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Hammered indeed. The closing lines are sweet.

History has yet to yield a verdict on the final outcome. But it has yielded one unmistakable verdict thus far: the idea that Arabs are not fit for or inclined toward freedom--the underlying assumption of those who denounced, ridiculed and otherwise opposed the democracy project--is wrong. Embarrassingly, scandalously, blessedly wrong.

The embarrassment of the presumed experts, the scandal of self-dealers (political, financial, or diplomatic self-dealing) trying to torpedo success, the blessings of liberty advanced because it was right.

Brilliant article about how President Bush has proven right in pursuing his Liberty Doctrine.

Being printed right now to show around to a few folks I know...

President Bush saw it coming, and has been working for it for a very long time.

Witness: President Bush has been expounding upon this same theme since 9/11, and to a lesser extent even before that time.

The most detailed look at it was first given on June 1, 2002 http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/06/20020601-3.html
President Bush Delivers Graduation Speech at West Point

Not long after that, in "The National Security Strategy of the United States of America", http://www.whitehouse.gov/nsc/nss.html , the administration laid out the whole deal, with reasoning and detail. Many only saw "preemption" in this, but they were simply being myopic, intentionally or not. The first paragraph of that is:

"The great struggles of the twentieth century between liberty and totalitarianism ended with a decisive victory for the forces of freedom—and a single sustainable model for national success: freedom, democracy, and free enterprise. In the twenty-first century, only nations that share a commitment to protecting basic human rights and guaranteeing political and economic freedom will be able to unleash the potential of their people and assure their future prosperity. People everywhere want to be able to speak freely; choose who will govern them; worship as they please; educate their children—male and female; own property; and enjoy the benefits of their labor. These values of freedom are right and true for every person, in every society—and the duty of protecting these values against their enemies is the common calling of freedom-loving people across the globe and across the ages."

I highly recommend that all FReepers, all who wish to catch up on what has been going on behind the scenes and why, all who still can't understand the reason our Declaration of Independence, the Magna Carta, and our Bill of Rights are so powerful, and all who simply wish to educate themselves as to the most probable direction of the Twenty-First century take a look at these documents - more than once.

Bush's Liberty Doctrine is to this century what the Monroe Doctrine was to the 19th. President Bush's administration has invited us all to understand what is happening, if we wish to understand. This team and president are far more intelligent and farseeing than most others in the whole world. Present events demonstrate the truth in these documents.
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Krauthammer QUOTE

When Ronald Reagan declared that the unfreedom imposed by communism was simply unsustainable and that it should be not appeased or accommodated, but instead forced--by the power and will of free peoples--into the ash heap of history, he was ridiculed and patronized as a simpleton. Clark Clifford famously called him an amiable dunce. The amiable dunce went on to win the cold war.

Two decades later, another patronized President. Our intellectuals and Middle East "experts" have been telling us that Bush's grand project to democratize the region is the fantasy of a historical illiterate. Faced with the stunning Iraqi election, they went to great lengths to attribute this inconvenient yet undeniable success to the courage of the Iraqi people.

This is all very nice. But this courage was rather dormant before the American invasion. It was America's overthrow of Saddam's republic of fear that gave to the Iraqi people space and air and the very possibility of expressing courage.

Those now waxing rhapsodic about the courage of the natives and the beauty of people power need to ask themselves the obvious question: Why now? It is easy to get sentimental about people power. But people power does not always prevail. Indeed, it rarely prevails. It was crushed in Hungary 1956, Czechoslovakia 1968, Tiananmen Square 1989--and Iraq 1991. Matched against tyranny at its point of maximum cruelty, people power is useless.

In the 1991 uprising, tens of thousands of Shi'ites and Kurds were killed by the raw power of Saddam's helicopters and tanks and secret police. What was different this time? No Saddam. The American army had come ashore to disarm and depose him. After the sword, it provided the shield to allow 8 million Iraqis to revel in their first exercise of democratic self-governance.

Why now? Because until now the forces of decency in the region were alone and naked, cynically ignored by an outside world content to deal with their oppressors. Then comes America, not just proclaiming democratic liberation as its overriding foreign policy principle but sacrificing blood and treasure in the service of precisely that principle.

It was not people power that set this in motion. It was American power. People power followed. Which is why the critics of the Bush doctrine take refuge in a second Bush-free explanation. They locate the reason for this astonishing Arab spring, if not in people power from below, then in rot from above. These superannuated dictatorships, we are now told, were fossilized and frail, already wobbly and ready to fall, just waiting to be undone by the slightest challenge.

Interesting. If the rot was always there, why is it that these critics never said so before? They never suggested that we challenge these wobbly despots? In fact, they bitterly denounced the Bush doctrine for presuming to destabilize the region in pursuit of some democratic chimera? They opposed the Bush doctrine precisely because they preferred stability. They warned us darkly that the alternative to the status quo was the seething Arab street--an unruly mob, anarchic, anti-American, pan-Arabist or perhaps Islamist, ignorant of all liberal traditions and ready to rise up against America should it disturb the perfect order of things by "imposing democracy."