s far as I can tell, George W. Bush believes three things about his war on terrorism. First, it can only be won by promoting democracy. Second, the more integral a country is to the war on terrorism, the less principle number one applies. Third, moral consistency matters above all else. 

If this sounds like an intellectual train wreck, it is. Consider the White House's response to the recent horror in Russia. On September 3, a terrorist attack left more than 300 people dead in the southern city of Beslan. The massacre reaffirmed Russia's critical role in the war on terrorism. And, since the Bush administration believes democracy is the key to winning the war on terrorism, that reaffirmation should have prompted a renewed U.S. push for Russian democracy. 

Instead, it had the opposite effect. On September 12, with rumors swirling that Russian President Vladimir Putin was planning an authoritarian crackdown, Bush visited the Russian Embassy and ignored democracy altogether--merely saying, "The United States stands side by side with Russia as we fight off terrorism." The next day, Putin proposed that Russia's governors be chosen essentially by him, not the voters, and that independent candidates be banned from running for the Duma. One opposition Duma member told The Wall Street Journal that "Putin is exploiting these terror attacks to strangle democracy." The White House responded by telling The New York Times, in the words of one official, that "this is a domestic matter for the Russian people." When that soft line sparked criticism, Bush eventually said he was "concerned about the decisions that are being made in Russia." But, as an official explained to the Journal, the administration's general view is that, given the recent attacks, Russia is the wrong place to pick a fight over democracy. 

That basic contradiction--that this administration promotes democracy least where the war on terrorism matters most--runs throughout Bush's foreign policy. Consider U.S. behavior toward two of the countries closest to terrorism's frontline: Uzbekistan and Pakistan. Uzbekistan's secular dictator, Islam Karimov, nicely illustrates the Bush administration's argument that repression fuels terrorism. His regime jails, and often tortures, anyone who seems excessively religious--and thus, Uzbekistan's once largely peaceful Islamist movement is turning violent. It would seem like exactly the kind of place the United States would be pushing democracy hard. Instead, in March 2002, the Bush administration signed a "strategic partnership" with Uzbekistan that has paved the way for hundreds of millions in U.S. aid. That money is supposed to be conditioned on human rights improvements. But, as The American Prospect's Matthew Yglesias recently pointed out, the United States has waived those requirements for the last two years. The reason? Uzbekistan, which provides a base for American troops operating in neighboring Afghanistan, is too important to the war on terrorism. As Democratic Representative Gary Ackerman recently put it, Karimov "has learned that all he really needs to do is provide us with assistance in the global war on terrorism and that the rest is really not that important." 

In Pakistan, the story is depressingly similar. In October 2002, General Pervez Musharraf, having taken power in a coup, rigged elections for Pakistan's reconstituted parliament. He banned the leaders of Pakistan's two largest secular parties--the greatest threats to his power--paving the way for Islamists to double their support. The European Union called the balloting "seriously flawed." But the Bush administration deemed it "an important milestone in Pakistan's ongoing transition to democracy," and, several months later, it rewarded Musharraf with a $3 billion aid package. Asked about America's unwillingness promote Pakistani democracy, Representative David Dreier, a Bush administration ally, recently told National Journal, "Our number one priority is winning the war on terror"--as if democracy were irrelevant to that goal. 

In Saudi Arabia, the Middle Eastern country where Al Qaeda has the deepest roots, the United States has also avoided serious democratization pressure. Everyone knows the Saudi royals are brutal and corrupt. Everyone knows that, for years, they have diverted their people's fury into global jihad. But, having relentlessly fomented Islamist extremism, the Saudis now warn the Bush administration that they cannot allow real political participation for fear that extremists will grab control. So, when Riyadh balked at the White House's much-hyped Greater Middle East Initiative this spring, the United States retreated, with Colin Powell meekly suggesting, "Each nation has to find its own path [to democracy] and follow that path at its own speed." 

In theory, perhaps one could reconcile the president's democratic rhetoric with his anti-democratic policies. Faced with a similar contradiction during the cold war, conservative intellectual Jeane Kirkpatrick famously distinguished "traditional," or pro-American, autocracies from "revolutionary," or anti-American, ones--defending support for the former as a means of preventing the latter. Kirkpatrick argued that pro-Western dictatorships like the Shah's Iran or Anastasio Somoza's Nicaragua were more benign, and more capable of democratic change, than the anti-American regimes that followed them. 

It is not clear how one would update that logic to distinguish, say, proAmerican Saudi Arabia, which has no democratic mechanisms whatsoever, from anti-American Iran, which has regular, partially free elections. But it remains a theoretical question because Bush officials don't grapple with the intellectual contradiction underlying their war on terrorism--they ignore it. On the stump, the president relentlessly touts what he called, in a recent speech in Colorado, his "steady, consistent, principled leadership." Bush's key foreign policy selling point--in contrast to "flip-flopper" John Kerry--is his moral consistency. And his supporters don't want to undermine that claim by acknowledging that, in fact, his conduct of the war on terrorism rests upon a giant moral inconsistency. 

But, if voters in Ohio and Wisconsin don't notice the sleight of hand, that's OK. Dictators from Moscow to Islamabad to Riyadh surely do.