<font color=brown> He's baaaaaaaaaaacccccccck! The Bush we know and love......not. <font color=black>
ted
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Bush foreign policy speech knocks realists
By Marie Horrigan
UPI Deputy Americas Editor
Published 6/2/2004 7:13 PM
WASHINGTON, June 2 (UPI) -- Establishing peace and democracy throughout the greater Middle East is a central tenet of the U.S. war to defeat terrorism worldwide, President Bush said Wednesday.
Speaking at the 50th commencement of the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colo., Bush offered the second in a series of weekly speeches outlining his plans to win the "global war on terror." Wednesday's speech offered a four-part plan based on pre-emptive action in the Middle East and took a swing at policy realists.
"Some who call themselves 'realists' question whether the spread of democracy in the Middle East should be any concern of ours. But the realists in this case have lost contact with a fundamental reality," Bush said.
"America has always been less secure when freedom is in retreat. America is always more secure when freedom is on the march."
Charles Peña, director of defense policy studies at the Cato Institute and a member of the Coalition for a Realistic Foreign Policy, disputed this assertion.
"Realists always understand what you can and cannot do," Peña told United Press International. "Your grasp never exceeds your reach. That's part of realism.
"Spreading democracy in the Middle East is exceeding your reach."
He later added, "The statement sounds nice rhetorically, but I'm not sure that it's backed up by reality, and I think it requires a little more careful examination before one accepts that."
Although the president often said his policy grew out of the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks on the United States, "I would argue 9/11 should have made the administration even more realistic in its approach to foreign policy," Peña said.
White House spokeswoman Clare Buchan told UPI the president's speech, which offered several arguments in favor of his pre-emptive global policy, presented a realist's position.
"He is saying that his view is ... realistic. That America is more secure when freedom is on the march. That is the reality," she said.
Among several things Bush said pointed to the need to take on a pre-emptive strategy was the argument that it could not anger terrorists more than they already are.
"Some say that by fighting the terrorists abroad since September the 11th, we only stir up a hornets' nest. But the terrorists who struck that day were stirred up already," Bush said to applause.
Bush also argued that the decades-long policy of tolerating oppressive regimes in the Middle East has "brought little stability and much oppression. So I have changed this policy," Bush said, into a "forward strategy for freedom in the broader Middle East."
An additional reason for his policy, Bush said, was that the stakes were too high to wait for threats to emerge. In his speech Bush touted the Middle East as the modern counterpoint to Europe during the Cold War.
"Events in the Middle East will set the course of our current struggle," he said. "If that region is abandoned to dictators and terrorists, it will be a constant source of violence and alarm ... (but) if that region grows in democracy and prosperity and hope, the terrorist movement will lose its sponsors, lose its recruits, and lose the festering grievances that keep terrorists in business."
Moreover, Bush argued, "The best way to protect America is to stay on the offensive."
Bush's previous major policy speech on May 24 offered five goals for post-war Iraq, while Wednesday's outlined four commitments for "a strategy that will lead to victory."
The first commitment is to use "every available tool to dismantle, disrupt and destroy terrorists and their organizations."
The United States also has destroyed terrorist sanctuaries by helping countries gain control over all their territory and by holding sponsors of terrorism equally accountable for any of their acts.
As part of this second point, Bush said, the United States also was working to prevent any terrorist organizations from taking control of any country's government, as he said they had in Afghanistan and Iraq.
"We can only imagine the scale of terrorist crimes were they to gain control of states with weapons of mass murder or vast oil revenues," he said. "So we will not retreat. We will prevent the emergence of terrorist-controlled states."
The United States also is "using all elements of our national power" to prevent proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, he said.
Bush defined this third goal as part of a global battle and said he is working to strengthen international institutions that oppose weapons proliferation.
As part of this, the United States has joined the 15-country Proliferation Security Initiative to interdict any shipments of weapons of mass destruction or components to build such weapons.
The final step, he said, was the implementation of his plan to create a peaceful and democratic greater Middle East region.
"We are denying the terrorists the ideological victories they seek by working for freedom and reform in the broader Middle East," the president said.
"Fighting terror is not just a matter of killing or capturing terrorists. To stop the flow of recruits into terrorist movement, young people in the region must see a real and hopeful alternative -- a society that rewards their talent and turns their energies to constructive purpose."
Bush reiterated a point he made in his first strategy speech on May 24 that the U.S. "vision of freedom" has advantages over terrorist ideology in this area. "In the long run, I have great faith that the appeal of freedom and life is stronger than the lure of hatred and death," he said Wednesday.
Bush asserted that establishing free societies in the Middle East would trigger a chain of events that would lead to terrorist ideology becoming the dismissal of terrorists' logic.
"As the entire region sees the promise of freedom in its midst, the terrorist ideology will become more and more irrelevant, until that day when it is viewed with contempt or ignored altogether."
Bush's speech comes one day after he recorded a success in moving post-war Iraq toward democracy when U.N. special envoy Lakhdar Brahimi named the Iraqi interim government.
Wednesday's policy initiative and its push for reform and democracy throughout countries in the Middle East is the next step in the president's plan and will be a main point on the president's agenda in next week's conference in Sea Island, Ga., by the Group of Eight top industrialized countries.
Also planning to attend the conference are several major Middle Eastern players, including Turkey, a country Bush has held forward as a "democratic partner" in the region.
In his speech Wednesday Bush urged Americans to remain steadfast in their determination to defeat terrorists. He argued that the situation throughout the Middle East is analogous to Europe after World War II, when the continent faced starvation and an apparently stagnating reconstruction process as the United States faced a growing communist presence further east.
"If that generation of Americans had lost its nerve, there would have been no 'long twilight struggle,' only a long twilight," Bush said.
"But the United States and our allies kept faith with captive peoples and stayed true to the vision of a democratic Europe. And that perseverance gave all the world a lesson in the power of liberty."
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