What I Want To Hear From President Bush
Forward To Victory
By California Yankee Posted in War — Comments (8) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »
I want to hear another of those remarkable speeches in which President has set forth an ambitious vision of the post 9/11 world.
I want President Bush to remind us how we felt on September 11, 2001, as we watched airliners smash into the twin towers, the Pentagon burn, people jump from the burning towers, the collapse of the towers, and the smoldering pile of debris that was the World Trade Center.
I want him to remind us about the objectives we pursue in our military intervention in Afghanistan and then in Iraq: first, to deter and defeat terrorism; second, to bring freedom and democracy, to these countries and the rest of the Middle East. I want the President to remind us yet again that establishing democracy in the Middle East will not be quick or easy, that we are engaged in a titanic struggle of global dimensions, and the consequences should we fail to achieve victory.
Read on.
In his Advance of Freedom speech to the National Endowment for Democracy on November 6, 2003, President Bush laid out his vision of a “forward strategy of freedom in the Middle East.” In the President’s vision, the “advance of freedom leads to peace:”
The advance of freedom is the calling of our time; it is the calling of our country. We believe that liberty is the design of nature; we believe that liberty is the direction of history. We believe that human fulfillment and excellence come in the responsible exercise of liberty. And we believe that freedom -- the freedom we prize -- is not for us alone, it is the right and the capacity of all mankind.
Over time, free nations grow stronger and dictatorships grow weaker.
Because we and our allies were steadfast, Germany and Japan are democratic nations that no longer threaten the world. A global nuclear standoff with the Soviet Union ended peacefully -- as did the Soviet Union.
[. . .]
Sixty years of Western nations excusing and accommodating the lack of freedom in the Middle East did nothing to make us safe -- because in the long run, stability cannot be purchased at the expense of liberty. As long as the Middle East remains a place where freedom does not flourish, it will remain a place of stagnation, resentment, and violence ready for export. And with the spread of weapons that can bring catastrophic harm to our country and to our friends, it would be reckless to accept the status quo.
Two weeks later, in his Three Pillars speech at Whitehall Palace in London President eloquently described the danger we are required to fight:
These terrorists target the innocent, and they kill by the thousands. And they would, if they gain the weapons they seek, kill by the millions and not be finished. The greatest threat of our age is nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons in the hands of terrorists, and the dictators who aid them. The evil is in plain sight. The danger only increases with denial.
[. . .]
Whatever has come before, we now have only two options: to keep our word, or to break our word. The failure of democracy in Iraq would throw its people back into misery and turn that country over to terrorists who wish to destroy us. Yet democracy will succeed in Iraq, because our will is firm, our word is good, and the Iraqi people will not surrender their freedom.
The terrorists have a purpose, a strategy to their cruelty. They view the rise of democracy in Iraq as a powerful threat to their ambitions. In this, they are correct. They believe their acts of terror against our coalition, against international aid workers and against innocent Iraqis, will make us recoil and retreat. In this, they are mistaken.
We did not charge hundreds of miles into the heart of Iraq and pay a bitter cost of casualties, and liberate 25 million people, only to retreat before a band of thugs and assassins. We will help the Iraqi people establish a peaceful and democratic country in the heart of the Middle East. And by doing so, we will defend our people from danger.
I want President Bush to invoke the similar words spoken by British Prime Minister Tony Blair in his magnificent July 17, 2003 address to a joint session of Congress:
We are fighting for the inalienable right of humankind--black or white, Christian or not, left, right or to be free, free to raise a family in love and hope, free to earn a living and be rewarded by your efforts, free not to bend your knee to any man in fear, free to be you so long as being you does not impair the freedom of others.
That's what we're fighting for. And it's a battle worth fighting.
Our love freedom is not a unique product of our culture. Freedom, democracy, human rights, the rule of law are not only American, or Western values, they are the universal values of the human spirit:
Anywhere, anytime ordinary people are given the chance to choose, the choice is the same: freedom, not tyranny; democracy, not dictatorship; the rule of law, not the rule of the secret police.
The spread of freedom is the best security for the free. It is our last line of defense and our first line of attack. And just as the terrorist seeks to divide humanity in hate, so we have to unify it around an idea. And that idea is liberty.
We must find the strength to fight for this idea and the compassion to make it universal.
I want the President to explain that it takes time to build a nation's security forces. As General Petraeus has explained:
The bottom line, the Iraqi security forces have made very substantial progress, but there's clearly a lot ahead for them still. It's an enormous undertaking to help a country establish all of its army, navy, air force, marines, police, special police, border guards; it goes on and on.
It's not just the infantryman, who is the tip of the spear. You have to make sure that the ministries can provide the level of support necessary for the soldiers who are in the field, to ensure that they're paid on time. That there are policies that are equitable.
We deliberately focused initially on the fighting forces. And then have slowly increased the focus on the supporting institutions, medical units, military police, maintenance units. It's a long-term endeavor. You can see the progress over time.
I want the President to explain that over the last eight weeks he has been gathering advice from leaders here, leaders in Iraq, and allies globally. He has gone through this effort to find common ground, as he says, "not for the good of the Republican Party or the Democratic Party, but for the good of the country."
Then, I want President Bush to explain how we are going to achieve the necessary victory. I want him to explain the mission so that we can accept the additional sacrifices that will have to be made, mostly by those brave men in women in the nation's armed forces and their families.
I'm not smart enough, and I don't know enough, to tell the President what our specific course of action should now be. I will listen carefully to what he has to say. I will think about it, then engage in the discussion.
I find it so disheartening that some want to give up in Iraq. It is disturbing that Democratic Congressional leaders, Pelosi and Reid, wouldn't demonstrate the common courtesy of listening to President Bush explain how we can achieve victory in Iraq before telling him that he must end the war.
