WASHINGTON: The US public is deeply sceptical about the priority President George W. Bush has put on promoting democracy abroad, and its experience in Iraq has made it more so, according to a detailed new survey released on Thursday by the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations (CCFR) and the Programme on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) of the University of Maryland.
Only 35 per cent of the 808 randomly selected respondents said they favoured the use of military force to overthrow dictators, and 74 per cent, including 60 per cent of self-identified Republicans, said the goal of overthrowing the Baathist regime in Iraq and installing democracy there was not a good enough reason for going to war. Bush’s main pre-war justifications — the alleged connection between Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda and his efforts to obtain nuclear weapons — were later shown to be unfounded.
The US president has since insisted that the war on terror can only be won through the spread of democracy, particularly in the Middle East. Indeed, his second inaugural address last January was devoted to this theme. “We are led, by events and common sense, to one conclusion: The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands,” he declared. “The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world..”
But “most Americans do not appear to have been persuaded by President Bush’s argument that promoting democracy is a critical means for fighting terrorism and making the world safer,” said Steven Kull, who, as PIPA’s director, helped design the survey. While Republicans appeared to be somewhat more inclined to accept Bush’s views, according to the survey results, significant majorities of the public as a whole were far more skeptical, particularly with respect to the use of armed or coercive means to bring democratic change abroad.
Fifty-five per cent said they opposed using military force to “overthrow a dictator,” compared to the 35 per cent (including 52 per cent of Republicans) who supported the idea. Moreover, a two-thirds majority said that threatening military intervention to bring about democratic change “does more harm than good,” compared to 21 per cent who took the opposite view.
On Iraq, three of every four respondents, including 60 per cent of Republicans, said the goal of overthrowing Saddam and establishing a democracy in Iraq was not by itself a good enough reason to go to war. Seventy-two per cent said that the experience in Iraq had made them feel “worse,” rather than “better,” about the possibility of using military force to bring about democratic change in the future. That was true of a majority of Republicans (57 per cent), as well as Democrats (88 per cent).
The administration’s confidence about the benefits of spreading democracy is not shared by the general public, according to the survey. Only 26 per cent of respondents agreed with the proposition that more democracies would make the world safer, while 68 per cent said that was not necessarily true. Moreover, 63 per cent of Republicans agreed with the notion that “democracy may make life better within a country, but it does not make the world a safer place”.
The public split evenly on the question of whether democracies would reduce support for terrorist groups, with a slight majority of Republicans agreeing with the statement. As for another administration argument that democracies are less likely to go to war with one another, a plurality of 49 per cent disagreed, saying that democracies were just as likely to go war as authoritarian governments. Moreover, the public is not persuaded that democratisation will lead countries to become more friendly to the US. Only 42 per cent agreed with that general proposition, and only 26 per cent said Saudi Arabia, as a specific example, would be friendlier if it had a democratic government.
Some of this scepticism appeared to be based on doubts whether all countries were ready for democracy. While nearly 80 per cent of respondents said democracy was the best form of government, only 50 per cent said it was best for all countries. At the same time, only a third of respondents said “democracy and Islam are incompatible”, while 55 per cent agreed that “it is possible for Islamic countries to be democratic”. Fifty-four per cent said the US should not press for greater democracy if there was a significant likelihood that elections would lead to an Islamic fundamentalist government.
The public generally support promoting democracy as a foreign policy goals, but only 27 per cent said they considered it a “very important” goal, compared to 49 per cent who called it “somewhat important” and 19 per cent who said it was “not important”.
Nearly 40 per cent said that US foreign policy as a rule should encourage governments to be more democratic, 54 per cent said it “should pursue US interests, which sometimes means promoting democracy and sometimes means supporting non-democratic governments”. —Dawn/Inter-Press News Service
