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I continue to think the president's inaugural address, suggesting as it did that he was on a mission to expunge all political tyranny from the globe, and asserting that our nation's survival depended on this utopian project, was a rather crazy speech, weirdly Wilsonian and at odds with conservatism's ancestral knowledge of the imperfectability of this world and the inability of politics to heal all that wounds us. (Take it away, FreeRepublic.) Samuel Johnson was a genius of literature, but he knew his politics: "How small of all that human hearts endure / That part which laws or kings can cause or cure!"

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No one knows what comes next. No one knows what Hezbollah will do, no one knows what will emerge from what is still a cauldron. But no one can say that a new hopefulness has not been infused, and infused by America.

Peggy was right about the inaugural address. President Bush declared that the power of human freedom was the supreme force guiding human events. It isn't, which is not to say that human freedom isn't a very good thing. Offering freedom to the supporters and beneficiaries of terror, such as the Palestinians, won't necessarily make them good neighbors.

Not all is rosey with the Iraq elections. While worrying that that the Shia might oppress the Sunni, or that either or both might oppress the Kurds, we've ignored the oppression of the Assyrian Christians in the North by those very Kurds. Thousands of Assyrians were prevented from voting by Kurdish corruption and intimidation.

If Iraq goes bad, it will be the Christians who will suffer the first blow.

... domestically, it's high time for a pivot.

Nothing is bigger than civil defense. At the beginning of an actual and metaphoric spring it is something we should turn to with renewed commitment. We'll regret it if we don't.

Anti-Peggy Freepers would do well to remember her prescience before September 11:

Three billion men, and it takes only half a dozen bright and evil ones to harness and deploy.
What are the odds it will happen? Put it another way: What are the odds it will not? Low. Nonexistent, I think.
When you consider who is gifted and crazed with rage...when you think of the terrorist places and the terrorist countries...who do they hate most? The Great Satan, the United States. What is its most important place? Some would say Washington. I would say the great city of the United States is the great city of the world, the dense 10-mile-long island called Manhattan, the city that is the psychological center of our modernity, our hedonism, our creativity, our hard-shouldered hipness, our unthinking arrogance.
If someone does the big, terrible thing to New York or Washington, there will be a lot of chaos, and things won't be working so well anymore.
The psychic blow will shift our perspective and priorities, dramatically, and for longer than a while. Something tells me more of us will be praying.
* From "There Is No Time, There Will Be Time," a piece by Peggy Noonan in Forbes, November 1998.

She was right in 1998, and she is right today. We are complacent on the homefront. Tax dollars have secured over 300 million doses of smallpox vaccine, yet the Bush Administration refuses to make it available to the public. Illegal aliens and suspected terrorists cross our borders almost at will, and President Bush refuses to fully fund not Border Patrol hiring.

One can acknowledge the successes to date without trunning a blind eye to the shortcomings of the President's conduct of the war.