The most surprising thing about the first half-year of Barack Obama’s presidency, at least in the realm of foreign policy, has been its indifference to the issues of human rights and democracy. No administration has ever made these its primary, much less its exclusive, goals overseas. But ever since Jimmy Carter spoke about human rights in his 1977 inaugural address and created a new infrastructure to give bureaucratic meaning to his words, the advancement of human rights has been one of the consistent objectives of America’s diplomats and an occasional one of its soldiers.

This tradition has been ruptured by the Obama administration. The new president signaled his intent on the eve of his inauguration, when he told editors of the Washington Post that democracy was less important than “freedom from want and freedom from fear. If people aren’t secure, if people are starving, then elections may or may not address those issues, but they are not a perfect overlay.”

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton followed suit, in opening testimony at her Senate confirmation hearings. As summed up by the Post’s Fred Hiatt, Clinton “invoked just about every conceivable goal but democracy promotion. Building alliances, fighting terror, stopping disease, promoting women’s rights, nurturing prosperity—but hardly a peep about elections, human rights, freedom, liberty or self-rule.”

A few days after being sworn in, President Obama pointedly gave his first foreign press interview to the Saudi-owned Arabic-language satellite network, Al-Arabiya. The interview was devoted entirely to U.S. relations with the Middle East and the broader Muslim world, and through it all Obama never mentioned democracy or human rights.

Click here to read the rest of this Special Preview from the July/August issue of COMMENTARY.

The Washington, D.C.-based Churchill Centre has just awarded the first Winston Churchill Award for Statesmanship to James A. Baker and Lee Hamilton.

This is the same James A. Baker who, as Secretary of State, when asked what the U.S. would do about aggression, ethnic cleansing, and mass murder in Bosnia-Herzegovina, replied: “We have no dog in that fight.” It is hard to say which was more Churchillian, the sentiment or the eloquence.

By this standard, Hamilton, former chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, was even more Churchillian. His reaction to the Bosnia debacle was described thus by Congressional Quarterly:

Hamilton was a well-modulated voice for cautious diplomacy…. Early in the Clinton administration, he agreed to a strategy under which Bosnia’s factions would agree to a partition of the republic…. But when Bosnia’s militarily dominant Serbs resisted, putting pressure on Clinton for U.S. military action…Hamilton suggested more time was needed to allow diplomacy and economic sanctions to work. To Hamilton’s many admirers, his caution as a foreign policy-maker is an aid in deterring the nation from rushing into foreign policy mistakes.

Other equally Churchillian moments in Hamilton’s legislative career include leading the opposition to military action against Iraq when it occupied Kuwait in 1990; opposition to aid to the Nicaraguan Contras in the 1980’s as well as to the besieged anti-Communist government in neighboring El Salvador; votes against a raft of weapons systems from the B-1 bomber to missile defense; and championing of the nuclear freeze.

Of course, the Churchill Centre was not honoring this pair for their past records but rather, as it explained, for their leadership of “the Iraq Study group, which resulted in critical policy recommendations.” The essence of those recommendations was to abandon hope of victory, begin to withdraw our soldiers, and cushion our defeat by appealing for help to the government of Iran (whose official slogan is “death to America”).

There’s a solution that would have done Churchill proud.

If you find the Baker-Hamilton legacy incongruent with that of Churchill, the Churchill Centre is out to reshape your memory of him, much as various academics lately have redefined Ronald Reagan as a liberal or moderate in noble contrast to the odious conservative, George W. Bush. The Centre explains: “The political precept that won Churchill respect from all sides was his belief that in difficult times the best results follow when people of differing beliefs and backgrounds come together, the greatest example of which was the ‘Grand Alliance’ of World War II.” In other words, Churchill’s great feat was not his resistance to Hitler but his embrace of Stalin.

Next, perhaps, the Centre will create a Churchill Award for Appeasement.

Senator Joseph Biden and foreign policy luminary Leslie Gelb have been promoting a plan for “federalism” in Iraq. Indeed, Biden succeeded several weeks ago in securing a lopsided vote in the Senate in favor of the idea. This is, at least at first glance, a more responsible position than that taken by most Democrats, who criticize the Bush administration’s policies without enunciating alternatives or demand withdrawal of U.S. forces without addressing the likely consequences.

