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	The Gap between U.S. rhetoric and Reality by Deepak Chopra, Anatol Lieven International Herald Tribune   February 6, 2006   Democracy and the Untouchables, by Deepak Chopra. (Huffington Post)   A coca farmer has been elected president in Bolivia and a socialist doctor in Chile. Hamas has won majority power in Palestine and a hard-line anti-Zionist leads Iran. These are all democratic outcomes, and in the foreseeable future we can expect more of the same.   From the American perspective, it looks like the worst example of getting what you wish for. We stand for democracy, and now we have to hold our ground when democracy doesn''t turn out remotely as we would want it to. Observers point out that the last five elections in the Middle East have brought in Islamic fundamentalists or close to it, while almost every election in South America has brought in socialists with an animus against the U.S., or close to it.   As the world''s leading democracy, it''s ironic that we have been so afraid of it elsewhere, supporting reactionary royal families and dictatorships in country after country, although capriciously our support of a Noriega, Saddam Hussein, Duvalier, Aristide, Assad, Musharaf, etc. can suddenly sour. We should welcome democracy for the same reason that India learned to accept the rise of the untouchables to power.   Historically, it was unthinkable that the most despised and dispossessed people in the country should share in its rule. But no horrors have come to pass, and India''s democracy has been strengthened. The factions rising to power in South America and the Middle East are similarly dispossessed and despised. Much as we dislike the religious Shiites who are about to rule Iraq, weren''t they the same rebels who tried to rise against Saddam in 1991 and were massacred by the thousands when the U.S failed to help them?   Poor, oppressed, ignorant, and rejected people don''t behave well; they are often angry and irrational. Whatever anyone may think of them, the dispossessed will only change if they are given a share of power. In Palestine the ruling Fatah party squandered and outright stole billions of dollars in foreign aid, and the leading politicians there have amassed fortunes in Swiss bank accounts while their people starve. The same is true of our favored pols in Iraq. They are prepared to steal billions more as the oil wealth of the country gets divided among the ultra-privileged. In South America a peon class, often made up of indigenous Indians, exists in hopeless degradation while the richest live like colonialists from two centuries ago.   These intolerable injustices aren''t ours to fix. Each country deserves self-determination. Billions spent to prop up the Shah of Iran did nothing to prevent the rise of democracy there, and it won''t anywhere else, not in the long run. America''s choice is either to guide this great historical upheaval or be charged with trying to suppress the very people who might have sailed to the New World when we were struggling to be free.   Jan. 30, 2006   The Gap between U.S. rhetoric and Reality, by Anatol Lieven. (IHT)   The victory of Hamas in the Palestinian elections ought to lead to a fundamental rethinking of U.S. strategy in the Middle East, especially since it follows electoral successes for Islamist parties in Pakistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Egypt.   The most important lesson of the elections is that the United States cannot afford to use the rhetoric of spreading democracy as an excuse for avoiding dealing with pressing national grievances and wishes. If the United States pursues or supports policies that are detested by a majority of ordinary people, then these people will react accordingly if they are given a chance to vote.   Above all, U.S. policy makers must understand that other peoples have their own national pride and national interests, which they expect their governments and representatives to defend. In Russia in the 1990s, the liberals helped to destroy their electoral chances by giving Russian voters the impression that they put deference to American wishes above the interests of Russia.   Today, Americans who want to support liberal revolution in Iran as a way of making Iran more responsive to U.S. and Israeli demands are making the same mistake. And in order to understand this, it is hardly necessary to study Russia or Iran. In the United States, if a political party were supported by a foreign country, and gave the impression of serving that country"s interests, would it stand any chance of being elected to anything?   But in truth, the present centrality of the "democratization" idea to administration rhetoric does not come from any study of the Middle East, or of reality in general. Rather, the Bush administration has fallen back on this rhetoric in part because all other paths and justifications have failed or been rejected. The administration desperately needed some big vision that would give the American people the impression of a plan for the war on terror, promising something beyond tighter domestic security and endless military operations.   Thus spreading democracy was always one of the arguments used for the Iraq war, but it only became the central one after the failure to find the promised weapons of mass destruction. As a result of the Iraqi quagmire, the language of preventive war and military intervention, so prevalent in the administration"s National Security Strategy of 2002, has also become obviously empty, requiring a new central theme for the forthcoming security strategy of 2006.   The road map toward a final settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been shelved, and Bush has admitted that his promise to create an independent Palestinian state by the end of his second term has been abandoned. Building Palestinian democracy therefore became in effect a diversion from a failure or refusal to make progress on addressing real Palestinian grievances.   Finally, demands for democratic regime change in Iran have been used as a way of avoiding making the very painful U.S. concessions that will be necessary if Iran"s nuclear program is to be stopped by diplomatic means. These will have to involve U.S. security guarantees to Iran, a leading place for Iran in any Middle Eastern security order, a role for Iran in shaping the future of both Afghanistan and Iraq, diplomatic recognition and open trade and investment. Any Iranian government would have to demand all this in return for giving up the future possibility of a nuclear deterrent.   Given the mixture of extremism and chaos in the new Iranian government, such a deal may now be impossible as long as the popularly elected President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad remains in office. But as Flynt Leverett, a former director for Middle East affairs at the National Security Council, has revealed, in 2003 the administration received a credible Iranian offer of comprehensive negotiations, which it brusquely rejected.   Democratic Party leaders, too, have failed utterly to support a diplomatic alternative to the failed strategy of the Bush administration, partly because they are too scared to confront the bitter anger among powerful groups in the United States that would attend any radical change of U.S. policy toward Iran.   The administration has also been able to neutralize domestic opposition to its "strategy" because its rhetoric appeals to a deep American belief in the U.S. duty to spread democracy and freedom. This is indeed in itself a noble aspiration, and has been until recently the source of much of U.S. moral authority in the world.   But the Bush administration"s combination of preaching human rights with torture, of preaching democracy to Muslims with contempt for the views of those same Muslims, has not helped either the spread of democracy or U.S. interests but badly damaged both.   In fact, the distance between Bush administration rhetoric and observable reality in some areas is beginning to look almost reminiscent of Soviet Communism. And as in the Soviet Union, this gap is also becoming more and more apparent to the rest of the world.   (Anatol Lieven, a senior research fellow at the New America Foundation, Washington, is the author of "America Right or Wrong: An Anatomy of American Nationalism.")
	Mobilizes knowledge on important public issues by Social Science Research Council (SSRC) USA   The SSRC has produced a number of online forums providing social science perspectives on topical issues. The typical forum consists of 10-12 edited essays that SSRC programs have commissioned from individuals in their networks with specialized knowledge.   A number of these forums have become the basis for subsequent work by the Council. For instance, our After September 11 forum developed into a five-book series with the New Press. The Privatization of Risk forum developed into a MacArthur-funded working group that commissioned six volumes for a joint Columbia University Press/SSRC series on the subject.   And our Understanding Katrina forum developed into the SSRC Katrina Task Force that secured major funding for its work and is now in the process of producing a series of books from its findings.   More recent forums cover such topics as change in Cuba, the Fourth Wave (gender and HIV/AIDS), and the controversy surrounding the Department of Defense’s Minerva initiative.   The Social Science Research Council is an independent, nonprofit international organization founded in 1923. It nurtures new generations of social scientists, fosters innovative research, and mobilizes necessary knowledge on important public issues. Visit the related web page
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