President Bush’s bold commitment to democratize the whole world, one country at a time, brings Simon Bolivar to mind.
The Latin American liberator tried to unite all of South America into one vast democracy based on the U.S. model.
Ultimately disillusioned, he likened his self-imposed task to trying to “plow the sea.”
Obviously, Bush’s expansive dream cannot materialize in four short years. We’ve pursued that very goal in Cuba for a hundred years, off and on, without result.
Four successive presidencies (John Kennedy’s into Gerald Ford’s) tried for 13 years to pacify and democratize Vietnam, sacrificing tens of thousands of American lives before giving it up as undoable.
In a hauntingly predictable rhythm, the hands of history’s political grandfather clock tend to complete their grand circles on something like 20-year intervals, and multiples thereof.
Twenty years elapsed between World Wars I and II. Nineteen between World War II (1945z) and the irreversible escalation in Vietnam (1964). One hundred between the Emancipation Proclamation (1863) and the kick-off of the Kennedy-Johnson civil rights agenda.
Was there rhyme or reason to that bizarre string of coincidence in which six presidents, elected two decades apart, all died in office? Probably not.
Still, situational similarities have confronted American presidencies in something akin to 20-year cycles. Could it be that it takes a shifting majority of American voters about that long to forget all about that last mistake?
Franklin D. Roosevelt’s fourth inaugural, 60 years ago and early in the last year of World War II, was the most low-key in modern memory.
His speech that day was the shortest since George Washington’s four-sentence remarks at his second oath-taking in 1793.
The third briefest inaugural address, and perhaps the most liltingly inspirational of all, was Abraham Lincoln’s second inaugural in 1865.
Like Roosevelt’s exactly 80 years later, Lincoln’s remarks came when all about him raged the bitterness and weariness of war.
In both cases, Lincoln’s and FDR’s, the war ended triumphantly a few months thereafter, but neither president lived to celebrate that end.
Each died within weeks of his speech.
These speeches (Lincoln’s and FDR’s) were remarkably similar. Each was less a war cry for military prowess than an ardent, eloquent appeal to the “angels of our better natures” (Lincoln’s phrase from his first inaugural).
“With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right,” Lincoln pleaded in his second, to “achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”
Roosevelt, 80 years later, ended his 1945 inaugural with a prayer “for the vision to see our way clearly … to the achievement of His will, to peace on earth.”
Noble sentiments, those.
Deeply decent, profoundly spiritual.
Bush was not lacking in boldness in his address Jan. 20, 2005. He virtually promised to make every country on Earth a functioning democracy.
Bush actually seems to consider it his divinely bestowed duty to make the world over in our image.
But to tell all other countries that their relations with us depend upon whether we approve of their internal rules of self-governance seems brashly presumptuous.
Where, for example, does that leave Saudi Arabia?
Is it our responsibility, or right, to dictate a set of reforms in the way that government prescribes dress codes for Saudi women?
And are we fairly sure we know what Saudi women want?
Even if we assume that most Iraqis approved our dethroning Saddam Hussein, it now appears evident that most of them do not approve the continuing U.S. occupation of their country.
Where does our demand for new constitutional systems go from here?
And where, given the universality of Bush’s pledge, does it end?
Is Iran next, or Syria? Or North Korea?
If so, where shall we get the manpower, stretched thin as we reputedly now are? A draft?
What does all this portend? Shall we spend the next 20 years judging, punishing, occupying and reforming?
I don’t personally believe there is anything magical or divinely ordained in the 20-year cycle. But I do suggest that democracy’s vulnerability lies in the shortness of public memory.
And it seems to me demonstrably important that the next time we choose a president, for God’s sake- – and our own – let’s be careful to pick someone who enjoys more than a passing acquaintance with history.

Author