Biden and Gelb point out disarmingly that federalism is already enshrined in the Iraqi constitution. Iraqis, though, call the Biden proposal “soft partition” of their country. Biden, himself, has long favored partition. And, if this is not what Biden and Gelb envision, it is impossible to see how their proposal amounts to an alternative to current policy—which is its whole point. Separating Iraq’s Sunni, Shia, and Kurdish parts, they reason, will dampen intercommunal violence, making it possible for the U.S. to withdraw its soldiers.

At a recent conference of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Biden’s well-respected aide, Tony Blinken, gave one of two major plenary addresses on Iraq, and he used the occasion to spell out the Biden-Gelb approach. We face two crucial desiderata, said Blinken. One is to withdraw our forces, since the American public wants to bring the troops home. The other is to avoid military defeat that, he acknowledged, would have disastrous consequences. “Federalism,” he said, would enable us to achieve both objectives. Moreover, this approach could be supplemented by “incredibly aggressive, sustained diplomacy.”

Whenever Democrats speak of being “aggressive,” not to mention “incredibly aggressive,” I grow suspicious. It usually means that they are proposing something weak, if not outright capitulation. My suspicions grew as I reflected on Blinken’s opening proposition: that a single policy would allow us both to pull out and to win. If we could do that, I wondered, why hadn’t we tried it in all our other wars?

So I took the floor and asked Blinken a question. If the federalism plan did not reap its hoped for results, namely, to reduce appreciably Iraq’s violence, then would he and Biden and Gelb support maintaining U.S. troop levels in that country. To his credit, Blinken came clean. We must withdraw regardless, he said. And he confessed that the federalism plan had “only a 20 to 30 percent chance” of success.

When the ardent advocates of a policy give it a 20-30 percent chance of success, it is a safe bet that even they know its chances are much lower. So there it is. The Biden-Gelb plan for Iraq is to get out. On our way to the exit, however, we will toss off one long-shot political maneuver (and of course “incredibly aggressive” diplomacy). And what of the consequences defeat in Iraq? That is a subject on which the Democrats seem sworn to maintain incredibly aggressive, sustained silence.

What is Vladimir Putin’s problem? Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates pay a rare joint visit to the Kremlin, and he snubs them by keeping them cooling their heels for 40 minutes. Then he treats them to a highly undiplomatic tirade before television cameras.

His diatribe was laced with threats. Should the U.S. continue with planned deployment of a small missile defense system in Poland and the Czech Republic, Russia will withdraw from the agreement on conventional force deployments in Europe and another treaty governing European nuclear weapons, and perhaps retaliate in additional ways. Putin’s performance, said the New York Times, “appeared to catch Gates and Rice off guard.”

Why the surprise? Because the subject of Putin’s rage, a shield avowedly intended against Iran, could not possibly diminish Russia’s nuclear deterrent. It would comprise enough interceptors to stop a handful of missiles, but Russia disposes of thousands. Moreover, lest Moscow fear that these sites could camouflage a larger anti-Russian system, the two U.S. officials came bearing a plan of transparency. As described by the Times, it

included an invitation for Russia to join the United States and NATO as a full partner in designing and operating an anti-missile system guarding all of Europe. The offer even could include invitations for Russian and American officers to inspect—and even be stationed as liaison officers at—each other’s missile defense sites.

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The most hated man in Iraq today is Senator Joseph Biden. Iraqis (except for Kurds) are outraged at the Senate’s adoption of a Biden bill, prescribing “federalism” for Iraq in terms that Iraqis take to mean partition of their country. My explanations—that Biden chose the anodyne word “federalism” because he couldn’t get support for “partition,” that the House was unlikely to pass a similar measure, and that even if passed, this bill was not binding—all fell on deaf ears. Sunni and Shiite politicians outdid each other in their denunciations. And some Iraqi lawmakers spoke of turning the tables by calling for the U.S. to be partitioned into sovereign black, white, and Hispanic nations.

During my stay in Baghdad I am bunking at CPIC (Combined Press Information Center) of the MNF-I (multinational forces in Iraq), where journalists are housed after catching either a “helo” or the “rhino” (armored bus caravan) from “BIAP” (the Baghdad International airport). The fortunate few get “manifested” in advance, but most have to travel “space A” (based on availability of space). A U.S. Army manual lying around our quarters gives this directive for dealing with the media: “avoid jargon, acronyms, slang and technical terms.” (The application for a press badge at CPIC asks, inter alia, for my “tribe” and “clan.” I figured I could put “Hebrews” for the former, but “clan” stumped me until the young lady soldier in charge told me I could leave those boxes blank.)