The struggle we are engaged in is, and will be, long and difficult. It will take time to pull up the roots of Islamic extremism which spawns evildoers like Osama bin Laden. The roots are nurtured by the anger and frustration from all the difficulties under which many Muslims live — the poverty, unemployment, oppression. The only way to eliminate the roots of the extremist movements is to give these people hope. Establishing democracy in the Middle East is not be quick or easy, but I continue to believe it is possible. More importantly, five years after the 9/11 terror attacks no one has come up with an alternative option for winning the War Against Terror.
« We need more COIN in the Afghan realm — Comments (0) | Make It Open-Ended — Comments (0) »
What I Want To Hear From President Bush 8 Comments (0 topical, 8 editorial, 0 hidden) Post a comment »
with the Iraq Venture. I simply do not share President Bush's vision that somehow our notions of individual freedom will spring naturally in that cultural and intellectual wasteland if only given some American light and water.
American notions of individual freedom spring from a unique juxtaposition of the Enlightenment and the Frontier. The only other culture that has anything like this experience is that of the Australians, New Zealanders, and, somewhat, the Canadians. Even the Brits, from whose experience we arise, are not comfortable with the freewheeling individual freedom of the former colonies.
Many of our own citizens, apparently these days a majority of them, are not comfortable with individual freedom as the Founders envisioned it. If we have trouble finding majority acceptance of individual freedom and concomitant responsibility even here, why would we thing we can make it grow unbidden in a desert that has known only despotism for 5000 years.
In Vino Veritas
I rely upon Bernard Lewis here:
The study of Islamic history and of the vast and rich Islamic political literature encourages the belief that it may well be possible to develop democratic institutions--not necessarily in our Western definition of that much misused term, but in one deriving from their own history and culture, and ensuring, in their way, limited government under law, consultation and openness, in a civilized and humane society. There is enough in the traditional culture of Islam on the one hand and the modern experience of the Muslim peoples on the other to provide the basis for an advance towards freedom in the true sense of that word.
In my view, Bernard Lewis is untrustworthy. Even in this single quote you have provided, there is an obvious flaw:
It is an almost uniquely American achievement to fruitfully combine freedom and democracy. For a long time this was thought impossible. Read Lord Acton or Tocqueville on the "elementary antagonism" between the two (Acton's phrase.) This almost providential amalgam of liberty and democracy is, in large part, the core of the American tradition. So when Lewis says that democracy in Muslims lands will derive from "their own history and culture," he can only mean that the uniqueness of the American tradition will be abandoned and he return to that elementary antagonism.
__________________
And the Lord upon the Golden Horn is laughing in the sun.
If our foreign policy is going to be built around this word, It would be useful if we had some understanding of what it means. Any thoughts?
If johne is reading, feel free to jump in here.
I should therefore suspend my congratulations on the new liberty of France, until I was informed how it had been combined with government; with public force; with the discipline and obedience of armies; with the collection of an effective and well-distributed revenue; with morality and religion; with the solidity of property; with peace and order; with civil and social manners. All these (in their way) are good things too; and, without them, liberty is not a benefit whilst it lasts, and is not likely to continue long. The effect of liberty to individuals is that they may do what they please: we ought to see what it will please them to do, before we risk congratulations, which may be soon turned into complaints.
Edmund Burke.
what the President needs to do is to repudiate the past approach to the war.
He needs to say that our goals, while noble, were unrealistic, and that the methods we chose to achieve them were inadequate.
Another excellent speech on the universal desire for freedom and Islam as the religion of peace....will not be acceptable to the American people.
In short, the President needs to break from his own past policy. He can do this by pointing out his new team, generals who want to win (and understand that we do that by killing terrorists) and who have a new strategy to implement, counterinsurgency.
Our policy will be shifted from training Iraqis to providing security. Illustrate what the policy will mean to the Iraqis. Discuss the environment our troops are operating in (tell the story of Cpl Jason Dunham, who will be awarded a posthumous Medal of Honor tomorrow) and how that environment will improve with the additional troops.
Above all, tell the American people that there will be a price to pay, that casualties will increase, that our troops will have longer deployments. In short there will be sacrifices.
If the whole speech did not include a reference to 9/11 or to fighting them over there so we don't fight them here, I would be very happy. These have outlived their usefulness, and I cringed when I heard Tony Snow employ them yesterday.
We're in a new war. We must win. We can win.
I certainly hope the President announces that we intend to kill all the terrorists we can find. I agree that some methods have been inadequate. Nevertheless, we must not forget why we are fighting.
I'm a little confused. The lead story mentions that what we need is "time". If you could possibly plot 'success' on a graph over time, I suggest the graph would essentially be a flat line right now. That is, while there may have been a good deal of 'success' early in the mission, nothing has given me any hope about progress in the last couple years.
So, 'stay the course' + 'time' = more lost lives and more lost treasure.
I see all the cheerleading above. The point isn't to remind us why we went (that is an entirely different discussion), the point is we are there. How are we going to 'win', and what does 'winning' look like.
Standing in front of a camera and repeatedly saying, "We have to fight them there so we don't have to fight them here" is NOT a strategy.
What we have been doing over the past few isn't working. What i want to hear is HOW we are going to win, not WHY we must.
freedom is not the "design of nature"? Or, what if it is indeed the design of nature, but it cannot proceed in the Middle East because of the obstacle of the Islamic religion?
I read that National Endowment for Democracy speech with some care in preparation for a chapter of my book. It seems to me that the President is resting almost everything on this assertion of the centrality of freedom in history. But the fact is that there is strong and growing evidence that this may not be the case in the Islamic world.
I find this refusal to consider the possibility that Muslims would be animated by something other than a desire to live free rather alarming.
______________
And the Lord upon the Golden Horn is laughing in the sun.