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Jewish World Review August 8, 2006 / 14 Menachem-Av, 5766 The heart of the matter By Rich Lowry http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | If there is one bedrock conviction underlying President Bush's foreign policy, it is that freedom is the desire of every human heart. Bush repeats the phrase at every opportunity, and it is the premise of his push for democracy in the Middle East and elsewhere: Given a free choice, it is assumed, people will choose freedom and the political system best suited to foster it. Bush's emphasis on the inherent hunger for freedom is powerful. It clothes his foreign policy in an undeniable idealism. It puts his liberal opponents in a tight spot, because it is awkward for them to object to the kind of sweeping universalism they have always embraced. It might be simplistic, but that is often an advantage in political communication. The problem with Bush's freedom rhetoric is that it appears to not be true. Hezbollah and Hamas, and the populations that support them, desire the destruction of Israel above all, and are willing to endure warfare and dysfunctional societies to bring it about. The Sunni insurgents in Iraq want power more than anything else, and are willing to kill and maim to gain it. The Shia militias, in turn, desire revenge against the Sunni. All around the chaotic and violent Middle East, human hearts are yearning for many things, but freedom isn't high on the list. An evangelical Christian, Bush couches his belief in the universal hunger for freedom in religious terms. He often says that freedom is G-d's gift to humanity. But it sometimes seems that he neglects what, for a Christian, is a central event in understanding human motivation, the Fall. Pride and hatred and fear are as likely to drive human behavior as any hunger for freedom. Bush's belief in the desire for freedom has influenced the policy of his administration in crucial ways. One reason that the administration hadn't more seriously considered worst-case scenarios prior to the fall of Baghdad was that its thinking was soaked in the notion that once Saddam Hussein's dictatorship was removed, the true nature of the Iraqi people would be revealed as freedom-loving democrats. Don Rumsfeld infamously justified the post-liberation looting as the natural exuberance of a newly freed people. In this, they had forgotten conservative wisdom about the importance of institutions and culture. Even if people desire to be free, it does them no good unless their desire can be channeled through appropriate governmental institutions, which are excruciatingly hard to build up once they have been torn down. We are still working on the Iraqi police, and will probably be doing so for years. And while, all things being equal, people surely prefer to live in freedom than under a dictatorship, culture ensures that things are never equal. Someone living in a tribal or traditional culture will view the world differently, and have different values, than an atomized individual in the West. He might value sexual purity more than freedom, thus insisting on the repression of women. He might value his religious conviction that all of the Levant should be Muslim-controlled over freedom and life itself. He might hate the dishonor of foreign occupation more than he loves anything. For all these reasons, Hezbollah seems to have a better understanding of human hearts, at least in its part of the world, than the president of the Unites States does. This doesn't mean that Bush should abandon the liberalizing thrust of his foreign policy. A democratizing Middle East offers the best alternative to the violent, dictator-plagued region of today. But his administration would be well served to focus on the particular instead of the universal, and talk more of the messy compromises and disappointments that are inevitable on the path to a better Middle East, even if we eventually get there. It would be nice if James Madison were by default the world's favorite political philosopher. He's not, because the human heart is more complicated — and twisted — than President Bush acknowledges in his rhetoric. Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes what many in in the media and Washington consider "must-reading". Sign up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here. Comment by clicking here. Rich Lowry Archives © 2006 King Features Syndicate

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