Moral Hazard

J. Peter Scoblic writes in The New Republic Online Democracy has become George W. Bush's reflexive answer to terrorism. Before the wreckage left by the July 7 bombings in London had even cooled, he broke from the G-8 summit in Scotland to explain how we would defeat the perpetrators of such attacks: "We will spread an ideology of hope and compassion that will overwhelm their ideology of hate." Four days later, he elaborated, "Today in the Middle East, freedom is once again contending with an ideology that seeks to sow anger and hatred and despair. And, like fascism and communism before, the hateful ideologies that use terror will be defeated by the unstoppable power of freedom and democracy."

This is true. Love trumps hate, and freedom trumps despair.

.... Yet the notion that we should defend ourselves chiefly by spreading democracy seems less than reassuring on the heels of the July 7 attack. After all, the four bombers who struck London were British--residents of one of the world's oldest and most stable democracies.

Britain went overboard and permitted the most extreme speach soliciting jihadists. Freedom of speech does not mean you can yell fire in a crowded theater.

The war on terrorism is, at some level, a war of ideas: To the extent that we can substitute democracy and liberal values for autocracy and Islamic fundamentalism, we will probably improve our security--and we should therefore try to do so.

So George W Bush's approach is right.

Illustration by Christophe VorletBut freedom--as Richard Haass, Bush's former director of policy planning at the State Department, has written--is not a doctrine. That is, the spread of freedom cannot be our guiding principle in the war on terrorism, because the spread of freedom cannot protect us from all terrorist threats, particularly the immediate ones. In fact, in the short term, democratization appears to exacerbate, rather than ameliorate, terrorism. The case in point is, of course, Iraq, which, according to the National Intelligence Council, now serves as a training and recruitment ground for the next generation of jihadists--its popularly elected government notwithstanding.

It may well be a training ground, because the jihadists fear a stable democracy and are coming in from many other countries, but it is not a recruitment ground, because Iraqis are not being lured into becoming jihadists; they are coming from Saudia Arabia, Yemen, Pakistan, and many other countries. There is a certain level of Sunni insurgents, but many of them are criminals released by Saddam just before the US invasion, who dont want a stable government because then they would be sent back to prision.