DEMOCRACY HYPOCRISY.(The Talk of the Town)(George W. Bush Iraq policies)

The Presidential election of 2000 was the first in which neither major-party candidate had held a military position in the Second World War since--well, if you count Commander-in-Chief as a military position--before the Second World War. But if the Presidential run of the "greatest generation" had ended, the run of the generation shaped by the sixties had already begun, with the 1992 Clinton campaign. It's not going to be a short one, either. At the very least, it will last through the end of Hillary Clinton's second term, in 2017, nearly fifty years after the sixties ended.

George W. Bush, more than is immediately apparent, is himself a sixties President. True, he was formed in opposition to the sixties, but he is still a product of that era, as are many members of his Administration. Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld worked together in the War on Poverty. Karl Rove was in student-movement politics. It matters a lot that they were on the non-intuitive side of their youthful historical moment, but it also matters a lot that they participated.

Bush's sixties side shows itself in the form of an unperturbed confidence that the world can now be remade entirely, and that all the efforts of the past few generations can be dismissed as cautious and unimaginative. The example most readily at hand is Bush's attitude toward democracy in the Middle East, which, in its way, is right out of "The Times They Are A-Changin'." "We must shake off decades of failed policy in the Middle East," he announced from the podium of the Royal Banqueting House of Whitehall Palace, on his recent trip to London. "Your nation and mine in the past have been willing to make a bargain: to tolerate oppression for the sake of stability. . . . Now we're pursuing a different course, a forward strategy of freedom in the Middle East. We will consistently challenge the enemies of reform and confront the allies of terror."

The music is very Bush, but the words are relatively new. In January, in the State of the Union address, when he listed at length his justifications for the imminent war with Iraq, he barely mentioned democracy. It made its debut as a major regional theme a month later, in a speech Bush gave at the American Enterprise Institute. More recently, however, as the justification that he gave first and most often before the war--that Saddam Hussein's regime represented a direct military threat to the United States, because of his nuclear-weapons program and his ties to Al Qaeda--has dematerialized, the President has rhetorically brought democracy to the fore. Last month, in a speech at the National Endowment for Democracy, he asked--in a spirit that was closer to "Blowin' in the Wind"--"Are the peoples of the Middle East somehow beyond the reach of liberty? Are millions of men and women and children condemned by history or culture to live in despotism? Are they alone never to know freedom, and never even to have a choice in the matter? I, for one, do not believe it. I believe every person has the ability and the right to be free."

Bush is correct in that previous Presidents hardly ever talked about democracy in the Islamic countries of the Middle East. For most of the past half-century, where such a country was concerned, they cared, first, whether it was aligned with the United States or the Soviet Union; second, how hospitable it was to American business; and, third, ...