I am sharing space with journalists from Icelandic television, here to cover the exodus of their country’s contingent from MNF-I. Antiwar advocates will surely point to Iceland as yet another desertion from Bush’s coalition. But the significance is easy to overestimate. As the film crew informed me, they were here to cover the “withdrawal of the troop.” When I said, “troops,” they corrected me. There was only one soldier, a pretty 27-year-old blond. After spending the day filming her they returned to CPIC to tell me that she enjoyed her job training Iraqis and regretted being called home.

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A young, pro-American, “neolibertarian” blogger from Argentina named Pablo Martin Pozzoni recently wrote me this lament:

A few months ago I got the chance that I never have had before: to visit the country that I admire the most, because of what it is and represents, I had to stubbornly defend my decision against the hysterical anti-Americanism for which my country is well known…. This simple dream was cut short…not because of an economic or political situation in my country [but] by the Embassy of the United States…. Without taking into account my motivations or interests, I was considered something that anybody that knows me, and I am well known in Internet, will realize that is unthinkable and even laughable: a potential illegal immigrant.

It reminded me of other such tales. The Czech Republic and Poland, two of our staunchest allies, were on the brink of winning non-visa entry into the U.S. for their citizens, which several western European countries enjoy, when the deal was scotched by 9/11. Instead, would-be Czech and Polish visitors have to shell out a couple of hundred bucks for a visa application (which is not refundable) and wait on long lines. If this doesn’t cure their philo-Americanism, nothing will.

The ostensible reason is security, but I doubt there has ever been a Czech or Polish terrorist who targeted the U.S. The real purpose of the screening process is to weed out anyone who might wish to stay in the U.S. But what harm, exactly, would a few Czech, Polish, or Argentine illegal immigrants do? And is that harm—such as it might be—worth the ill will we invite at a time when we have a serious dearth of foreign friends?

The stories get even more absurd. This June, when President Bush tried to revivify his democracy-promotion agenda by delivering a stem-winder at a conference in Prague organized by Natan Sharansky and Vaclav Havel, and meeting with a group of dissidents from around the world, the most important Iranian dissident who had been invited was unable to attend. Mohsen Sazegara was scheduled to be one of the conference’s speakers, but he was forced to cancel: U.S. immigration authorities refused to promise him undelayed reentry into the U.S. (where he lives in exile).

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Last week, Lebanese legislator Antoine Ghanem was assassinated by a powerful bomb, the signature weapon of Syria’s secret service. He was at least the fifth member of the Lebanese legislature to die in this manner. Of course, there is no proof of the bombers’ identity, but all five victims have been distinguished by their anti-Syrian positions. If the perpetrator was not the Syrian regime, it was its fairy godmother.

This adds up to a blatant act of international aggression, the very thing that the United Nations was founded to prevent. And it is unfolding in full view. Where is the U.N. Security Council? Where is the Secretary General? Where are all those who preach greater reliance on the world body as the guarantor of “peace and security?” Where is the chorus that sings of international law, at least when it comes to rebuking the United States? (Where, for that matter, is Washington?)

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It’s time to declare victory and go home. That was the formula that Senator George Aiken famously suggested for Vietnam in 1966. Today, it bears relevance to Iraq. No, not to the U. S. military presence in that country, but to the Democrats in Congress.

Since November, the Pelosi-Reid Democrats have demonstrated shocking disdain for the well-being of our country. Their only concern has been to defeat or embarrass George W. Bush. Once, one of the noblest American traditions held that politics stops at the water’s edge. But, for the Pelosi-Reid Democrats, it seems that the inverse is true: namely, that national interests stop when the opportunity arises for partisan point-scoring.

In the last few weeks, however, a number of Democratic voices have been raised to observe that General Petraeus’s surge strategy seems to be working in Iraq. “We are finally getting somewhere in Iraq, at least in military terms,” wrote Michael O’Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack of The Brookings Institution in a widely quoted op-ed. Senator Richard Durbin of Illinois reported from Baghdad that our forces are “making some measurable progress.” And Anthony Cordesman, a strong critic of the war, said after a recent visit to the country, “real military progress is taking place.”

