With Bush attempting to claim credit in recent months for the apparent 'wave of democracic movements' sweeping from Egypt to Kyrgyzstan, I have been dissatisfied with the Left's relative silence on the issue. The trouble is that we progressives have been struggling to come up with a good, serious intelectual challenge to the assertion that Bush gambled and won on the idea that democracy would flourish in the Middle East and Central Asia as a result of the occupation of Iraq.

In April, I got a chance to make a minor contribution to this debate.The Hippolytic sponsored a public debate between me and Al Jiwa, the president of the Yale College Republicans. One of the speeches I gave, on foreign policy, developed, with the help of the rest of the Hippo crew, into a bullet-pointed list of ways that Bush is actively making the World less safe for democracy:

6.) The War in Iraq has been a setback for the cause of Democracy in the Muslim World and around the World. The recent Pew Trust Poll shows that significant majorities of people in countries from Pakistan to Morocco actually support violence against American forces in Iraq. Indeed, the rhetoric of democracy is surprisingly weak next to the images of Iraqi civilians at Abu Grhaib, naked, shackled, being raped and urinated upon. Because “democracy” is the slogan of the American occupiers of Iraq, we have, in the words of Richard Clark said, closed Muslim eyes and ears to our subsequent calls for reform in their region.

7.) Under Bush’s leadership, the US continues to actively support brutal, authoritarian regimes around the world.

a. We embrace Uzbekistan as an Ally in the war on terrorism. Political prisoners and religious dissidents in Uzbekistan are routinely tortured, even boiled alive.

b. We continue to Support the deeply conservative monarchy in Saudi Arabia, and the Pakistani Autocrat Pervez Musharraf. We give a great deal of military aid to the authoritarian government of Egypt.

c. The Bush government supported a coup to over through Hugo Chavez, the Democratically elected president of Venezuela

You get the idea. There's more in the extended.



Here's most of the rest of the speech.

Let’s look at the facts. Over one thousand five hundred American soldiers have died in the Iraq war. Coalition forces have killed 17,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed. By then end of fiscal year 2005, we will have spent 200 billion dollars on the Iraq War. I contend that the still unachieved goals of that war are not even close to being worth the loss of life, the fiscal burden. It is certainly not worth the irrevocable damage it was done to the American image in the Muslim world.

What has Bush’s foreign policy done? And more importantly, what does it continue to do?

1.) Iraq and Saddam Hussein had absolutely nothing to do with September 11th. The war in Iraq is actively damaging the war on terrorism and is increasing recruiting for Al Qaeda and similar groups. In the words of former Counterterrorism Czar Richard Clark, “Far from addressing the popular appeal of the enemy that attacked us, Bush, handed that enemy precisely what it wanted and needed, proof that America was at was with Islam, that we were the new Crusaders come to occupy Muslim land. Nothing America could have done would have provided Al Qaeda and its new generation of cloned groups a better recruitment device than our unprovoked invasion of an oil-rich Arab country. Nothing else … could have so closed Muslim eyes and ears to our subsequent calls for reform in their region.” (246) For this reason alone, the war in Iraq has made America less safe.

a. We’ve seen an increase in terrorism worldwide since the beginning of the Iraq war, with the Madrid train bombings, increased terrorist Activity in Indonesia and the Philippians, and Islamic insurgency in Pattani province in Thailand. The State department report released this week shows that serious Terrorist attacks tripled worldwide in 2004

2.) The War has stretched our military resources to the breaking point. Intelligence units and Special Forces were called directly out of Afghanistan to support the War in Iraq. With the National Guard and reserves tied up in Iraq, Bush compromised domestic security. He has also shouldered the cost of the war on to predominantly rural areas where young people sign up for the Guard and Reserves to help with disaster relief. My home state of New Hampshire is one of those areas.

3.) This foreign policy has turned Afghanistan into human disaster and a national security failure. We never devoted enough military or humanitarian resources to Afghanistan to do anything more than a perfunctory job there. Because he Bush let the Al Qaeda leadership get away at Tora Bora because he was saving those resources for the Attack on Iraq.

4.) The War on Terrorism has made deception and secrecy into organizing principles of Government. The Bush administration has never seemed to care that the central justification for the war in Iraq, those Weapons of Mass Destruction, were never there. The Bush administration seized on every shred of evidence, including those forged documents about the Niger yellow cake uranium, and propaganda from a corrupt gang of Iraqi exiles. This is not to mention their aggressive intimidation of the press, and the belittling of patriotic dissent.

5.) Bush’s Foreign policy has made the outright Torture of innocents a routine practice by US forces around the world. Policymakers at the highest levels of this administration made decisions early on that let to this policy of torture. Memos by former Whitehouse counsel Alberto Gonzales and Assistant Attorney general Jay Bybee rejected the Geneva Conventions and authorized the use of the most extreme interrogation techniques. These decisions paved the way for the use of torture at Guantanamo Bay, at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan. There’s more: there are the arbitrary detentions of immigrants in this country, extraordinary renditions, by which people are kidnapped all over the world and flown to countries where they are tortured. The Center for Constitutional Rights says there are prisoners as young as 9 and as old as 98 at Guantanamo Bay, and that there may be as many as 20,000 prisoners held around the world, in violation of international law. I regard this policy as a singular offense against human dignity.

a. It has been one year since the release of those horrible pictures from Abu Ghraib. Has there been a single investigation that hold’s policy makers accountable? No. Instead, the administration has rewarded those responsible for the policy of torture. Bybee has been appointed to a federal judgeship. Gonzales has become Attorney General.

6.) The War in Iraq has been a setback for the cause of Democracy in the Muslim World and around the World. The recent Pew Trust Poll shows that significant majorities of people in countries from Pakistan to Morocco actually support violence against American forces in Iraq. Indeed, the rhetoric of democracy is surprisingly weak next to the images of Iraqi civilians at Abu grhaib, naked, shackled, being raped and urinated upon. Because “democracy” is the slogan of the American occupiers of Iraq, we have, in the words of Richard Clark said, closed Muslim eyes and ears to our subsequent calls for reform in their region.

7.) Under Bush’s leadership, the US continues to actively support brutal, authoritarian regimes around the world.

a. We embrace Uzbekistan as an Ally in the war on terrorism. Political prisoners and religious dissidents in Uzbekistan are routinely tortured, even boiled alive.

b. We continue to Support the deeply conservative monarchy in Saudi Arabia, and the Pakistani Autocrat Pervez Musharraf. We give a great deal of military aid to the authoritarian government of Egypt.

c. The Bush government supported a coup to over through Hugo Chavez, the Democratically elected president of Venezuela.