Just over one year ago, President Bush declared at his second inaugural that "it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world." Indeed, the president has devoted much of the past year to advancing just this objective, resulting in an unmitigated disaster for the United States and a devastating setback in the war against Islamic extremism. Apparently heeding Bush's clarion call for democracy, the Palestinians promptly elected by an overwhelming margin the fanatical Hamas militia—whose raison d'etre is the annihilation of Israel—a development that will likely sound the final death knell for the already moribund peace process. Meanwhile, the United States is confronted with the looming crisis presented by Iran's nascent nuclear program—a nation that is led, it should be noted, by the democratically-elected but certifiably insane Mahmoud Ahmedinejad. Any effort to forcibly dismantle the program would surely prompt Tehran to retaliate by seeking to pull the already orthodox (and democratically-elected) Shia regime in Iraq into the abyss of Iranian-style theocracy.

Such are the poison fruits of the Neoconservative crusade for global democracy. The law of unintended consequences and the bitter truths of reality have once again brutally, but yet somewhat poignantly, revealed the fallacy of the sentimental and naive notion that self government and freedom are, in Bush's words, "the permanent hope of mankind, the hunger in dark places, the longing of the soul." If the president and his advisors had chosen to turn to the wisdom of history rather than to the tomes of philosophical abstractions produced by theorists cloistered in think tanks, perhaps they would have discovered that democracy may indeed at times be the key to liberty, but it can just as often serve as the shackles with which a people doom themselves to an even more pernicious form of servitude. To Americans and those steeped in the Western political culture of self-rule and individual rights, freedom connotes the absence of positive restraints and a government limited to preserving justice and the common safety. For many in the Arab world, however, freedom means living under the strict dictates of Islamic law, with the rights of free speech and press held subservient to the demands of the Koran. The political fate of the Islamic world rests in the hands of those who populate it; that struggle is not one in which American blood ought to be spilled.

Developments in that region are not only relevant to those countries, but also to us, Bush argues, for "the survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands." Let it first be said that the notion that the health of our republic somehow depends on the degree of freedom enjoyed by people in distant lands is complete and utter nonsense. To be sure, America's national interests are deeply intertwined with the internal affairs of other countries, yet this is only true because Bush and his Wilsonian-inspired predecessors have made it so; it is entirely a self-fulfilling prophecy. But unless we are to disentangle ourselves from this volatile region—an idea leaders of both parties wholly reject—we should encourage policies and pursue plans which do advance our national interests, a course which must sometimes entail supporting despots. As unfortunate as that might be, the Palestinian, Iraqi, and Iranian democratic debacles and fanatical chaos unleashed by the publication of the now infamous Danish cartoons clearly illustrate that the benevolent deliverance of Jeffersonian-style democracy and liberties is not always an advisable strategy, to say the least. Bush and the Neoconservatives have repeatedly emphasized that we are engaged in an epic struggle against evil; if this is so, then they cannot have it both ways, insisting that we must fight tirelessly while retaining an absurd fixation on winning 'hearts and minds.' Our military does not exist to 'liberate'; its purpose is to act by any and all means necessary to defend the homeland and secure the vital interests of the United States. To this end, once the difficult decision to go to war is made, the sole objective should be the obliteration or complete submission of the enemy with minimal loss of American life. If this be too harsh, then refrain from using the armed forces, but do not abuse the military by employing it in endless and quixotic nation-building efforts. Apparently the administration has forgotten the cardinal rule of war: the goal of battle is to expel the enemy from power, not actively facilitate its ascent, as we have done in the Palestinian territories and even possibly in Iraq. That U.S. troops now find themselves in the crosshairs of warring religious factions in a country some six thousand miles away is a testament to the folly of the GOP's abandonment of John Quincy Adams' sage precept that "America does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own."

While the president again repeated his Trotskyesque ideal of an America beckoned by "the call of history to deliver the oppressed and move this world toward peace" in the recent State of the Union address, he also assumed a curiously defensive posture against "isolationism", a road, he claims, that "ends in danger and decline." Bush's attack on isolationism is quite intriguing from a political standpoint, insofar as his own party is generally united behind him and America First sentiments have seldom been championed by internationalist, U.N.-adulating Democrats. Interestingly, Bush's rhetoric bears a striking resemblance to the attack unleashed by his father on Pat Buchanan during the latter's 1992 Republican primary challenge to the incumbent president. Buchanan's defeat ushered in an era of bipartisan commitment to rampant interventionism; fourteen years later, the fruits of these policies are painfully clear. The messianic vision of America promoted by both Bushes and Clinton have ensnared America in wars on the Balkan peninsula and in the Middle East which did not even remotely implicate any vital national interest; U.S. efforts to act as the guarantor of global security have in turn been rewarded with unprecedented levels of anti-Americanism. Indeed, if Bush is worried about a "road that ends in danger and decline," isolationism is not the problem; to the contrary, a healthy dose of traditional conservative noninterventionism would do America much good. Perhaps the president's indignation reflects an underlying recognition that the American Right will not tolerate such an obvious subversion of its fundamental foreign policy principles forever, and that the 2008 primaries may see the beginnings of a robust debate about the future of the Republican Party's foreign policy.

Let the elections fiasco and the cartoon-inspired mayhem mark the end of the ridiculous blather about spreading freedom and the beginning of substantive efforts to liberate the United States from the quicksand that is the Middle East. Democracy may in fact be on the march, but it is trampling American interests and security in the process.