Being an inveterate cable-channel surfer, I caught C-SPANs presentation this morning (Sunday, Dec. 5) of Natan Sharansky and his coauthor, Ron Dermer, discussing in Chicago, their oeuvre, The Case For Democracy: The Power of Freedom to Overcome Tyranny and Terror.

Their central thesis is that dictatorships almost invariably employ the same survival tool to prop themselves up.  They divert their populace’s attention from inadequacies at home by creation of a state of high anxiety about some “enemy.” 

In Sharansky’s former Soviet Union, the enemy of course, was the United States.  In the Arab world, the enemy-of-choice is Israel, where Sharansky is a member of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's cabinet.

The antidote to an unfriendly dictator is not another, friendlier, dictator.  It is democracy.  In Sharansky’s and Dermer’s view, democracies have a way of working matters out with each other—accountable as their leaders are to electorates.

What lifts this book beyond an interesting academic treatise, and makes it particularly important, is Sharansky’s report that one of its earliest—and apparently most enthusiastic readers—is U.S. President George W. Bush.  The book, of course, provides apparent justification in hindsight for the removal of Saddam Hussein from Iraq— with or without there having been weapons of mass destruction.  It  provides similar justification for Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s  isolation and refusal to deal with the late Palestinian leader Yassir Arafat.

During the lecture, Sharansky lauded former U.S. President Ronald Reagan for his ongoing opposition to the “evil empire,” as Reagan described the Soviet Union.  It’s true, the author said, that Reagan once confused Sharansky’s name with that of then-Soviet foreign minister Eduard Shevardnadze.  But, according to Sharansky, what  Reagan never confused—unlike others—was the moral principle that people deserve to live in freedom.                                                                —Donald H. Harrison