DON EMMERT/AFP

President George Bush addressing the U.N. General Assembly in New York. He sought global support for sanctions against Myanmar.

ON January 18, 2005, Condoleezza Rice sat before the United States Senate Foreign Relations Committee to make her case to be appointed as the next U.S. Secretary of State. Looking back at the last century of U.S. foreign policy, Rice pointed to the “spread of democracy and freedom throughout the world” and pledged that under her watch in the new century the U.S. would lead the world into “an era of liberty”.

To get to work, Rice pointed out six “outposts of tyranny” – Cuba, North Korea, Iran, Belarus, Zimbabwe and Burma (Myanmar). Of the six, Myanmar received little attention in Washington. The U.S. Campaign for Burma is a small organisation with a staff of four who are experienced human rights activists and former Myanmarese political prisoners. But their clout in Washington is negligible, apart from a visit by a State Department official to their annual convention.

In July 2003, as the occupation of Iraq frayed, President George W. Bush signed into law the Burmese Freedom and Democracy Act that intensified sanctions against the Myanmar government and a freeze on visas to those in the country’s leadership. With the U.S. focussed on Iraq and Iran, the other “outposts of tyranny” could take a deep breath.

The idea of “spreading democracy”, a key theme in Bush’s second inaugural address in January 2005, comes from a manifesto, The Case for Democracy, written by the Israeli politician and Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky. Sharansky proposed a “town-square test” for liberty: can one walk into the centre of one’s town and express one’s opinions without fear of arrest? If yes, then the person lives in a free society; if no, then one lives under tyranny. Rice cited this particular test at her confirmation hearing in 2005, and Bush has since talked about it frequently.

In December 2006, Bush honoured Sharansky with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. The subtitle of Sharansky’s book is “The Power of Freedom to Overcome Tyranny and Terror”. In his account of the collapse of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), the “power of freedom” was the U.S. government’s arms build-up (it was Reagan’s Star Wars proposal, Sharansky writes, that convinced Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev’s inner circle that the USSR could not compete with the U.S. and “made them finally accept demands for internal reform”). If this is the case, then it is Bush’s bellicosity that will spread freedom rather than the upsurge of people for liberty. Political means (pressure in the U.N. Security Council), economic suffocation (sanctions) and military threats (support to rebels and build-up of bases in the proximity of the country) are on the menu for the Bush method of spreading democracy.

As Bush and Rice prepared their 2005 speeches, events seemed to prove them right. The Orange Revolution (Ukraine), the Cedar Revolution (Lebanon) and the Tulip Revolution (Kyrgyzstan) created a dizzy atmosphere for democracy promoters. Even as each of these transformations had their own timetable and logic, the Bush team quickly fastened onto them as proof that the goal of spreading democracy was tangible and necessary. Within months of Bush’s second term, the White House convened an inter-agency team to work on a strategy to spread democracy.

The group created three categories: states with weak institutions that had only recently taken the path of democracy (Georgia and Ukraine); states with authoritarian leaders who could be reformed (Pakistan); and reform-resistant states (the “outposts of tyranny”). Forty-nine countries made the list, with the promise of funds to push democratic forces in each country at its own pace.

Two events in 2006 confounded the Bush rhetoric. The White House was eager for elections in Palestine even as the Israeli Cabinet warned that Hamas would win. Disregarding this warning, the U.S. pushed for elections and the organisation that the U.S. State Department calls a terrorist group won handily. In his book Sharansky claimed, “The democracy that hates you is less dangerous than the dictator that loves you.” With Hamas in the saddle, the situation was more complex both for Sharansky’s Israel and for the White House.

The second event came later in the year, when the Thai military overthrew Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra. President Bush spent the day of the coup at the United Nations, giving a speech on spreading democracy, but he would not comment on events in Thailand. The U.S. government reneged when the U.N. Security Council wanted a strong statement against the coup, and within a few months the U.S. Navy resumed its joint exercises with the Thai armed forces. Bush’s rhetoric stumbled.

Vice-President Dick Cheney’s tour of Lithuania, Croatia and Kazakhstan in May 2006 made a mockery of the Bush rhetoric. At Vilnius in Lithuania, Cheney gave a stiff indictment of the Russian government, which he called “opponents of reform” who use their oil and natural gas as “tools for intimidation and blackmail. Then, the next day, in Almaty, Kazakhstan, Cheney warmly greeted President Nursultan Nazarbayev, whose regime suffers from a wanting human rights record.

“I have previously expressed my admiration for what has transpired here in Kazakhstan over the past 15 years, both in terms of economic development as well as political development,” said Cheney, who was once on Kazakhstan’s Oil Advisory Board. The contrast between Cheney’s harsh words for Moscow and his tenderness toward Almaty showed that tyrants could be friends if they were on bended knees, and if they had something desirable (such as oil).

Meanwhile, in Washington, as the Iraq occupation became increasingly expensive, funds for spreading democracy to Myanmar and Central Asia shrank. It was a sign of the times that groups such as the U.S. Campaign for Burma focussed their attention on Beijing’s relationship with Myanmar rather than on the hypocrisy of the Bush agenda or the role Chevron plays in the Yadana project. (Rice served on the board of Chevron, and also has a Chevron oil tanker named after her.) Chevron is not alone; along with it are the U.S.-based oil-field services companies Schlumbeger, Baker Hughes and BJ Services.

Calling Myanmar “Darfur of the East”, the U.S. Campaign for Burma also joined in the Save Darfur project of demanding a boycott of and protests at the Beijing Olympics of 2008. In July, Laura Bush said that China had a “huge amount of influence over Burma” and that it was currently “propping up a failed state”. Rather than promote democracy itself, the new agenda moved in the direction of using the ugly situation in Myanmar and Sudan to put pressure on China. Talk of “spreading democracy” dissipated in Washington to reappear occasionally for major speeches and when events elsewhere allowed the Bush team to quickly take credit where no credit was due.

When protests started in Myanmar (the “Saffron Revolution”), Bush hastened to interpret the dynamic there as part of his overall vision. He used his U.N. speech in September as a way to take leadership when in fact the White House simply followed the courageous actions of tens of thousands of Myanmarese people. Thanks to the Myanmarese protests, Bush returned to his robust message to go after the outposts of tyranny and liberate the world’s peoples. Myanmar topped the list, but it was joined by Cuba, Zimbabwe and Sudan.

In July, during an event in Prague organised by Sharansky, Bush said, “If standing for liberty in the world makes me a dissident, I wear that title with pride.” This is a last-ditch effort by the lame-duck Bush team to lift itself out of the morass of failure in Iraq.

Words like “tyranny” and “liberty”, “freedom” and “democracy” are demeaned by the Bush team, but fortunately people across Myanmar and elsewhere understand that these words are more than ornaments for imperial legacies; they are also the vocabulary of today’s struggles for a better tomorrow.