US President George W. Bush spoke forcefully from the Capitol steps of a global crusade, though he carefully avoided that incendiary word, to spread liberty around the world.

"It is the policy of the US," the president pronounced at his inauguration speech Jan 20, "to 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 principle, this is unobjectionable. But as policy, it is crippled by contradiction and hobbled by hypocrisy.

"It is great rhetoric," responded Stanford University political scientist
Michael McFaul. "But there is no real strategy for actually carrying it out."

McFaul, who has been involved in grass-roots promotion of democracy in places such as Russia, Ukraine, Serbia and Iran, sees an essential contradiction.

"There have not even been any serious changes in the organisation of the government to actually pursue this," he said. "If they were serious, then you would see changes in spending."

The most visible attempts to export democratic freedom have taken place at the point of a gun. Though the president proclaimed that "this is not primarily the task of arms", the American military bears almost all the burden of this agenda.

Those who quietly labour to aid dissidents in Uzbekistan or build schools in
Pakistan live on the budget crumbs that fall off this table. The task of democracy promotion is buried deep in our foreign policy bureaucracy.

Instead, we should form a cabinet-level Department for Democracy Promotion and Development combining the resources for economic assistance and the Pentagon's assets for regime reconstruction, suggested a team of European and US experts, including McFaul.

While President Bush spoke in sweeping terms about his belief that the liberty of others is essential to our liberty, this is really about targeting a handful of countries for forcible "regime change".

The president carefully separated off in his address what he called "outlaw regimes" which, he warned, "cannot long retain" their rule. Vice President Dick Cheney nicely filled in the blanks earlier in the day by putting Iran at the top of the list. North Korea is still in this camp. Condoleezza Rice, during her confirmation hearing, added a few others -- Belarus, Zimbabwe, Myanmar and Cuba.

The president put in a different category: "governments with long habits of control" who would not be pressed in similar fashion. These are governments like the military regime in Pakistan, the Islamist monarchy of Saudi Arabia, the communist rulers of China or the government of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

These places matter. Most possess nuclear weapons. Their populations range from the billion-plus of China to nearly 150 million Pakistanis. They sit in strategic locations. Vital US interests -- from the supply of energy to waging a war against Islamist terror -- are at stake. And all are, by the definition of Freedom House, among the least free nations in the world.

In practice, the US administration embraces all those states as allies or partners in the war with Islamic extremism. This is no different from the realpolitik of the Cold War when the US backed authoritarian dictatorships from South Korea to Nicaragua because they joined in the battle against communism.

Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf throws aside promises to restore elected government, confident that the arrest of an occasional Al Qaeda operative is enough to buy US silence. Saudi monarchs continue to dine with Bush in Crawford.

Bush excuses the retreat from democracy in Russia while expressing confidence in his "good friend Vladimir". Human rights issues sit at the bottom of a US-China agenda occupied more by the problems of North Korea's nuclear programme or trade.

Such compromises are sometimes necessary. US interests are complex, not easily corralled under the banner of promoting liberty. Our ability to transform other nations, particularly those with long histories, is always more limited than we think.

The president's rhetoric contained no such caveats. That is why this call for freedom will be perceived in much of the world as hypocrisy, if not arrogance.

(Daniel Sneider is foreign-affairs writer for the Mercury News. He can be reached at dsneider@mercurynews.com)