ABSTRACT
President George W. Bush has put democracy promotion at the center of his foreign policy, what I call his “Democracy Doctrine.” He has articulated that commitment from the beginning of his presidency. But his commitment deepened and became the primary focus of his foreign policy when the initial rationales for the American invasion of Iraq proved to be baseless. No weapons of mass destruction were found at the time of that invasion. Nor were any links between Saddam Hussein and “global terrorism” established. As the rationales disappeared and as the war turned from a campaign against the army of Hussein to a war against an Iraqi insurgency joined by foreign terrorists eager to damage the United States, the President turned to his Democracy Doctrine to justify the entire enterprise. But the promotion of democracy in other countries, especially in the countries of the Islamic world whose people tend to view the United States as the problem and Islam as the solution, will be neither easy nor likely to produce governments friendly to the United States.
