A View of Democracy, Forged in Totalitarian Prisons

It is not every day a foreigner sees his book adopted by the greatest power on earth as its guiding philosophy in the conduct of global affairs. But that is what has happened to Natan Sharansky, an Israeli politician and a former Soviet dissident. His recent book, "The Case for Democracy: The Power of Freedom to Overcome Tyranny and Terror," has become de rigueur in the Bush White House. This is not surprising. It often reads like a punchy distillation of the worldview to which the Sept. 11 attacks have delivered the president.

Here is Condoleezza Rice, the new secretary of state, explaining last month what will guide her policy: "The world should apply what Natan Sharansky calls 'the town square test': if a person cannot walk into the middle of the town square and express his or her views without fear of arrest, imprisonment or physical harm, then that person is living in a fear society, not a free society. We cannot rest until every person living in a fear society has finally won their freedom."

The idea of the town-square test appears on Page 40 of Mr. Sharansky's book. By this point, he has developed the arguments that are repeated in various guises through the remaining 263 pages. These may be summarized as follows: Freedom is attainable for every person on earth. It is the best guarantee of global security, because democratic societies are nonbelligerent. Totalitarian or, as he puts it, fear societies are dangerous because they always seek external enemies as a means of self-preservation.

To act on the above requires "moral clarity." This phrase is repeated with bludgeoning insistence. By moral clarity, Mr. Sharansky means the courage to bring down autocracy wherever it may exist, including the Middle East. "We must recapture moral clarity," he writes, "by recognizing that the great divide between the world of fear and the world of freedom is far more important than the divisions within the free world."

This book has the merit of straightforwardness. It is written with vigor, argued with panache and imbued with the fierce conviction of a man who grew up in a society where "every typewriter had to be registered with the authorities." Mr. Sharansky is often prescient and rarely dull.

But the book's simplicity can also seem simplistic. The author shies away from hard questions. What, for example, should be done when one person's freedom - say that of an Israeli settler - becomes another person's prison? How should freedom for 1.3 billion Chinese living in a one-party state that is also the engine of the world economy be delivered? On the former question, Mr. Sharansky seems myopic. On the latter, he has little to say. These are not small issues.

He also offers neat formulas that seem a little pat. "When it comes to promoting democracy and human rights across the globe, the values and interests of the free world are one and the same," he writes. Cut to President Bush in his Inaugural Address last month: "The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world. America's vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one."

All of this has a ring to it. Aren't we all for freedom? But the question of whether it is really in the free world's interests to overturn the autocratic systems of Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Egypt, to name just three Islamic countries that are also pivotal American allies, is of course a complex one. It also leads to the next question: How?

In Iraq, the United States used force of arms to oust a dictator, with mixed results. Moreover, the removal of this tyrant was not the principle reason given for a war that has seen the rhetoric of freedom soar as the rhetoric of the war's other justifications has withered.

International politics, in short, are messy. Interests and values are never going to coincide as neatly as Mr. Sharansky and his co-author, Ron Dermer, argue. The debate over what measure of realism or morality should characterize foreign policy is certain to endure.

But the author's basic tenet - "promoting peace and security is fundamentally connected to promoting freedom and democracy" - is clearly in the ascendancy in the post-9/11 era.

Mr. Sharansky's own morality was forged in oppression. Imprisoned by the Communist authorities, he came to the view that there were three sources of power: an individual's inner freedom, a free society and the power of the free world's solidarity. Some of the book's most powerful passages evoke the incarcerated dissidents' despair at the Kissingerian realism that placed détente, engagement and containment at the heart of American policy toward the Soviet Union.

The prisoners would communicate by talking through toilets in their cells. "After draining a toilet of water it becomes an excellent telephone to your neighbor," Mr. Sharansky writes. But such communication was dangerous: "It is very hard to plead innocence if a guard catches you with your head in a toilet." True enough. Still, those heads were all smiles when Ronald Reagan "refused to accept the permanence of the U.S.S.R." Lesson 1 in moral clarity learned.

