Bush said the only way to defeat the terrorists is through offering a better vision, namely a “hopeful alternative of political freedom and peaceful change.” True. This is an ideological struggle.
He said raising up a democracy requires more than elections. True. We are getting reminders of this fact all over the place at the moment.
He said, “Democracies in the Middle East will not look like our own, because they will reflect the traditions of their own citizens.” True. No one should be surprised that religious parties do well in deeply religious societies.
So far so good. Where I got off the bus was when he said, “liberty is the right and hope of all humanity.” This is another way of putting the signature Bush line, “Freedom is the desire of every human heart.” Maybe Bush means this in some aspirational, rather than factual sense, but I’m sorry, it’s just not true.
People might not affirmatively yearn for oppression, but they can certainly value and desire all sorts of things more than freedom, at least freedom as we would define it. We have just seen that in the Palestinian elections. A lot depends on how you interpret them, but it certainly seemed that the Palestinians valued the destruction of their neighbor, national (or pre-national) honor, and religious chauvinism more than freedom.
In general people can desire order, power, fealty to religious faith, ethnic pride, and/or sexual purity more than freedom. Which it is very important to remember when you’re trying to re-make foreign societies.