Democracy Promotion Bush-Style Posted by Michael Cohen

The New York Times had an excellent piece on Sunday about the challenges facing America's democracy promotion agenda in Central Asia. Contrary to the President's recent, rosy rhetoric (how's that for alliteration) on the spread of freedom around the globe, the facts on the ground in Central Asia speaks to a far different reality:

In the last three years in these former vassals of the Kremlin, the exuberant vision of nurturing pluralistic societies and governments responsive to popular will - enunciated by President George W. Bush's public calls for democratization - has met so many obstacles that it has been quietly recalibrated. Throughout the region, journalists and opposition figures have been harassed, threatened, beaten, imprisoned and sometimes killed. American policy has accepted less ambitious goals.

Democracy promotion is not gone. But it has taken its place in a wider portfolio of interests. These include access to oil and gas, improving trade and transportation infrastructure and expanding military, counternarcotic and counterterror cooperation - all informed by a sense that in the competition with Russia and China for regional influence, the United States has lost ground.

Forgive me for momentarily sounding like a realist, but this sounds about right. Of course America should be promoting democracy, but we have to recognize that the spread of democracy is one of many American interests and we must balance it with other important foreign policy goals. The President's messianic and largely empty call on behalf of democracy promotion never seemed to reflect this necessary balancing act. This has only served to weaken American credibility when we've been forced to reduce our commitment to freedom in the face of challenges to our other national interests.

Now having said that, it does seem to me that America should be focusing its efforts at democracy promotion on building the civic institutions necessary to sustain not only democracy, but also the free exchange of ideas. It's a point my blogmate Patrick Barry made just a few days ago.

All of that makes this choice nugget from the aforementioned NYT piece that much more inexplicable.

In oil-rich Kazakhstan, the pattern has been similar. President Nursultan Nazarbayev, who runs the country like a family business-and-television empire and has been enveloped for years with allegations of corruption, won 91 percent of the vote in a December 2005 election that independent observers said was flawed.

Before the election, a human rights worker who published allegations of presidential corruption on a Web site was mugged. The attackers tore open his clothes and used a blade to carve a large X - the mark of the censor - on his chest. The government also confiscated newspapers that published articles on presidential corruption.

The State Department urged Nazarbayev to respect press freedoms. But, like the message to Azerbaijan, that message became mixed when the American ambassador to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe appeared to dismiss the crackdown's significance, when she addressed a Kazakh official during a speech.

"When I was in Kazakhstan a couple of weeks ago I had the interesting pleasure of reading some of this (sic) newspapers that have been seized," the ambassador, Julie Finley, said to a session of the organization's council in Vienna, Austria, in November 2005, according to the transcript. "Maybe you saved some readers some waste of time, anyway."

Sheesh, that's just awful. It's one thing to look the other way when a nominal ally subverts democracy, but to actually praise it? Just for the record Julie Finley not only still has her job but she enthusiastically supported Kazakhstan's application for chairmanship of the OSCE.

And just in case you're wondering about what qualified Julie Finley for ambassadorship to the OSCE:

Ambassador Finley was National Finance Co-Chairman for Bush-Cheney '04 for the District of Columbia and Co-Chairman of Team 100 for the Republican National Committee from 1997 through 2004.

Democracy in action!

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