Freedom has to be more than a word

E.J. Dionne Jr. / Washington Post Writers Group 24oct01

President Bush keeps saying that our battle against terrorism is a fight for freedom. He's certainly right that we're fighting for our own liberty. But how seriously do we take freedom for everybody else?

If you look at the nations with which we've allied ourselves, you begin to wonder. In recent days, the president has been eager to strengthen our relationship with China. Bush laid the burden on himself, saying he wanted the Chinese president to "look me in the eye, take measure of the American president . . . so he can see that I'm a sincere person when I say that I want to have good relations."

Perhaps I'm missing some subtleties in the ways of Sino-American communication, but I don't think an American president speaking of a dictator has to vouch for his own sincerity. In the meantime, Chinese human rights cases are allowed to remain unresolved, which means that individual dissenters remain unjustly in prison.

Our putative allies include Saudi Arabia, which wants to do as little as possible for us publicly and whose repressive monarchy respects neither religious nor political freedom, let alone gender equality. Pakistan is governed by a military dictatorship. President Islam Karimov of Uzbekistan has jailed thousands of political prisoners.

Like Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt before him, Bush is justified in seeking help from unsavory governments now. But the United States also has obligations to honesty and to our own claims of representing democracy and freedom in the world. At the very least, we should never pretend that countries with repressive governments are "free" just because they're standing with us in this war.

And if we claim that this is a war for freedom in the broad sense, we have to consider how a shortage of freedom in the world helped create the conditions for our current fix. This, in turn, means that a concern for human rights must be part of our strategy.

To argue for human rights as a necessary component of American policy is to invite dissent from left to right. For the United States to speak out in favor of human rights is seen by some as an effort to impose "Western" ideas on non- Western nations.

Foreign policy tough guys mistrust human rights, too. National interest alone, they say, should guide our policy.

The notion that human rights can be discounted as a "Western" idea surely makes no sense to Arabs, Asians or Africans languishing in prisons because of their political views or religious beliefs.

The United States faces terrible choices in dealing with allies in part because citizens in nation after nation in the Middle East and Central Asia face only bad options themselves. Democratic alternatives are rarely available.

Of course, the United States can't remake every society on Earth. But to argue, as the hard-nosed types do, that we have no national interest in the spread of democratic values is to lack realism. We are now committed to building a new Afghanistan because we know that the fracturing of government there helped create the Taliban and that only an effective and more representative regime can create durable social peace.

The events of Sept. 11 unmasked the instability that reigns across a large patch of our planet. In the short run, the United States needs to do what it can to contain the terrorism this instability breeds. But if we really mean to seek long-term solutions then expanding democracy's reach will become a central purpose of our foreign policy. This task is not a luxury, it's an imperative.