I know I'm risking Kevin Knuth accusing me of harboring romantic fantasies again, but I hope some of you caught Condolezza Rice on "60 Minutes" last night. Her passion for democracy and supporting democratic movements is strong, remarkable and necessary in today's world. A lot of her passion comes from growing up black in the segregated South. What is the difference, she asks, between those today who say "some people aren't ready for democracy" and those then who said "blacks are childlike and need us to take care of them"? What is the difference between Islamic terrorists who leave roadside bombs and homegrown terrorists who bombed churches? A fanatic willing to deliberately target innocents is a fanatic willing to deliberately target innocents.
It's been raised as an issue that perhaps Rice isn't equipped to deal with today's war on stateless terrorism because her education, training and early government work dealt with the Soviet Union, a super state. But I think she learned a valuable lesson there, too, in watching the breakup of the USSR. No matter how subjugated they are, people yearn for freedom, and they are willing to sacrifice for it perhaps more than we remember.
As the world's leading democracy, and the nation that has most shown what freedom can achieve, we have not only a responsbility but a duty to self-interest to nurture the growth of democratic movements around the world (and almost 50 percent of the world's population is now rated as free, according to Freedom House, an all-time high). A major topic of our foreign policy conversations for at least the last 50 years is over how to do that. There is a difference between nurturing democracy and supporting those who seek it and trying to impose democratic values at the point of a gun. In Iraq, we might have blurred the difference, and Rice might be too close to it to acknowledge the arguments of the other side.
But Rice and her boss (yeah, him), however we might fault them for how they are pursuing their goals, are on the right side of history. At a minimum, we have to wish them well.
