invading Iraq, toppling Saddam Hussein and continuing the U.S. occupation. It grew in significance last year when President Bush pronounced, during his second inaugural address, that "it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture."

And now, as pressure mounts on the president to explain why U.S. forces remain in Iraq as that fractured country slips deeper into civil war, Bush increasingly offers up the need to democratize the world as his raison d'être for hanging on in Iraq. In other words, Iraq is the Khyber Pass of the president's defense of America. It's the passageway through which he wants us to believe freedom must flow to the rest of the world.

"In this new century, the advance of freedom is a vital element of our strategy to protect the American people, and to secure the peace for generations to come," Bush said last week to a gathering organized by the Freedom House, an organization based in Washington that advocates spreading democracy. "We're fighting the terrorists across the world because we know that if America were not fighting this enemy in other lands, we'd be facing them here in our own land."

That's the kind of grandiose vision of this country that journalist John L. O'Sullivan espoused in 1845, when he invoked the phrase "manifest destiny" while claiming that America had a divine right to expand its borders from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean. The right of our "manifest destiny to over spread and to possess the whole of the continent which Providence has given us," O'Sullivan wrote, was inextricably linked to "the great experiment of liberty and ... self government entrusted to us."

http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/columnist/wickham/2006-04-03-bush-democracy_x.htm