Kang Chol Hwan is exactly the sort of man North Korea dreads to see escape, for he left in order to return. After spending ten years incarcerated with his family at the Yodok concentration camp, Kang fled to China in the late 1980s and settled in South Korea. In 2000 he wrote an autobiographical indictment of Kim Jong Il's foul regime and as an advocate for human dignity above the 38th Parallel traveled to Washington in June to meet with President Bush. It was reported that both Kang and his vision for the Korean Peninsula were welcome in the Oval Office; the president had read Kang's The Aquariums of Pyongyang and, enjoying it as much as another universalist favorite, The Case for Democracy by Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky, hoped to add it to the library of American understanding.
Kang and Bush talked North Korea, rights, diplomacy, security, six parties, nuclear weapons. Interviewed by Japan's Yomiuri Shimbun one month later, the Korean described his conversation with the president framed in terms of the "Six-Party Talks" taking place in Beijing. Placating Kim Jong Il, Kang advised, echoing sentiments expressed at a recent convention held by Freedom House, could not be more counterproductive. "You will lose both popular support in North Korea and you won't be able to solve the nuclear problem." How to go at it, then? Kang was asked the same question by the most powerful man in the world. "He asked me what I would do if I was the President of the United States. I told him that I would take care of North Korean refugees, then gulags, then the nuclear problem, in that order. I said if you solve the first two problems the third will solve itself."
A lingering question of President Bush's proposed supplement to American policy, articulated in this year's inaugural address, has been how far the president's exhortation might reach. Would it be heard by the administration, the State Department's reactionary tenure? The Congress, whose representatives could easily judge career a higher priority than altruistic ideal?
The White House has allies. For a first, "Universal Democracy" fit into a mainstream headline — a Wednesday New York Sun article by Eli Lake on the "ADVANCE Democracy Act." Democrat Tom Lantos, and Republican John McCain and Democrat Joseph Lieberman are responsible for adding language to respective House and Senate foreign aid bills to "Use all instruments of United States influence to support, promote, and strengthen democratic principles, practices, and values in foreign countries." To what end? "The promotion of such universal democracy constitutes a long-term challenge that does not always lead to an immediate transition to full democracy," reads ADVANCE, "but universal democracy is achievable."
ADVANCE, Lake writes, is a professional culmination of Mark Palmer, whose democratist work has been essential and poignant: helping to rescue Natan Sharansky from the Soviet gulag and as ambassador, a witness to Hungary's independence three-and-a-half decades after Washington turned its back on Budapest. Palmer is the author of Breaking the Real Axis of Evil: How to Oust the World's Last Dictators by 2025 and with ADVANCE has answered Bush's address with Lantos, McCain and Lieberman. According to Lake the White House has niggled, but only a little, and if an ADVANCE-laden foreign affairs bill crosses the president's desk it will likely be signed.
Following ADVANCE, tyrant bank accounts would fall under CIA scrutiny; Foggy Bottom would follow the lead of Freedom House and classify nations by civil and political liberties; ambassadors would be rewarded for facilitating democratic progress, not detente; umbrella groups would have the door held open for them. The bill enumerates "findings." Men are equal, they deserve by natural law consensual government; democratic countries are categorically prosperous and peaceful; authoritarian states are unstable and checkered with famine, subjugation and dehumanization, and societies in which "radicalism, extremism, and terrorism can flourish."
Identifying this fundament is critical. More drawn to trusting what is extant than what is moral or reasonable, traditionalists and parochialists on the right have begun to push hard the notion that our enemy begins and ends with, quote, "militant Islam." Or worse, Islam itself. While posing thoughtful questions about a bastardization of faith, these retirees of Cold War realpolitik draw a line between anarchic tyranny of terrorists and ordered tyranny of dictatorships so thick that attacks by the former against the latter — like bombings in Egypt and Saudi Arabia — could reimburse to Near East despot regimes governing legitimacy rightfully lost after having been exposed as terror's cradle. The Egyptian people share our enemy, goes the fractured logic, so we should hang onto Hosni Mubarak.
If Islam were the catalyst for intramural repression and foreign rapacity, it would mobilize an army in far greater proportion to the one billion professed Muslims living on Earth, trampling the free world as a contiguous mass of swaddled, oath-belching fanatics. Now, to be a Communist one must seek the abolition of free enterprise and private property, and expect ineluctable human tragedy. Worshipping Allah precludes neither democratic participation nor administration. Look to Turkey and hopefuls Iraq, Afghanistan and Lebanon; or liberalizing monarchies Bahrain and Kuwait; or your Muslim neighbor a few doors down whose house, family and daily routine closely resemble yours. Are Islamofascists Muslims? Recitations and pantomimes and metaphysical acrobatics aside, they are not. In the Times of London Amir Taheri recently wrote, as he has for some time, that cultural tradition, not Islamic doctrine, regulates the hijab and the beard — to say nothing of murder and enslavement.
The Muslim Near East is still a wide swath of dictatorship, true. But the secular Ba'athists and Arab nationalists required no help from Islam to enthrone Saddam Hussein, Hafez Assad or Abdel Nasser last century. Warlords who preceded the prophet conquered lands well enough without him. Islamists regularly join those with whom they are antithetical in letter but bound in spirit, no less driven to power and the rule of force than ancient idolator nomads, sword-and-shield-and-mare. As Victor Davis Hanson wrote Friday, dominion holds many forms. What was so inherently German about militarism? Nothing, it turned out, when neither Hohenzollern nor Hitler emerged from the rubble of the Berlin Wall. Islam is a tortured reactant of volatile, authoritarian culture.
It was of course the annotation of dictators as pro- or anti-Communist, good-dictator-bad-dictator, that left virulent societies intact after the Cold War. American reliance on the strongmen controlling Pakistan, Egypt, Jordan and elsewhere does not contradict the Bush Doctrine so long as each of those partnerships is transferred to an elected government as soon as feasible. Nor does diplomacy with belligerents foreign to Islam if the United States invests in people. The ADVANCE Democracy Act makes good on all that. Should Washington revert to old policy instead of adopting policy both progressive and determinate like Mr. Palmer's and Mr. Kang's, this war will end dangerously short of victory.