Please do check out today's Krauthammer. It sends me back to the President's speech in May of 2002 on the Palestine question. All the usuals here at FR, on talk radio, and in editorials yelped at the President, saying it was too much, too little, and naive, blah, blah, blah. I still believe that speech to be one of his most important -- and most effective.
Going back to Kayak's question yesterday regarding the President's role in pushing issues and awareness -- that is precisely what the speech accomplished. The news cycle that followed was the failure of the President's initiative and more and more suicide bombings. There is nothing so long as the present tense, and nothing so short as the past. I haven't heard a word about Palestine in months but of the opportunities now before us.
Taking down Saddam is like the felling of the Berlin Wall. An old enemy goes down, and with him his allies in hatred of the U.S. Remember the end of history? With the Soviets gone, the world would never again be bothered. The incredible opportunities of the end of the Cold War were lost to eight years of White House self-indulgence and a power vacuum filled by Islamicists and the new America haters.
President Bush is recreating that tiny, perfect moment his father and Reagan bequeathed to us ten years ago. "The New World Order" was not about the Rothschildes, it was about remaking a world that was for half a century wrapped around the Cold War, and a half a century before that wracked and ruined by ugly alliances and demented utopias. On September 11, 2001, just about every Cold War alignment outside of Europe was exactly as it had been ten years before.
Read Krauthammer, and I hope you will see what I mean.
Off now to the American Historical Assoc. conference. Every pleader and complainer with an agenda is there. It'll be pathetic. I'm arguing for automobiles and fat presidents.