Jacques Chirac and George W. Bush didn't get along. The French president "opposed the removal of Saddam Hussein," Mr. Bush recalls in his memoir, Decision Points. "He called Yasser Arafat 'a man of courage.' At one meeting, he told me: 'Ukraine is part of Russia.' " Yet, Mr. Chirac and Mr. Bush worked closely together to save Lebanon's imperilled democracy in 2005. They rallied the Arab world to Lebanon's cause following the assassination of former prime minister Rafik Hariri, a killing that led to the withdrawal of Syrian troops from Lebanon and that empowered the Cedar Revolution that filled Beirut's Martyrs' Square, in a historic expression of self-determination, with more than a million freedom-affirming demonstrators.
Mr. Chirac counted only two democracies in the Middle East - Israel and Lebanon. Mr. Bush counted four: "The triumph of democracy in Lebanon came less than two months after the [first]free elections in Iraq and the election of President [Mahmoud]Abbas in the Palestinian Territories," he wrote. "Never before had three Arab societies made so much progress toward democracy." Beyond all doubt, the eight million Iraqis who had risked death to cast ballots obliterated the notion that Arab countries were destined to despotic rule.
But the fact is that democracy doesn't rise, like Aphrodite from the foam, fully formed. Iraq's first elections were held in 1925. Lebanon's democracy is imperilled once again. The Palestinian democracy is a work in progress. But then few democracies survived the 20th century without violent interruption: The short list would include the United States, Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Sweden and Switzerland.
More than 30 democracies were established in the 20th century - and more than 30 were (for varying periods) swept away. In Europe, the Nazis, Fascists and Communists extinguished most of them; in South America, military coups did the job. It took a world war to restore democracy in Germany and to impose it in Japan.
Mr. Bush made democracy an option in the Middle East - and presumably beyond. Celebrated for his impeccable defence of democratic Israel (Barbara Bush, his mother, once asked him how it felt to be the first Jewish president in American history), he promoted Palestinian democracy, too. In his second inaugural speech, in 2005, he affirmed the promotion of democracy as America's fundamental foreign policy objective. In the Cold War, the Truman Doctrine had promised U.S. aid to any country that resisted communism. Now the Bush Doctrine promised U.S. aid to any country that promoted democracy.
"The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands," Mr. Bush famously asserted. "So it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world." The Economist magazine, for its part, said the Bush administration subsequently "nagged, scolded, bribed and bullied its allies toward greater democracy." It pressed Egypt to hold more open elections in 2005. It talked Israel into letting Hamas contest Palestinian elections. It persuaded Saudi Arabia to hold its first elections (for male voters only).
"The experts who scoffed at Mr. Bush for thinking that Arabs wanted and were ready for democracy on the Western model are suddenly looking less clever," the magazine said. "Mr. Bush's simple and wonderful notion that Arabs want, deserve and are capable of democracy is looking rather wise."
Some conservatives fear the abrupt collapse of the old order in Egypt - that Israel's survival requires permanent alliances with despots. Of course, it doesn't - though now, amidst revolutionary foment, the U.S. must still guarantee Israel's security. But it's not Israeli democracy alone that requires U.S. protection. It's democracy, period.
It's the exceptional vulnerability of democracy that, in the end, justifies the use of force to defend or extend it - as the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights implicitly recognizes. Article 1: "All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights." Article 3: "Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person." Article 18: "Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion." But then, as Mr. Bush says, freedom is not an American value - it's a universal value.