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.
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.
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Comments: 10
Where are the folks who think without a preconceived outcome in mind who consider the facts, the realities which exist and whose morals allow them to face whatever outcome our actions lead to.
The most glaring problem I see in our participation in Iraq is that we look at the situation from our own point of view with little or no digestion of the realities of how society and governings normally operate in the middle east. A case in point is our insistance that we force the training of "policeman" on the administration which we forced into office. We want the Iraqis to learn about and become efficient using a concept which is totally foreign to many of its citizens. There were no or very few policeman in Iraq as we know policeman to be in the US. That concept is still difficult for them to grasp. For centuries the various religious orders and denominations were the center of a regional or area wide community. Within that community exist a leader with his surrounding enforcers who kept order. If followers needed loans, health care or any of the services citizens normally need it was handled at that regional level. There has been little real influence from a national governance as we have in the states. Most areas were segmented by the people's religious affiliation with little contact with those who believed different from them.
Now, we are there in their country attempting to force our ideals of community and religious order down their throats and are frustrated because it takes so long to train them. Remember they have a culture which is foreign to us yet I don't see us taking that fact into consideration in our attempt to win the war. Even at this late date I would not be surprised if most or many of the citizens of Iraq had no grasp of why the US and their supporters are even in their country. They hear words like democracy yet do not know what it means. They hear words like nation building yet don't know what it means. They hear words like policeman yet have no idea what it means.
Think in terms of their losses since we've been there. Jobs are more and more scarce which makes the poorest potentially open to any leadership not within the US understanding. Those who want to hear the best of rhetoric from the president with his desire to bring democracy to middle eastern countries are smoking something funny. There has been nor will there ever be a successful "war" on terrorism in this world. As we take more and more bumbling steps without facing the realities of life in the the middle east we are marching farther away from anything intelligent people can call success. Please tell me how one wins a physical war against mentalities. How does one physically out fight a principle? All the consultations with others with similar thought processes will accomplaish nothing but mental masturbation within the limitations we set for ourselves in this so called war.
I don't know any better than you California as to what the answer is... but
until the Iraqi people can grasp the concept of Democracy... maybe we should start first with the idea of compromise and 'peace'... but then again how do you teach these people anything when all they know is that we came and deposed Saddam, which made most of them happy (good!), and now they have a civil war, death squads and no jobs and no safety for their families... if the roles were reversed... what would you be doing?
These days our soldiers are caught in between two sides of a centuries old dispute
and we need to figure out how to get them out of harm's way without giving up our now tenuous position of strength as a "Super Power"...
I too, cannot listen to Bush anymore.
Look up the number of American dead when Nixon proclaimed pursuing 'peace with honor' then look at the total war dead the day the last chopper lifted off the roof of the embassey in Saigon. Also then, like now, we never counted the civilian deaths.
Naturally, we'll give equal time for Cheney to do the same.