"We have declared a fierce war on this evil principle of democracy," said Jordanian-born terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi." Zarqawi is the bogeyman that the US government currently blames for almost everything that has gone wrong in Iraq, but he does speak essentially the same language as President George W. Bush.

For Bush, as for Zarqawi, political principles come from God. In his "God-drenched" inauguration speech, President Bush explained that people have inalienable rights because they "bear the image of the Maker of heaven and earth," and that America's mission to spread democracy around the globe comes directly from "the Author of liberty."

The problem is that George W. Bush's belief that Americans basically own the copyright on democracy is widely shared even by Americans who deplore his actions. The US crusade for freedom (aka democracy) is justified, even if it requires cluster-bombs and Guantanamo Bays, because otherwise there will be no freedom.

That is their fundamental mistake. The United States was the first mass democracy in history, but the "Founding Fathers" who carried out that revolution were the heirs of the European enlightenment. It was the English Levellers who first declared in 1647 that "all government is in the free consent of the people." And only twelve years after the American Revolution, a far more radical revolution broke out in what was then the biggest nation of the West, France.

America's democratic revolution had a huge impact on the world, but it was both less, and less indispensable, than most Americans suppose. Democracy was on its way anyway: to European countries first of all, but in due course even to the "dark corners of the world." We are living through the final wave of that process in this generation, with non-violent democratic revolutions from Bangkok, Dhaka and Seoul to Berlin, Moscow and Johannesburg, and on to Jakarta, Tbilisi and Kiev. Few of them had American help. This notion that the United States should "seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world," as President Bush put it in his inaugural speech, is profoundly misleading, because it suggests that American support for such transformations is essential.

But most of the world's countries already are democratic, and the exceptions are mainly in the Middle East and Africa. Indeed, it's striking that within the Middle East, the primary focus of American anxieties about terrorism, the Islamist terrorists come overwhelmingly from countries that have close links with Washington -- Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Algeria, and now Iraq -- and not from places like Syria, Libya and Sudan. "Liberty" and "freedom", are American catch-phrases for what other people call democracy: freedom under the law, and under the presumption that we are all equal before the law. It's not necessarily God's gift either, unless you are religious. Which is why, in an opinion poll carried out in fifteen democratic countries in the week of Bush's inauguration, 58 percent of the 22,000 people polled said that they expected his reelection to have a negative impact on peace and security. In Canada, Britain, Australia and South Africa, France, Germany, Italy and Russia, Mexico, Brazil, China, Indonesia and Japan, the story was the same: deep distrust for the Bush administration's policies and motives.