In view of these hopeful assessments, it would be criminally irresponsible to deny Petraeus the time and resources he needs to see if he can pull America’s chestnuts from the fire. It would also, in the end, be bad politics. Congressional Democrats should drop their efforts to force surrender upon us. Instead, they should try to take credit for the fact that things are improving. They can argue plausibly that by holding Bush’s feet to the fire, they forced him to adjust strategy, bringing on a new field commander and authorizing the surge. The Democrats should, in short, declare victory and go home.

What is the meaning of freedom of speech? You might think it means simply the right to say what you want, constrained only by a few common-sense barriers against injuring others. There is, however, another definition of free speech propounded by the likes of Stephen Walt, John Mearsheimer, Jimmy Carter, and other Israel-bashers. By this definition, freedom of speech consists of their right to say what they want without having to suffer demurral or criticism. They complain that supporters of Israel “stifle debate” by, well, debating with them.

This audacious polemical stratagem now has been elevated to the status of a full-fledged campaign. On the web page of the New Israel Fund, I found MuzzleWatch, its logo a mouth taped shut. This is a blog sponsored by something called Jewish Voice for Peace, a group led by such luminaries of the hard left as Ed Asner and Adrienne Rich.

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In addition to the very interesting speeches delivered by President Bush and Senator Lieberman at last week’s Prague Conference on Democracy and Security, there were some noteworthy moments during the panel discussions.

The most touching came during the remarks of Mithal Al-Alusi, a liberal secularist member of the Iraqi legislature. “We are fighting for you in Iraq,” he said, “because what we are fighting against is part of the Iran-Syria-Hamas-Hizballah axis.” Then he added that Iraqis were aware of and grateful for the losses of American sons and daughters in Iraq: “we have lost children, too.” What he was too dignified to mention was that he, himself, lost two grown sons to terrorists who were attempting to assassinate him after he had attended an anti-terrorism conference in Israel. He has somehow found the strength to continue the struggle to make his country peaceful and free.

The most welcome moment came during the remarks of Egyptian intellectual and leading dissident Saad Eddin Ibrahim. Ibrahim has been an advocate of dialogue with Islamists ever since his prolonged jailhouse exchanges with Muslim Brotherhood prisoners during his own long incarceration. Last summer, however, during the war in Lebanon, Ibrahim appeared to veer toward a closer embrace of Islamists, freely granting their democratic bona fides, a position I criticized in COMMENTARY.

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Yesterday, I wrote about the recent Prague Conference on Democracy and Security, focusing on the speech of President Bush. Another speech worthy of attention was given by Senator Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut, a man who, before our eyes, grows stronger as the going gets tougher. His keynote speech to the opening dinner was an easy occasion for platitudes. He might have heaped praise on Natan Sharansky and Václav Havel, topped it off with some bromides about freedom, and taken his bow to much applause. Instead, he plunged unflinchingly into the most difficult issue of the day, and threw down a rhetorical gauntlet to those demanding a quick U.S. exit from Iraq. Here is a key excerpt:

What is happening in the Middle East today is not simply a battle between the United States and its enemies in one particular country, but a much larger struggle between freedom and fear, in which Iraq happens to be the central front. On the one side of this conflict are the latest in a long line of totalitarians, a loose alliance of terrorists and tyrants every bit as fanatical as the fascists and communists with whom they share a hatred of America and the values for which it stands.

Terrorism is their preferred weapon, but it is not their ultimate aim. Their vision is far more ambitious and terrifying: a vision of hatred and conquest, in which billions of people fall under a jihadist jackboot of vicious and repressive rule. . . .

The outcome of the struggle in Iraq will go a long way toward determining whether our future in Europe, and America, and throughout much of the world belongs to these totalitarians, or to democrats. . . .

Iraq is about the survival and success of the very ideal of freedom not only in Iraq, but in Iran, and Syria, and the rest of that region, and in a very real way, in the rest of the world. . . .

Today, the choice we face is not simply whether we support the advance of democracy in the abstract, but at what cost we are willing to fight for it.

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With the U.S. military effort in Iraq having bogged down, with Islamists winning elections in Egypt and the Palestinian territories, with the rebirth of democracy in Lebanon thwarted by Syrian and Iranian intervention, the momentum of George W. Bush’s foreign policy, which had flowed high in the “Arab spring” of 2005, has ebbed. The Conference on Democracy and Security, which met in Prague June 4-6, grew out of former Soviet dissident and leading Israeli intellectual Natan Sharansky’s sense of the need to reinvigorate the Bush administration’s flagging project of promoting democracy in the Middle East.

