High World Stakes <cont'd>
Bush is an idealist of sorts. He sincerely wants to share the blessings of liberty with the Arab word. And he believes liberty is for all peoples, not just for the culturally fortunate. As he said, echoing Thomas Jefferson and the Declaration of Independence, "We believe that liberty is the design of nature." In other words, freedom is everywhere and always desired. It is not culturally and historically conditioned. However, Bush has set the country on the course of democracy-promotion in the Middle East less for the sake of the Arab peoples (though it's certainly the right thing to do) than for our own safety and security.
True enough, he made scarcely any mention of weapons of mass destruction and terrorists in his address. But these dangers did not go exactly unexamined. Securing democracy in Iraq and the Middle East is, he declared, "worth our effort, it is worth our sacrifice, because we know the stakes. The failure of Iraqi democracy would embolden terrorists around the world, increas[ing] dangers to the American people." In September 11 was to be found a great horror, but also the premonition of much worse to come.
Do the American people agree with the president? Do they see the "stakes" as he sees them? According to a recent CNN-USA Today-Gallup Poll, 54 percent of respondents disapprove of the president's policy in Iraq. Meanwhile, the Democrats smell blood in the water. Many opposed Bush's $87 billion aid package for Iraq, and most of the Democratic candidates running in the primaries favor a rapid withdrawal from Iraq. They have turned their backs even on Wilsonian idealism to embrace instead the deep and self-defeating pessimism of George McGovern and Jimmy Carter. The election next year will very likely be a referendum on the Iraq war and Bush's foreign policy of democracy promotion in the Middle East.
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