DOCTRINE OR DIVERSION?

President George W. Bush presented his Nov. 6 speech, “Iraqi Democracy Will Succeed,” as the introduction of a seminal doctrine, comparable to President Reagan’s 1982 speech at London’s Westminster Palace declaring the failure and imminent collapse of Soviet communism. He recalled also Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points and Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms. Outlining what he called a “forward strategy of freedom in the Middle East,” he used the word “freedom” 35 times, “democracy” 28 times and “liberty” 18 times. His audience, at the 20th anniversary meeting of The National Endowment for Democracy, obviously found his remarks inspiring, interrupting 19 times with laughter and applause.

News stories emphasized his expressed determination to stay the course in Iraq, his vision that a democratic and free-enterprise Iraq could be a model for reform throughout the region, and his implied criticism of past cozying with unnamed dictatorships and oligarchies. He said: “Sixty years of Western nations excusing and accommodating the lack of freedom in the Middle East did nothing to make us safe, because in the long run stability cannot be purchased at the expense of liberty.”

But Mr. Bush’s expression of optimistic determination came just as resistance to the American occupation of Iraq was expanding in deadliness and sophistication. Suicide attacks were spreading beyond Saddam Hussein’s old stronghold in the Baghdad area. The Central Intelligence Agency was suggesting that ordinary Iraqis were losing faith in the American-led occupation and the U.S.-appointed governing council. The administration was in the midst of what looked like a desperate change of strategy, a return to large-scale military combat against guerrilla insurgents and a speeding up of the writing of an Iraqi constitution and turning over governance and power to Iraqi leaders yet to be selected.

Instead of the gigantic foes confronted by those earlier speeches – Kaiser Wilhelm’s Germany in World War I, the German-Italian-Japanese axis of World War II, and the Soviet Unison in the Cold War – the new enemy is a shadowy conspiracy once centered in Afghanistan but now increasingly concentrated on driving the United States and its allies out of Iraq.

Mr. Bush chose a controversial venue for enunciating what certainly will be known as the Bush Doctrine. Congress established the National Endowment for Democracy in 1983 to take over the covert functions of the Central Intelligence Agency after disclosures of various dirty tricks including the Iran-Contra scheme had given the CIA a bad name. Although unregulated and supposedly a nongovernment organization, it spends mostly taxpayers’ money to influence elections and policies in other countries through grants to dissident groups. The U.S. General Accounting Office and the Inspector General of the U.S. Information Agency have accused it of serious mismanagement. A foreign policy briefing by the Cato Institute described it as a “loose cannon” that is “superfluous at best and often destructive.” But when the organization’s funding was threatened in Congress, another conservative group, the American Heritage Foundation, rushed to its defense.

If a new strategy succeeds and the Iraqis take over, the National Endowment for Democracy, for better or worse, is likely to quietly try to guide the way to freedom and private enterprise.

Mr. Bush was correct in saying that the war in Iraq has reached a turning point. But it is far from clear that the dream of a peaceful and democratic Iraq will be realized soon. And it is far from clear that the National Endowment for Democracy should lead the way.