Sharansky found the ideal co-convener of the conference in Vaclav Havel. The former Czech president and the circle of one-time dissidents close to him (such as deputy prime minister Sacha Vondra and the Czech ambassador to Israel Michael Zantovsky) have demonstrated an unflagging and unparalleled dedication to the cause of freedom in the eighteen years since they won their own. They have, for example, set up a committee to monitor Beijing’s human-rights record during the 2008 Olympics and have had their diplomats succor dissidents in Cuba. In addition to their unusual dedication to principle, these Czech freedom-fighters keep a wary eye on Russia, where Vladimir Putin’s success in restoring dictatorship and a bullying foreign policy has put all of the former subject states of the Soviet empire on the qui vive.

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My idea of uncomfortable is having one of my heroes attack another. That is how I felt when I read Daniel Pipes’s charge that Carl Gershman was among “government figures [who] wrong-headedly insist on consorting with the enemy.” Pipes is a prolific Middle East expert and indefatigable opponent of jihadism (as well as a longtime contributor to COMMENTARY) from whose writings I have profited greatly. Gershman is the president of the National Endowment for Democracy (and another valued contributor).

Pipes’s case against Gershman is that the NED supports the Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy (CSID) and that Gershman himself spoke at its 2004 annual conference.

For all my admiration of Pipes, I think his attack on Gershman is off-base. For starters, Gershman is not a “government figure.” The NED is funded by Congress, but it is privately incorporated, and Gershman is chosen by its board of mostly private citizens, not by any branch of the government. This is not a nit, because the NED’s effectiveness depends on this modest margin of separation from the government.

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Last month, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi led a delegation to Damascus in defiance of the express wishes of President Bush. In response, Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad’s spokesman praised her “courageous position” and expressed the hope that it would inaugurate a dialogue between “the people of the United States” and the Syrian regime, despite President Bush’s efforts to isolate it. Pelosi explained her unusual action by saying that she was trying to “build some confidence” between Americans and the Assad government.

Apparently she has succeeded, after a fashion. Assad, at least, seems to have gained confidence that he can behave as brutally as he wishes without incurring too much international opprobrium. In the month since Pelosi’s visit, he has ratcheted up repression, all but snuffing out the lingering embers of the “Damascus spring” that followed his accession to power seven years ago. Six prominent dissidents were packed off to prison for sentences ranging from three to twelve years, the longest term being given to Kamal Labwani for “communicating with a foreign country,” i.e., the United States. “It’s back to the 1980’s, to the worst days of his father’s rule,” commented the exiled dissident Ammar Abdulhamid.

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Amnesty International is beating its anti-American drum again. In 2005, AI’s secretary-general Irene Khan called the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo “the gulag of our time.” Aside from defaming the U.S., this grotesque metaphor belittled the martyrdom of the millions of victims of the real gulags, most of whom did not survive the experience and none of whom were terrorists. Rather, they were sent to their doom for such offenses as being “the wife of an enemy of the people.”

On Wednesday, AI issued its 2007 report, and Khan was back at it. “One of the biggest blows to human rights has been the attempt of Western democratic states to roll back some fundamental principles of human rights,” she said. Which “democratic states”? As Khan continued, with characteristic restraint, “the U.S. administration’s doublespeak has been breathtakingly shameless. It is unrepentant about the global web of abuse it has spun in the name of counterterrorism.”

But who is doing the doublespeak? The war against terrorism is the supreme human-rights struggle of our time. This is so because the first human right is the right to life, and scores of innocents every day have it brutally snatched from them by terrorists. It is so, too, because the regimes that succor terrorists are themselves among the world’s most repressive and because the jihadists and other radicals who carry out terrorism aim to become rulers themselves. If they succeed, they will show their subjects no more mercy than they do their victims today. And the war on terror is doubly a campaign for human rights because the Bush administration has “shamelessly” built its anti-terror strategy around the objective of promoting freedom and democracy in the Middle East.

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Much has already been said about Hillary Clinton’s shifting positions on Iraq. Having once criticized President Bush for not sending enough troops, she now has announced her intent to vote to block war funding. But Hillary’s zigzagging is nothing new. It has been the stamp of her last fifteen years.

