Overboard alert!

Josh Marshall — in a follow-up to his Atlantic Monthly article on John Kerry’s realist foreign policy principles — has a provocative post up about the extent of the Bush administration’s commitment to democratization. The key parts:

[W]hen you look at the actual record I think there is very little evidence that the assumption [that the Bush administration is focused on the goal of democracy promotion] is at all valid. I don’t mean simply that the Bush administration has been unsuccessful or incompetent in pursuing its plans for democratization. I don’t even mean that they’ve been hypocritical or inconsistent. I mean that democratization as a moral or strategic goal simply doesn’t figure into the White House’s plans. Let’s start with a review of the administration’s record in the 189 UN member states whose governments the US has not overthrown in the last three and one half years…. Remember, the key here is the advancement of democracy not only as a good thing, a humanitarian gesture, a form of state-imposed meta-philanthropy, but as a way of advancing American national security. But for that to mean anything one would have to point to cases where we, or in this case, the administration made short-term geopolitical sacrifices to advance our long term interest in democratization. And I cannot think of a single case whether in Egypt or Saudi Arabia or Pakistan or Russia or China or Uzbekistan or anywhere where that has happened. At the risk of repeating myself, this is not to say that the US should, willy nilly, upend friendly non-democracies with an indifference to American strategic interests. But if that’s the model the administration is following then there’s really, at best, no difference with previous administrations and the whole premise — so widespread now in our political and foreign policy debates — that the Bush administration is hawkish on democracy or neo-Wilsonian — and that this is a departure from previous administrations or a potential Kerry administration — is just an empty claim embraced by the inattentive and incurious. (bold emphasis added)

Josh makes an interesting argument, but I gotta call him on the bolded section, because in fact the Bush administration did take action in Egypt that fits Marshall’s criteria. In August 2002, after the arrest of democracy activist Saad Eddin Ibrahim, the U.S. applied intense diplomatic and economic pressure at precisely the same time Iraq was moving to the very front burner. In particular, President Bush personally and publically criticized the Egyptian government, and the administration also declared a moratorium on new US assistance to Egypt as long as Ibrahim remained in prison. Ibrahim was released in March 2003. Whether U.S. pressure accelerated or delayed Ibrahim’s release is the subject of some debate — but democratization activists of all stripes do agree that the U.S. risked a fair amount of diplomatic capital on the issue. The New York Times, in an March 19th, 2003 editorial, thought the pressure was a good thing:

To its considerable credit, last year the Bush administration froze additional aid to President Hosni Mubarak’s government over Dr. Ibrahim’s treatment. This pressure, and the efforts of human rights groups worldwide, helped persuade the government to back off and prosecute the case less aggressively

Given the timing of this pressure — the start of the global debate on Iraq — I’d say this counts as a situation when “short-term geopolitical sacrifices to advance our long term interest in democratization” were made — in one of the countries Marshall highlights. This example doesn’t completely vitiate Marshall’s point — take U.S. policy towards Uzbekistan, for example — but it does suggest that Marshall’s exaggerating his case a bit. Blog readers now may return to their “inattentive and incurious” mode. UPDATE: While I’m discussing Egypt, David Remnick’s “Letter from Cairo” in this week’s New Yorker is a very sobering read. ANOTHER UPDATE: Robert Tagorda provides another counterexample for Marshall — the case of Tunisia. Greg Djerejian rebuts Marshall on Georgia. And David Adesnik addresses the Iraqi exception. YES, A THIRD UPDATE: Beyond individual countries, it’s also worth mentioning the G8 Greater Middle East Initiative, a follow-up to earlier Bush proposals from last year. It’s obviously way too soon to debate the effectiveness of the proposal, but Al Jazeera certainly believed it was going to cover states of strategic interest to the U.S.:

The original document, intended for internal distribution among designated senior officials of the G8 (group of eight industrialised countries), was meant to signal a new US plan for reform of the Middle East and some other Muslim-majority countries such as Pakistan, Iran and Turkey…. However, speculation is growing that the US plan may also take in other Muslim countries such as Indonesia, Bangladesh and the central Asian countries of Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan and Tajikistan.

AND NOW A FOURTH UPDATE: Earlier in this post, I gave Josh Uzbekistan as an example that supported his line of argumentation. Maybe I was too hasty — Here’s Central Asian expert Martha Brill Olcott’s testimony to the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe on Uzbekistan’s human rights situation (link via the Argus):

The [December 2003] decision by the U.S. Secretary of State to refuse to certify Uzbekistan as having made sufficient progress with regard to reforming human rights, got the attention of the government in Tashkent, and has already led to some small improvement, including a more open attitude toward the investigation of abuses in Uzbekistan’s penal system. By its actions in December the U.S. put the government of Uzbekistan on notice.