ABSTRACT
Democracy support, as an element both of US foreign policy and of the foreign policies of many established democracies, suffered greatly during the last decade as a result of a damaging association with policies led by US president George Bush that were extremely widely, and often very deeply, disliked. The close identification of the enterprise of democracy promotion with the US-led war in Iraq and with President Bush’s more general regime change impulses caused many people around the world to view democracy promotion not as an at least somewhat idealistic effort to advance commendable principles but instead as a hypocritical cover for aggressive assertions of US geo-strategic power. What President Bush held out as the muscular core of his global “Freedom Agenda” – military-based efforts to construct democratic governments in Iraq and Afghanistan – seemed to many people by definition a contradiction of democratic principles in that they involved the imposition on a citizenry of an outside power’s political will. Moreover, US abuses of the rule of law and human rights at Guantanamo, in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere undermined America’s standing as a global symbol of democracy and human rights, further weakening the broader democracy promotion enterprise.
