The President and the War |
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| Media Link - Washington Times | ||||
| Monday, 06 September 2004 00:00 | ||||
President Bush, in his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention, said "The progress we and our friends and allies seek in the broader Middle East will not come easily or all at once. Yet Americans, of all people, should never be surprised by the power of liberty to transform lives and nations." On the surface, this seems like an unarguable point with which even Mr. Bush's opponents can agree. However, it contains a crucial and profound error. Liberty, as magnificent as it is, does not itself transform a people. Rather, a transformed people demand and fight for liberty. Colonial Americans were self-starting, self-responsible, rational people determined to make their own way in the world. Because of this, they were ready for liberty and demanded it. They would not have put up for five minutes with a Saddam Hussein, and the American Revolution was a revolt against a far less dictatorial regime than that. Many early Americans were religious, but most did not let religion dictate their lives in the same ways many of today's Muslims let religion (and religious dictators) determine theirs. Dictatorship, secular or religious, springs up only where the roots of liberty - rationality, independence, self-esteem - fail to take root. Our forces in Iraq are powerless to do anything about this problem. One of the major flaws in Mr. Bush's foreign policy is this mistaken premise. The premise is that liberty causes personal transformation, rather than the other way around. When and if the Iraqi people or any other people in the Middle East transform themselves into rational, self-responsible people, they will both demand liberty and support our attempts to help them have it. Until or unless this happens, our military can do relatively little except take the shots it's taking in the Middle East in hopes that, sooner or later, these poor people finally will "get it." This is why Sen. John Kerry has such a good chance of winning the upcoming election and in some polls has even been ahead. In one of the most dangerous eras our nation has ever faced, nobody who has voted against so many defense weapons in the past 20 years should even have a chance at becoming our commander in chief. The problem is that many voters sense the error in Mr. Bush's reasoning about the Middle East. The focus of the war against terrorism should solely be destroying and dismantling terrorist states, not pie in the sky about delivering liberty to people who may or may not want it and who may or may not be ready for it.
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