There’s a link between last Sunday’s election that confirmed Mahmoud Abbas (“Abu Mazen”) as Palestinian leader, and a speech made by Abraham Lincoln nearly 150 years ago. The Great Emancipator’s brief address to the New Jersey Senate isn’t the best known of Lincoln’s speeches, but it foretells not only the Palestinian exercise in majority rule, but also the election that saw Hamid Karzai installed as president of Afghanistan last October, and the election scheduled in Iraq at the end of this month that Saddamite and Islamist insurgents are trying so hard to prevent.

“I am exceedingly anxious,” said Lincoln to the senators on February 21, 1861, “that this Union, the Constitution, and the liberties of the people shall be perpetuated in accordance with the original idea for which that struggle was made, and I shall be most happy indeed if I shall be an humble instrument in the hands of the Almighty, and of this, his almost chosen people, for perpetuating the object of that great struggle.”

The “original idea” about which Lincoln spoke was, of course, democracy. The president said he was a child when he first read about America’s revolutionary struggle. “I recollect thinking then, boy even though I was, that there must have been something more than common that those men struggled for; that something even more than National Independence; that something that held out a great promise to all the people of the world to all time to come.”

In these two brief paragraphs Lincoln outlined what many would today describe as the Bush doctrine. In 1861, the president affirmed his mandate as “an humble instrument” of the Almighty’s “almost chosen people” in “perpetuating the object of that great struggle,” the “original idea” that “even more than National Independence, held out a great promise to all the people of the world to all time to come.”

Stripped of their 19th century veneer, Lincoln’s words translate into gratitude for being the instrument of America’s mission to spread democracy around the world. This appears to be President Bush’s quest as well.

Lincoln offered a sketch of democracy for the senators. “I learn that this body is composed of a majority of gentlemen who, in the exercise of their best judgment in the choice of a Chief Magistrate, did not think I was the man,” the president said. “I understand, nevertheless, that they came forward here to greet me as the constitutional President of the United States…As such, I accept this reception more gratefully than I could do did I believe it was tendered to me as an individual.”

No one has summed up the noblest aspirations and practical manifestations of democracy more succinctly. It’s to spread this gospel that the warriors of America’s current chief magistrate are sailing around the world, shedding the blood of their enemies along with their own.

They do it for Lincoln’s vision, not for oil. Afghanistan has no oil and neither does Palestine. Iraq does, but whoever rules it is only too eager to sell it to America. Oil left in the ground buys no Rolls-Royces. Tyrants and ayatollahs may be pathetic rulers, but they’re staunch vendors of fossil fuel. For oil, America need never unholster its gun, only unzip its wallet.

It’s not for oil, but for the near-religion of electoral democracy that Lincoln’s “almost chosen people” are conducting what Islamists aren’t entirely wrong to describe as a crusade. Is democracy worth it? Yes, if anything is. Does democracy lead to peace and prosperity? It has in all regions. Can democracy be spread by bayonets? That’s a harder question, but it has been spread by bayonets to Germany, Italy, and Japan, and – less directly and less decisively – to some countries within the former Soviet empire.

Would Lincoln have used bayonets to spread democracy, with its constituent liberties and equalities, within the United States? He did, in a conflict called the Civil War. Would he have done so beyond America’s borders? If democracy’s enemies had attacked America on its own soil or on the high seas, probably, yes. Woodrow Wilson did when confronted, and so did Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Mr. Bush is following Lincoln’s lead when he makes Levantines swallow teaspoonfuls of democracy, whether they like it or not. Many gag and retch, which isn’t a pretty sight. Would I recommend such coercive medicine? No – but my mandate as a commentator extends only to observing the body politic. Mr. Bush feels called upon to cure it.

Mr. Jonas is a columnist for the National Post and a syndicated columnist for CanWest News Service.