Measuring the Success of American Foreign Policy

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice gave an excellent speech at AIPAC on Monday, worth reading in its entirety.  It includes a paean to the creation of Israel, spoken by someone who, according to this report (see the next to last paragraph), attended a seder at Ambassador Danny Ayalon’s home.

The portion of the speech that received one of the largest rounds of applause was this one:

[T]he United States looks to a future and has a vision of a day when Israel is no longer the sole democracy in the Middle East.  (Applause).  This aspiration shapes the very heart of our approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as well.

For four years, President Bush refused to meet with Yasser Arafat.  (Applause) . . .

There were those who ridiculed this principled decision as if the refusal to negotiate with a man who aided and abetted terrorism somehow revealed a lack of concern for peace.  America and Israel had tried before to gain peace where democracy did not exist and we are not going down that road again. (Applause).

Secretary Rice also made this observation, about measuring the success of American foreign policy:

We measure our success in the democratic revolutions that have stunned the entire world:  vibrant revolutions of rose and orange and purple and tulip and cedar.

The destiny of the Middle East is bound up in this global expansion of freedom. . . .  The people of this region are expressing ideas and taking actions that would have been unthinkable only one year ago.

Some in the Arab media have even asked why the only real democracies in the Middle East are found in the “occupied lands” of Iraq and the Palestinian territories. . .

It is an incisive point — except there are significant differences between the “real democracy” in Iraq and the “Palestinian territories.”

In Iraq, millions of voters risked death to vote in competitive elections that served as a rejection of terrorism and established a new government wholly divorced from the past.  There were many new political parties, innumerable new newspapers (and bloggers) — all free to express their views — and numerous candidates, none of whom were the familiar faces of the prior regime.  (Imagine if the only candidate had been a rehabilitated Tariq Aziz, newly pledged to “peace”).

In the Palestinian presidential elections, the only credible candidate running was Yasser Arafat’s long-time second-in-command, someone who opposed suicide bombings not because killing women and children on buses is a crime against humanity, but because they were “counterproductive.”  He campaigned literally on the shoulders of terrorists.  He made clear, as part of his campaign, that he had no intention of dismantling terrorist groups — a campaign promise he has kept.  He seeks hundreds of millions of dollars from the United States and massive releases of prisoners from Israel (neither required by the Road Map), as compensation for negotiating a “cease fire” that can be called off once the new concessions end.  The Palestinian media under his control continues to vilify Israel and Jews with “sermons” and national observances of the “disaster” of Israel’s existence.

The Palestinian election was essentially uncontested (that is, staged), since the principal opposition (Hamas) did not compete, and the candidate who probably would have won (Marwan Barghouti) was “persuaded” not to run — on the not-unreasonable grounds that it would have been counterproductive to elect a murderer sitting in an Israeli jail.

Unlike the Iraqi election, the Palestinian election was democracy only in the Jimmy Carter sense, not the Natan Sharansky sense.  The latter requires a free society, with open discussion and an uncontrolled media, and multiple candidates presenting real choices — not simply a “vote” for a pre-selected candidate, or an election manipulated to effect a pre-conceived result.

The success of American foreign policy will be measured by whether the U.S. sticks to its insistence that the Palestinians create a "real democracy" — beginning with the dismantlement of the terrorist networks — or starts heading down again the same road Condoleezza Rice foreswore on Monday.