Reagan was extremely good at boiling complicated ideas down to simple, compelling memes. I wasn't a particular "believer" at the time, but there's no doubt he was the Great Communicator. Look how he explained in a few simple sentences (in his personal hand-written notes for a radio broadcast) why free markets beat communism:
"Our system freed the individual genius of man. Released him to fly as high & as far as his own talent & energy would take him. We allocate resources not by govt. decision but by the mil's. of decisions customers make when they go into the mkt. place to buy. If something seems too high-priced we buy something else. Thus resources are steered toward those things the people want most at the price they are willing to pay. It may not be a perfect system but it's better than any other that's ever been tried." (Reagan quote taken from the Andrew Sullivan piece mentioned below.)
A part of what makes those words compelling is their recognition of the simple fact that free markets may not be IDEAL, they're merely the best we've tested to date.
It's the truth, or at least close enough. A meme isn't compelling if it doesn't seem true. Actually being true is the most direct path to seeming true and thus forming the basis for a compelling meme. Now, of course truth alone isn't enough -- it also has to be exciting and perhaps even inspirational.
Ultimately I think the Iraq war's main purpose is to create the meme in the Arab world that it's more attractive to live freely in democracy, and work in that context to better yourself and your situation, than it is to nurse your bitterness about not having as much as the western democracies do. (That bitterness leads to certain negative affects we have seen). Such a meme can only propogate effectively if it's perceived to be true. If a free Iraq succeeds, it will provide strong evidence to other Arabs that it is in fact true, and we'll all be a lot better off for it, and history will remember Bush even more kindly than Reagan. If not, the Iraq war will be regarded as very, very great blunder.
As was Reagan, Bush is guided by a deep faith that freedom is better than the alternatives, and that freedom is what people will insist upon for themselves once they truly understand it. But, if you and your friends have no experience of it, it is probably impossible to truly understand. So it has to be injected. Then the meme can have the opportunity to spread.
Not all Arabs are resistant to the freedom-meme, of course; many are obviously very excited about freedom. But many are not. Critical mass is not reached, and without our doing something about it, it might never be. The main problem is that there is a competitive pull in the opposite direction from fundamentalist Islam. Thoughts of hate and visions of martyrdom can be very powerful. They need to be combated with the experience of seeing other Arabs experiencing the benefits of freedom, because that will be very powerful too. A lot more powerful than seeing some strange-looking Westerners experience it on TV, while being constantly told by other Arabs that Westerners are evil.
Bush hopes that the injection of the freedom-meme into Iraq will enable it to take hold in the Arab world. Whether it does or not remains to be seen. Bush is betting that it will; it is a humungous gamble. I can't even think of a precedent. Personally, I give it more than a 50% chance of succeeding. But not a 90% chance.
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