THERE WAS a lot wrong with President Bush's speech Thursday to the National Endowment for Democracy in which he proclaimed "a new policy: a forward strategy of freedom in the Middle East."

Whole chapters of history were omitted or distorted. Bush gilded US policy as a purely altruistic affair. Still, he must have been doing something right; Iran's Foreign Ministry denounced Bush's paean to democracy as "obvious interference in Iran's internal affairs."

Iran's clerical masters seem to have recognized themselves in Bush's allusion to unnamed rulers who employ "an ideology of theocratic terror" to disguise their "ambition for absolute power." In this view, Bush's contention that Islam "is consistent with democratic rule" is tantamount to telling the Iranian masses to revolt against their overlords.

The reality, however, is that Iranians and other peoples in the Middle East and North Africa do not need to be told they are being deprived of freedom and self-government. They know. Moreover, they also know about Washington's sordid history of supporting, for reasons of Realpolitik, even the most despotic ruling cliques in the region. The princes of Saudi Arabia, the military bosses of Algeria, and even Saddam Hussein in the days when he was killing communists in Iraq and warring against Ayatollah Khomeini's Islamic Revolution in Iran -- all benefited from the complicity of American governments.

It will not be easy to persuade the victims of Washington's erstwhile clients that Bush now means it when he proclaims that "liberty is the direction of history." Saudis know about America's special relationship with the princes who treat the country and its oil reserves as their private property. Iraqi Shi'ites remember that Bush's father, after calling for their popular uprising in the spring of 1991, allowed Saddam to crush them with his helicopter gunships, tanks, and heavy artillery, slaughtering perhaps 200,000 people, whose bodies are now being found in mass graves.

It is precisely because Washington has collaborated for so long with the crooked dictators and presidents for life in the Arab world that the common people are prone to believe the nastiest tales about Americans spread by propagandists and conspiracy peddlers.

If Bush's gaudy oratory about the blessings of liberty is to have any chance of being taken seriously beyond these shores, he will have to prove to skeptical peoples in the Gulf region, the Mideast, and North Africa that the United States has truly embarked on a "new policy." That would mean genuinely helping Iraqis shape a new democratic state with minority rights and the rule of law; firmly shepherding Israel and the Palestinians toward peaceful coexistence; and siding not with America's old client regimes but with the populations those regimes have robbed and repressed.

© Copyright 2003 Globe Newspaper Company

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