"Impressed because promoting democracy in the Arab world is something no president before has advocated with such vigor and dubious because this sort of nation-building is precisely what Bush spurned throughout his campaign..... Where did Bush's passion for making the Arab world safe for democracy come from?"
Did it not occur to the writer that 9/11 changed everything?
"A cynic might say Bush was always interested only in stripping Iraq of its weapons of mass destruction."
It would also be deceitful as this was NOT the only reason
to remove Saddam.
"But with no such weapons having been unearthed thus far in Iraq, and with the costs of the war in lives and dollars soaring, he felt he needed a new rationale. And so he focused on the democratization argument."
Pure speculation, with no thought whatsoever given to what
I've already discussed.
""Indeed," he adds, "President Bush, who campaigned for the presidency as an ardent realist, scorning nation-building and idealism in foreign policy, is now quoting President Wilson and speaking about the need to make the Middle East safe for democracy. It shows how the burden of the office and the power of events can transform presidents." "
Again they have a point, but give no thought to how
EVERYTHING changed on 9/11. That's where Bush had to begin
changing his way of thinking about everything.
"If you listen to him speak about it, it seems heartfelt. But the fact is, Lincoln wrote the Gettysburg Address himself. Bush's democracy speeches were written for him. "
As I told Lindybill, Bush may have speech writers, but he
certainly has significant input into the content of those
speeches.
So other than spin & distortion, what was their point?
"Thomas L. Friedman is a columnist for The New York Times"
Nevermind. |
