Mona Charen
No lack of vision thing
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George W. Bush is, above all, an idealist. We saw it during his
first term in his passionate advocacy of faith-based charity and in his
ardent desire to reform education. This is not a leader who thinks small.
Now, by inaugurating his second term with a sweeping declaration
of ambition for world freedom, he has found the perfect mold into which to
pour his vaulting idealism. Echoing the words from Leviticus that grace the
Liberty Bell, "Proclaim liberty throughout the land and to all the
inhabitants thereof," President Bush declared that those words have meaning
still. "America, in this young century, proclaims liberty throughout all the
world, and to all the inhabitants thereof."
Impossibly grandiose? Impractical? Wilsonian? Perhaps. And yet,
the president made clear in a speech that was also an argument that his is
no ivory-tower idealism. "America's vital interests and our deepest beliefs
are now one." We are faced with a world made frighteningly smaller by modern
technology. Our enemies, nurtured in the bitter backwaters of repression and
religious bigotry, can do incalculable harm with modern weapons. And though
we may prepare, we cannot possibly defend ourselves against every terrorist
with a grudge.
Freedom, the president argues, is the only solution to this grim
threat. The more places liberty takes root, the safer the world, and we
ourselves will be. "The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends
on the success of liberty in other lands." In this address, the president
answered those who say that the Iraq War was a mistake, that the absence of
weapons of mass destruction made the whole enterprise an empty and shameful
waste of blood and money. It was not a mistake, the president urges, because
it is part of a protracted struggle to liberate enslaved people. The U.S.
cannot free every repressed population through armed intervention (the
Iraqis were some of the fortunate few), but it is "the policy of the United
States 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." There is no problem with the "vision thing" in the
administration of George W. Bush.
Doubters will scold that the task the president has undertaken
is impossibly ambitious, that we cannot even confidently predict a
benevolent outcome in Iraq, far less the whole teeming world. But the
president's speech — with its sweeping scope — demands that critics at
least provide an alternative. Promoting and nurturing freedom in darker
corners of the world is difficult. But not doing so, the president argues,
is dangerous. "For as long as whole regions of the world simmer in
resentment and tyranny — prone to ideologies that feed hatred and excuse
murder — violence will gather, and multiply in destructive power, and cross
the most defended borders, and raise a mortal threat." Nor does encouraging
freedom mean imposing American values on unwilling recipients. "Across the
generations we have proclaimed the imperative of self-government, because no
one is fit to be a master, and no one deserves to be a slave."
Rarely has a president embarking upon a second term undertaken
such an ambitious agenda. At home as well as abroad, this president is bold
and courageous. He has chosen to take on Social Security as part of his
"ownership society," though nothing in the actuarial tables or the political
calculus of Republican ascendancy required it. This is not politics, but
statesmanship.
Guiding everything President Bush does is his abiding faith in
God. This was not an inaugural to suit Michael Newdow's taste. He will have
cringed to hear the president invoke "the truths of Sinai, the Sermon on the
Mount, the words of the Koran, and the varied faiths of our people." He must
have stuffed newspaper in his ears when mezzo-soprano Susan Graham sang "God
Bless this House," and when the president declared that "God moves and
chooses as He wills." But the greatest rhetoric in American history, from
the Declaration of Independence to Lincoln's second inaugural, has invoked
the Almighty. And one needn't be a Christian to see that faith guides George
W. Bush to, in Lincoln's words, find "firmness in the right, as God gives
[him] to see the right."
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