The Business
of State
Commentary by Greg Lewis / TheRant.US
November 23, 2004
The Bush administration has had to manage a number of
important events during the past week. These include the shakeup in his
second-term cabinet, the recapturing and securing by American and Iraqi
forces of terrorist strongholds in preparation for the January elections
in Iraq, the speculation about the chances for a revival of the Middle
East "peace process" that the death of Yasser Arafat has brought
about, and the sniping and defensive posturing and moral outrage that
has accompanied the latest revelations of the unimaginable scope of the
corruption that pervades the United Nations. Despite the urgency and gravity
of these events, things have actually calmed down to a significant degree
recently on the political front.
It seems that, because Bush's victory in the Presidential
election was decisive, the air has been let out of the balloon of the
election-fraud-conspiracy retribution threatened by Democrats, except,
of course, for the continued embarrassing railing of MSNBC's Keith Olbermann
and the Air America retro-"movement" jocks. The emphatic Bush
victory in and of itself has generally caused the perpetrators of punditry
to scale down their rhetorical intensity several notches. And, if the
resulting hiatus hasn't quite been the occasion for a return to the public
debate of civility — even, gasp, sanity — it has at least
provided an opportunity for us to take a few deep breaths and a somewhat
less impassioned look at the events in the world than we had been able
to prior to November 2, before which time we were always feverishly assessing
the import of said events in terms of how the candidates, if elected,
would handle them and what their respective handling of them might mean
for America.
But if the pundits' rhetoric has been scaled back, this
period in history is nonetheless one of crucial importance. It is a period
during which the direction of the Bush "mandate" is being defined
through the President's cabinet appointments. It is also a period in which
the efficacy of America's efforts to transplant democracy to the Middle
East will be tested in the pending Iraqi and Palestinian elections. The
next several months will truly provide important feedback to the question,
"So, are the so-called 'neo-con' strategies, which so many on the
left characterize as reckless war-mongering, really working?" Or,
put another way, "Despite the continued 'insurgency' in Iraq, and
despite the apparent intractability of Palestinian terrorist organizations,
which will be satisfied with nothing short of the destruction of Israel
. . . despite the continued high-profile activities of murderous and barbarous
Arab terrorist movements, will we see definitive evidence in the coming
months that the course our President is pursuing is producing positive
results?"
The President's foreign policy — which postulates
above all else that expanding the aegis of democratic rule throughout
the world is the single eventuality that can insure the very survival
of civilization as we know it on this planet — faces important tests
in the weeks and months ahead. Many criticize Bush as being what can be
termed a "neo-conservative cowboy" for his aggressive pursuit
in Iraq of the war against international terrorism and the enforced spread
of the principles of democracy. But it can also be convincingly argued
that, if we had not followed this course of action, if, indeed, we are
not successful in implementing it, we would have lost history's final
battle. If we do not continue to pursue and finally to win the war against
the forces of terrorism and nihilism and the perpetuation of the culture
of death that Islamist radicals represent, we are paving the way for a
plunge into "dark ages" that will make the last half of the
first millennium A.D. look like a day at the beach.
The issues that are emerging as the Congressional investigation
into the United Nations Oil-For-Food Program moves forward are relevant
in this regard. While then-Secretary of State Colin Powell put a respected
and moderate face on the United States' position regarding Iraq and the
need to invade that country and overthrow Saddam Hussein's regime, his
approach also belied what all of the President's advisors must even then,
in the Spring of 2003, have known: that the very nations to whom we were
appealing in the UN for support in overthrowing a dictator who was indisputably
a major player in the international Islamist terrorist movement were themselves
on that very dictator's payroll. Can there be any doubt that France's
and Germany's and Russia's resistance to approving a UN resolution sanctioning
the use of force against Saddam Hussein was motivated overwhelmingly by
the fact that Hussein was greasing their collective palms to the tune
of billions of skimmed and kicked-back UN-Oil-For-Food dollars?
And so President Bush has implemented a strategy that
he and his advisors have come to understand provides the best —
and very possibly the only — means by which western civilization
can survive the current onslaught of Islamist terrorism. President Bush
has remained steadfast in his vision, despite the fact that there is a
willful blindness, a refractory inability on the part of his critics to
admit that this assessment has validity.
Yasser Arafat's death has, if nothing else, called on
us to look back on the past decade and understand that — if Arafat
is representative, and I think he is — the principals of the Arab
world, aided and abetted by bribed UN cohorts, have been, finally, not
amenable to a negotiated resolution of their differences with, not only
the existence in the Middle East of a Jewish state, but the existence
of western-style democracies in any form. The radical resistance by Islamist
terrorists to the United States' effort to bring to Iraq a version of
representative western democratic government is only the most visible
manifestation of a life-death conflict that is being played out around
the world between the forces aligned with democracy and those aligned
with murderous and repressive totalitarianism of the most heinous sort.
To see this conflict in any less than cataclysmic terms
is to understate it, to devalue the impact of its outcome. Indeed, if
that outcome is not one in which the principles and governmental consuetude
consistent with modern democracies prevail, there will be hell to pay.
Insuring the desired outcome is the true business of state of the emerging
Bush administration.
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