DOHA, Qatar -- Cast aside the nonsensical rhetoric about U.S. President George W. Bush's ostensibly successful efforts to bolster democratic tendencies "sweeping" the Middle East, and you'll discover that the facts are not so rosy, with Iraq remaining the most horrific reminder.
Bush seems to reside over an entirely different world reality when he adamantly presents himself as a visionary whose uppermost concerns are freedom and democracy worldwide, with due emphasis on the Middle East.
Neither genuine freedom nor truly representative democracies are on Bush's foreign-policy agenda, no matter how much prominence these topics receive in the president's ever-predictable speeches. We know for a fact that most tyrannical, repressive regimes have historically been the traditional friends and allies of successive U.S. administrations, in the Middle East and elsewhere.