In 1914, the word realpolitik, a German import into the language, came to mean an all-purpose license to conduct politics based on practical factors rather than ethical objectives. Epistemologically, it was in effect an equal-opportunity employer where a democratic country would have no qualms about doing business with and underwriting the survival of two-bit dictators and repressive regimes around the world.
So long as your support of these odious leaders and the rackets they ran served the broad design of your national interests, there should be no need for you to lose any sleep over the moral contradictions inherent in your policy.
The trouble with morals, the practioners of realpolitik would tell you, is that there are too many of them.
The fact of the matter is that the problem today seems to be that there are so few of them.
Take the seemingly significant shift in US foreign policy as articulated last week in President Bush's soaring inaugural address and Secretary of State-designate Condoleezza Rice's testimony on the Hill before the Foreign Relations Committee two days earlier.
Forget the Axis of Evil. That's now old hat. Evil is out, tyranny is in.
During her confirmation hearings on Jan. 18, Rice branded six countries as "outposts of tyranny" and vowed that the US "would spread freedom and democracy throughout the globe."
"In our world, there remain outposts of tyranny, and America stands with oppressed people on every continent," she said, naming Cuba, Burma, North Korea, Iran, Belarus and Zimbabwe as culprits.
And as George W. Bush took the oath of office for a second term on Jan. 20, a breezy winter day, he spoke of how he will dedicate his presidency to spreading democracy and freedom "with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world." He vowed to transform US foreign policy to make human rights its defining priority, and claimed that from now on relations with "every ruler and every nation" will be defined by how they treat their own people, presenting America as a beacon for all subjugated folks around the world and promising to confront the tyrants who subjugate them. "When you stand for your liberty," he thundered, "we will stand with you."
In the 21-minute address, Bush reportedly used the words "free," "freedom" and "liberty" 49 times.
No question about it, them are noble ideals -- though more Wilsonian than conservative -- pointing to an America committed to a struggle against dictatorship, or conversely, to a struggle for democracy, social justice and freedom on behalf of people not endowed with them.
This is a policy, on the face of it, that no one could possibly object to, a policy, however, that neither Bush nor his predecessors over the last half a century or more have pursued.
To believe that the new administration is both earnest and sincere in its rhetoric is to believe that the US is committing itself to no less than a profoundly significant shift in its foreign policy, that it no longer seeks, as it had done in the past, to carry the message of freedom while at the same time hypocritically carrying the baggage of realpolitik.
The US must show us -- democrats, reformers and human rights activists in our part of the world to whom the lofty values Bush alluded to are of paramount importance -- that its commitment to "end tyranny" and promote freedom is genuine. Washington, in other words, cannot pursue that commitment when it coincides with American interests, but conveniently leave it by the wayside when it is seen as being at odds with those interests -- and still expect us to believe that change, of such historic magnitude, in US foreign policy is not mere grandiose and hollow inaugural rhetoric.
What we have to raise here should not be our hopes but our guard.
Since when, pray tell, have Republicans been apostles of freedom? (Abraham Lincoln, it will be noted, confronted the South not to save slaves but to save the Union.)
Republicans have engineered bloody military coups all the way from Iran to Chile, deposing leaders voted into office in free elections and replacing them by vicious dictators who openly went about repressing, torturing and butchering their people, confident in the belief that Washington was behind them. They supported dictators all the way from the Philippines to Iraq. And they acted as the midwife of terrorists, death squads and military juntas in virtually every wretched Central American republic.
Long before the liberation of South Africa from the shackles of apartheid, Dick Cheney, the current vice president, voted in Congress to oppose sanctions against the white minority regime in the country. Later, when the House of Representatives introduced a nonbinding resolution, known a " sense of congress," expressing the sentiments of the members, calling for the release of Nelson Mandela from prison, again Cheney voted against, identifying the African National Congress as a "terrorist organization."
Now we are called upon to believe, wam, bam, thank you ma'am, US foreign policy will be so dramatically changed by these same Republicans as to reflect, at its very pivot, the deepest moral convictions around.
President Bush talked himself into an expansive, eloquent and at times lyrical speech, but will he have the cajones to follow through on his uncompromising stance on "tyranny" and support for oppressed people?
And as far as we are concerned, in our own part of the world, can we trust a leader who has bragged about heading an administration that proved itself the most ardent supporter of Israel, a leader who called a war criminal like Ariel Sharon a "man of peace," who pre-empted final status negotiations in the Arab-Israeli conflict by dismissing Palestinian refugees' right of return, and who has unttered nary a word of criticism about Israeli practices, but was totally unstinting in his criticism of the Palestinians, who just happen to be universally recognized as the injured party in the dispute?
Before Bush can elicit our support and recruit us as allies of his new campaign to help "subjugated people," it would be edifying if he were to tell us, first, whether he is convinced that Palestinians -- who live under the rule of the gun by another people, and who daily have their land robbed from under their feet, their homes demolished, their dignity assailed at checkpoints, their patriots incarcerated in the thousands, and their lives pauperized -- come under his definition of a "subjugated people." If so, let's see him apply his grand rhetoric to the sad facts on the ground.
Otherwise, it becomes obvious that even the most lyrically resonant of inaugural speeches, as President Bush's indisputably was, can contain egregious falsehoods and pretentious trivia divorced from felt reality.
We'll all be waiting. But don't think for one moment any of us will be holding their breath.
By Fawaz Turki
© Arab News 2005
