Incurious George W. can't grasp democracy
Apr. 18, 2004. 01:00 AM
RICHARD GWYN
President George W. Bush possesses some considerable liabilities. He's not particularly bright and, as he showed by his fumbling responses in his press conference last week, he doesn't think quickly.
He also possesses considerable assets that critics often overlook out of sheer snobbery. He is decisive and courageous. He has the invaluable quality in all leaders of stick-to-itiveness.
Bush's most substantial liability is that he's incurious. He isn't interested in, and appears fundamentally unaware of, the existence of, other cultures, other countries, other ideas, and of people unlike himself — no matter whether they happen to be "others" or Americans.
He strides around inside a bubble that blocks out all sounds and sights and ideas other than those already in his mind.
Bush is a natural, committed unilateralist. He doesn't just believe in American "exceptionalism." He believes in his own exceptionalism: Whatever he believes in is right because he believes in it.
No better example can be found of Bush the incurious than his joint declaration this week with Israeli leader Ariel Sharon.
"Sharon Got It All," headlined the Israeli daily Haaretz the next day. An entirely accurate summation.
Sharon got rid of what he didn't want — bedraggled Gaza with its 1 million Arabs for the minimal price of moving 7,000 Jewish settlers whom most Israelis agree should never have been there in the first place. (Neither religion nor nationalism attracted them there but cheap land and a chance for remission from military service).
In exchange, Sharon got everything he wanted. Approval of his "security wall"; that no Palestinian refugees could ever return and that most Jewish settlers in the West Bank could stay (a handful of small settlements there will be closed of the type settlers regularly build to give their government something to appease world opinion by closing).
In practical terms, "reality," as Bush put it at their joint appearance at the White House, always ensured that most Jewish settlers would stay and that almost no Palestinian refugees would ever return.
But, as the European Union and Canada pointed out in futile protests, these were always to be part of "final status" discussions. Palestinian negotiators could then have used them as bargaining chips — to get compensation for refugees, to get some Israeli land in exchange, if purely as a face-saving trade since any such land would be of the poorest quality.
Bush talked only to Sharon because Sharon talks his anti-terrorism language. The Palestinians weren't consulted, informed, were not even thought about.
At this very moment, Bush and his soldiers are trying to close down the worst-ever uprising in Iraq since the invasion. Close to 100 American soldiers (some of them retired types out of uniform who don't show up in the official lists of casualties) and about 1,000 Iraqis have been killed.
Bush is doing this in the cause of democracy.
But you don't turn people into democrats by shooting them. Worse, all those Iraqis still on the sidelines will have noticed what has just happened in Washington. To all Arabs, in Iraq or anywhere else, the Palestinian issue is their issue.
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict isn't the only source of Arab rage. Self-hatred and a sense of perpetual defeat is an important part of it.
But throughout the Islamic world there is a deep sense of unfairness about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. For example: Iraq ignores a United Nations resolution and gets invaded; Israel ignores every single U.N. resolution that applies to it and gets everything it wants. Bush is too incurious to notice.
In Iraq, he is attempting to transform the country into a democracy. I believe that, in his uncomplicated, even simple-minded way, Bush has grasped that democracy is the only conceivable alternative to perpetual, self-generating, terrorism.
But he's just shown Iraqis that he hasn't a clue about democracy itself. It's about give and take, about listening, about respecting the opinions of others. It's not about being told what to do — including being told to become democrats.
Every Iraqi must now know that what's just been done to the Palestinians is what's going to happen to them: They'll get "democracy" without being consulted, informed, thought about, except for a bit of show.
While Bush may mean what he says about democracy, he doesn't know what he means.
He doesn't know, that's to say, that no one who is totally incurious about other people, other ideas, other cultures, other values, can be a democrat.
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