But things become murkier in the second part of Mr. Sharansky's life, the almost two decades lived in Israel. His arguments are persuasive about the impossibility of Yasir Arafat's ever making peace with Israel because his was an autocratic system. As early as 1993, Mr. Sharansky wrote that "Palestinian autonomy can become a unique test case for the determined introduction of democracy in the Arab world." Most people scoffed. But the former dissident insisted he knew enough about fear societies to see that the cowed acolytes gathered around Mr. Arafat were symbols of a closed system that would "inevitably threaten Israel."

Such acute observations, reinforced by the rapid move to a cease-fire since Mr. Arafat's death, are, however, undermined by Mr. Sharansky's apparent inability to see the Palestinians as more than a troublesome abstraction.

He says he has no wish to rule over them. But he also argues that Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's wall-cum-fence is not a land grab, even when it drives far into the West Bank, because "the West Bank is disputed territory." He evinces deep sympathy for a few hundred settlers in the West Bank town of Hebron and little or none for the 150,000 Palestinians beside them. He dismisses Israeli killing of Palestinian civilians as the unintentional byproduct of military operations. "Israeli counterterror strikes are meant to save innocent life and Palestinian terror attacks are meant to take it," he writes. This may look like moral clarity, but it is a little too glib.

Mr. Sharansky also describes the devastating Israeli sweep through the West Bank town of Jenin in 2002 as "one of the finest examples in history of a democracy protecting human rights in wartime," blaming the widespread portrayal of the Israeli actions as brutal on "an environment that lacked moral clarity." Some of the accusations against Israel were outrageous, but so, too, is this argument.

"The Case for Democracy" is an important book. In the post-9/11 world, it speaks eloquently and from the heart of a moment of possibility for freedom; it is often persuasive in making the link between liberty and security.

The danger now is that the beauty of his argument may become a form of blindness. He uses America's abuse of Iraqi prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison mainly to laud the response of a free society to such an outrage: investigation, public debate, judgment and punishment.

But Mr. Sharansky might also have taken Abu Ghraib as an illustration of what can happen when a society becomes too certain of its mission, too giddy with its might, too negligent of constitutional safeguards of liberty and too blind to the humanity of people from another culture. Moral clarity in the name of freedom is one thing. But the slogan of freedom masquerading as moral clarity is quite another.

Dear NYT:

When you have moral clarity, events call forth judgement from you and you have to act. And live with the consequences.

But when you have nuance, you can stay safely on the sidelines and sneer. When there is always a reason not to act, not to judge, not to decide, you can escape criticism of your imperfections. Nuance makes you a nullity, like France. Or the NYT, for that matter. The paper of record for nullities.

Roger actually seems to have read the book. That's a good start for a reviewer.

As I recall, the quote is from another individual, not Natan. And I would hardly call it outrageous. Natan goes into a great deal of detail about the incident. I guess Roger chooses not to believe him on that account, but rather chooses to believe the NYT account. Big surprise.

Roger is willfully misreading Natan on this point. Natan was making the point that when problems of this nature happen in a freedom society, they are the exception, and those involved are punished. In a fear society, they are the rule, and the perps are never punished.

Although he uses the words, Roger either doesn't believe in Natan's version of moral clarity, or he's just not bright enough to understand it's application in the real world.

Cohen is uncomfortable with the notion of moral clarity, I guess. The notion of right and wrong absolutes is anathema to the left, mainly because Bush and Sharansky's moral certainty is so essentially foreign to the shades of gray, 'nuanced' way of thinking the New York Times seeks to exemplify. Cohen evokes Abu Gharib and Jenin as if an isolated instance of prisoner abuse and a purely self-defensive military action (which was most definitely proven not a massacre) are somehow on the same moral plane as Saddam's institutionalized mass murder or the bloodthirsty extermination agenda of Hamas. He calls the Iraq war, one of the most successful military campaigns ever, by anyone, culminating in the first free election in that history of that beknighted country, a 'mixed result'.

Badly and baldly contrived arguments like Cohen's give me heart. Sharansky is a welcome fist in the face to moral and cultural relativism, and it's nice to see people like Cohen reeling from the blow.

But Mr. Sharansky might also have taken Abu Ghraib as an illustration of what can happen when a society becomes too certain of its mission, too giddy with its might, too negligent of constitutional safeguards of liberty and too blind to the humanity of people from another culture.

And what happened to those people? Where are they today?
Out of the military, awaiting trial, sitting in prison is where.

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