She began her political life in the radical student movement of the 1960’s, summarized by her commencement speech at Wellesley College in 1969, in which she declared that the “prevailing, acquisitive, and competitive corporate life . . . is not the way of life for us. We’re searching for a more immediate, ecstatic, and penetrating mode of living.” (Husband Bill seems to have taken this quest to heart.)

Her New Leftism was not soon outgrown. In 1987, her profile raised by Bill’s status as governor of Arkansas, she assumed the chairmanship of the New World Foundation, a funder of radical Left, pro-Communist, and PLO-linked causes. The foundation had a history of such activities before Hillary took it over, but as I showed in a 1993 article for COMMENTARY, the number of extremist and Communist front groups funded by the foundation multiplied under her leadership.

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In my last post, I described the distressing amount of support for al Qaeda revealed by a recent poll of public opinion in four U.S.-allied Muslim-majority countries: Egypt, Morocco, Indonesia, and Pakistan.

This was not the only disconcerting finding of the survey. Asked whether one of the goals of U.S. global policy is “to weaken and divide Islam,” 79 percent answered in the affirmative, including 92 percent of Egyptian respondents. Asked whether the U.S. aimed “to spread Christianity in the Middle East,” 64 percent said yes. The poll then asked for the “primary goal” of the U.S. war on terror. Offered three choices, 36 percent said it was “to achieve political and military domination to control Middle East resources.” Thirty-four percent thought it was “to weaken and divide the Islamic religion and its people.” Only 19 percent thought the reason was “to protect itself from terrorist attacks.” (Please note, all numbers above and below have been rounded.)

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Do supporters of al Qaeda make up only a tiny fraction of the Muslim world? This is what we want to believe and what American leaders, from President Bush on down, have insisted since 9/11. So we have strained to ignore the Osama bin Laden T-shirts and other anecdotal evidence suggesting that the story might not be so simple. Now there are disquieting data from a survey released last month by the respected Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland.

The survey covered four Muslim countries—Morocco, Egypt, Pakistan, and Indonesia—that are closely allied with the U.S. and that are, on average, slightly more liberal politically than the mean of Muslim countries. Many aspects of the poll’s findings are fascinating, starting with what it reveals about support for al Qaeda. (Please note, all numbers below are rounded.)

Respondents were given three choices by which to describe their feelings about al Qaeda. At one end they could say that they “oppose its attacks on Americans and do not share its attitudes toward the U.S.” At the opposite end they could say that they “support its attacks on Americans and share its attitudes toward the U.S.” Or they could chose a middle option, namely to say that they “oppose its attacks on Americans but share many of its attitudes toward the U.S.”

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Sandmonkey, the well-known Arab blogger who recently announced an end to his blogging, may have been the most deliciously irreverent voice in the entire blogosphere. A 26-year old Egyptian, he went to college in Massachusetts, where he cultivated fluency not only in the American tongue but also in the folkways of global youth culture. (His moniker is a pejorative term for Arab, he explained to me when I first met him, amazed that I didn’t know it. Brandishing it was typical of his in-your-face style.)

Sandmonkey reveled in freedom; back in Egypt, he behaved as if he were free, almost. With the help of the Internet he spoke his mind pseudonymously, but with breathtaking audacity. His website, for instance, appealed for financial contributions by asking readers to “Support the Neo-con American Right-wing Zionist Christian Imperialist Conspiracy in the Middle-east!”

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Since the unexpectedly strong showing by the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt’s parliamentary elections in late 2005—and other rough seas that President Bush’s policies encountered in Iraq and Palestine—the administration has pulled in its horns on the promotion of democracy in the Middle East. Tactical retreats are not tantamount to an abandonment of policy, but apparently no one has told this to the U.S. ambassador to Egypt, Frances Ricciardone. In recent public comments Ricciardone has gone out of his way to excuse and cover up some of the most serious violations of democracy and human rights in Egypt.

In a television interview (the transcript of which is posted on the embassy’s website), the ambassador was asked about the circumstances of the Coptic Christians who constitute an estimated 10 percent of Egypt’s population. Here is the relevant exchange:

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In an exchange on National Review Online (April 17), Andrew McCarthy takes Mario Loyola to task for suggesting that the Bush Doctrine is about spreading democracy. “That is just nonsense,” writes McCarthy. “The Bush Doctrine, as announced in the days after 9/11 . . . holds that jihadists are our enemies and that regimes that support their terror have the choice of being with us or against us.” It is only “revisionists,” he argues, who claim that “the Bush Doctrine means terrorism will be defeated by spreading democracy.” And this is “preposterous” since there is “is no evidence—NONE—that adopting democracy means defeating terrorism.”

