Fawaz Turki, disinherited@yahoo.com

In his speech at Whitehall Palace in London last week, President Bush spoke of the “three pillars” of his policy: the strengthening of “international institutions,” the justified “use of force when necessary in the defense of freedom,” and America’s commitment to promote “an ideal of democracy in every part of the world,” in particular ours.

It is the third leg of that tripod of American foreign policy that this column returns to today.

President Bush’s call for the imposition, export or introduction (check one of the above) of democracy to the Middle East was, of course, articulated at length in his Nov. 6 speech, delivered on the 20th anniversary of the National Endowment for Democracy, where he said that Arabs are as equally capable of exercising democracy in their political culture as any other people, and that their faith is not by any means incompatible with it.

Let’s set the record straight here. No one in their right mind would reject outright the notion of democracy, a system of government that bespeaks of checks and balances, accountability, and a social contract between ruler and ruled, where political leaders are constitutionally enjoined against, say, arbitrarily shutting down newspapers and shutting up dissidents, and against encroaching on citizens’ right to fire and hire their governments.

Moreover, we have known all along and all too well of the myriad problems that afflict our world. That’s why, for example, the release of the “Arab Human Development Report 2003” in the first week of November had the urgency about it of a late notice from one’s public library.

The issue here is not whether Arabs spurn the democratic ideal, insanely opting for its antithesis, but whether they trust this latest foray into their world by a Western power. Is it all, one wonders, “la mossion civilizatrice” all over again? We’ve been burnt a lot more times than we care to admit in our modern history by a Western world hell-bent on regrouping our human resources in response to its geopolitical interests.

A decade or so ago, France, with a wink and a nod from Washington, prevailed upon the army in Algeria, its former colony, to annul the results of a fair election that Islamist groups were poised to win. The consequence? A civil war that resulted in the death of well over 100,000 Algerians.

And what Arab would forget that larcenous betrayal, known as the Sykes-Picot agreement, by the British and the French, our putative allies in World War I, who proceeded to colonize us, dismember our nation into little statelets, and render us impotent at meeting the challenges of modernity? A people do not forget readily because the reach of their historical archetype is long.

To this day, the arrested state of our cherished dream for an “Arab national renaissance” (each of these three terms carries its full range of implication and meaning in our cultural sensibility) is rooted in Western machinations and double-cross.

We don’t need a mythographer, a historian of the unconscious, as it were, to explain away our unease - and in some quarters of the public debate, weariness, mistrust, even scorn - at this latest overture to “democratize” our world. And who could blame us for that posture? Heck, just because you’re paranoid, they say, doesn’t mean someone is not following you.

And what of Palestine, the spiritual homeland of all Arabs, where the US has consistently supported the occupier in his struggle against the occupied? So long as the US continues its lopsided policy there, its new agenda for the Middle East will not pass the smell test.

No one in their right mind, I say, would reject the democratic ideal. But first must come Palestine, the touchstone of all ideals in our historical, cultural and ideological experience. And while we’re on the subject of ideals, one admires the idealism that President Bush invoked in his speech at Whitehall last week. But like a kiss, a speech is just a speech. What we want to know is this: Does he still think that Ariel Sharon is “a man of peace”?

Call me, I’ll pick up instantly if you have the straight skinny on that one.