Anti-Climacus

LINK: this argument is a little inscrutable to me:

"I agree with Hiatt that for all of Bush's soaring rhetoric, he sees democracy mainly as a club to wield over unfriendly or uncooperative regimes. It's not that the people living under these regimes don't deserve demoracy-- of course they do. But are those whose rulers currently please us any less deserving?"

...and it seems mostly inscrutable as the argument is either obvious or wrong. If Gene means to say that the US could certainly be doing more than it is to promote democracy in the world, well, that seems to be quite evidently the case. If he's saying that our willingness to temporarily abet dictators in some parts of the world is a moral failure, well, that also seems to be right. But it seems like the implication of this argument that what progress we are making with respect to the spread of democracy is somehow compromised by the fact we're not doing it everywhere. That's pretty clearly wrong. If we had unlimited time and resources, that'd be a fantastic way to do things, but, lacking that, we have to pick , and choose our battles. You can argue that maybe we haven't picked the right ones, but having picked any at all is a giant step forward for US foreign policy, and that deserves notice, too.