On the historical record, McCarthy is wrong in claiming that promoting democracy somehow slipped into Bush’s rhetoric only in his second inaugural address. It was clearly set out in Bush’s 2002 National Security Strategy (about which I wrote in COMMENTARY). But the important question is not the semantic one of whether promoting democracy deserves to be called part of the Bush Doctrine. It is whether it is a good idea for winning the war on terror.

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A couple of months ago I blogged about a news report that North Korea had bought some giant rabbits from a German breeder as seed stock, apparently in the hope of alleviating its dire food shortage.

Although the starvation of Koreans is anything but funny, here in a capsule was the entire story of Communist economics. Despite its professed humanitarian motives, the Marxist model was entirely mechanistic, blind to the role of human invention and incentive in creating wealth. Planners could simply draw blueprints of abundance and—abracadabra—their word would become flesh.

Stalin, for example, decided that it would be more efficient if some of the rivers of the Soviet Union reversed direction, so he tasked his engineers to turn them around. Mao calculated that China could industrialize overnight if each citizen made his own steel, so millions of backyard furnaces were created. And this year the minions of Kim Jong Il figured out that national starvation could be solved by means of larger rabbits, each of which could feed many more humans than ordinary examples of that species.

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April 15 is Yom haShoah, the day of commemoration of the Holocaust. The Nazis killed one-third of the world’s Jewish population, and most Jews, at least most Ashkenazi Jews, lost an ancestor or cousin in this unparalleled slaughter. Many lost their whole families. Around the world, Jews will pray for these lost ones and lament the immense part of the body of our people that was torn away from us—a wound that will never heal. It is a moment of deepest grief and solemnity.

Except, that is, to one Michael Lerner, who has just announced that he will use the occasion to launch a “campaign for a Global Marshall Plan.”

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Is the Muslim Brotherhood the answer to our prayers for a force to promote democracy and to counter jihadism in the Islamic world? Yes, answer Robert Leiken and Steven Brooke in the March-April issue of Foreign Affairs, in an article to which I took exception on Monday. They have replied to my criticisms, and I will answer their replies and continue the discussion about the Brotherhood.

Brooke says of my citation of Mahdi Akef that one should “look at the overall group and not just pull out the most conspicuous bad examples. . . . [W]e can’t get distracted by ‘weeds in the garden.’” But Mahdi Akef is not merely a “bad example” or a “weed.” He is the head of the organization, its General Guide or Supreme Guide (translations vary). When asked in an interview about public statements by other Brotherhood figures, Akef replied:

I am the one and only leader of the Brotherhood in Egypt. Ever since I was elected to the post, I have permitted other prominent members to speak to the media. . . . Ultimately, the Brotherhoood has one head and one elected supreme leader, Mohammed Mahdi Akef.

Was this an empty boast?

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“In the anxious and often fruitless search for Muslim moderates, policymakers should recognize that the Muslim Brotherhood presents a notable opportunity.” So write Robert S. Leiken and Steven Brooke in “The Moderate Muslim Brotherhood” in the March-April issue of Foreign Affairs. (Leiken, a friend of mine, is an expert on Central America who made important contributions to debates about that region in the 1980’s.)

He and Brooke claim that “jihadists loathe the Muslim Brotherhood . . . for rejecting global jihad and embracing democracy.” Although “critics speculate that the Brotherhood helps radicalize Muslims . . . in fact, it appears that the Ikhwan [i.e., Brotherhood] works to dissuade Muslims from violence, instead channeling them into politics and charitable activities.” Indeed, in its birthplace, Egypt, “the Ikhwan followed the path of toleration” rather than “pursuing a divisive religious or cultural agenda.”

In short, the Muslim moderates for whom we have been searching since 9/11 have been under our noses all along in the guise of the granddaddy of all Islamist organizations. How could we have missed this? “U.S. policymaking has been handicapped by Washington’s tendency to see the Muslim Brotherhood—and the Islamist movement as a whole—as a monolith,” lament the authors. “When it comes to the Muslim Brotherhood, the beginning of wisdom lies in differentiating it from radical Islam and recognizing the significant differences between national Brotherhood organizations.”

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