Prize-worthy performance

“The world must be made safe for democracy. Its peace must be planted upon the tested foundations of political liberty…. We desire no conquest, no dominion. We seek no indemnities for ourselves, no material compensation for the sacrifices we shall freely make…. We shall be satisfied when those rights have been made as secure as the faith and the freedom of nations can make them.”

These were the words spoken by President Wilson on April 2, 1917, before a joint session of Congress to seek a declaration of war against Germany. These words could be spoken today by President Bush. In fact, in a similar formulation, these words have already been spoken by our 43rd president.

What Mr. Bush is saying is that world peace is impossible where dictators rule, personalist dictators like Robert Mugabe of stricken Zimbabwe or ideological totalitarians like the Chinese communists, who specialize in political prisoners, dead or alive. While a Saddam Hussein ruled Iraq, Middle East peace was unattainable. What is quite clear is that even a semi-hemi- demi-democracy is better than a country run by an unelected general or a tribalist like Mr. Mugabe. A world of democracies means a world of peace. Who can deny it?

And that is what has made Iraq an Islamist battleground. The fundamentalists, like the sanguinary despots who rule Iran and the Islamist militarists who rule Syria, see a democratized Iraq as endangering Islamist theocracies.

From 1789 when the United States, the first new nation, was born to the present day, no war has ever occurred between two democracies. Harsh words exchanged, yes. A warning shot, here and there, probably, but offhand I can’t think of any lurid examples.

Mr. Bush’s aim in Iraq is clear. As Woodrow Wilson put it so Mr. Bush could say: “We desire no conquest, no dominion. We seek no indemnities for ourselves, no material compensation for the sacrifices we shall freely make.”

And Mr. Bush will succeed because the majority of the Arab peoples are tired of all the old shibboleths, about warring against the “Crusaders,” the euphemism of choice for Christianity. Jordan and Egypt are managing their relations with Israel. A million Arabs live peaceful and profitable lives within Israeli borders. Arab parents do not wish to see their sons dead regardless of what the ayatollahs in the mosques preach.

The war in Iraq is the last gasp of Islamist fundamentalism. And it is to the credit of Mr. Bush that he has had the courage and foresight to see that the only road to peace in the Middle East is to bring the message of democracy to that area. Even Saudi Arabia, that bastion of theological reaction, is getting the message. Suddenly there is a global realization that Mr. Bush means to achieve an aim the peoples of the world share: a world of peace-loving democracies.

I think by 2007 the world will realize that no statesman deserves the Nobel Peace Prize more than George W. Bush.

Arnold Beichman, a Hoover Institution research fellow, is a columnist for The Washington Times.