Bush Knows His History

Two weeks ago, I pointed out that we live in something close to the best of times, with record worldwide economic growth and at a low point in armed conflict in the world. Yet Americans are in a sour mood, a mood that may be explained by the lack of a sense of history. The military struggle in Iraq (nearly 2,500 military deaths) is spoken of in as dire terms as Vietnam (58,219), Korea (54,246) or World War II (405,399). We bemoan the cruel injustice of $3 a gallon for gas in a country where three-quarters of people classified as poor have air conditioning and microwave ovens. We complain about a tide of immigration that is, per U.S. resident, running at one-third the rate of 99 years ago.

George W. Bush has a better sense of history. Speaking last week at the commencement at West Point -- above the Hudson River, where revolutionary Americans threw a chain across the water to block British ships -- Bush noted that he was speaking to the first class to enter the U.S. Military Academy after the Sept. 11 attacks. And he put the challenge these cadets willingly undertook in perspective by looking back at the challenges America faced at the start of the Cold War 60 years ago.

"In the early years of that struggle," Bush noted, "freedom's victory was not obvious or assured." In 1946, Harry Truman accompanied Winston Churchill as he delivered his Iron Curtain speech; in 1947, communists threatened Greece and Turkey; in 1948, Czechoslovakia fell, France and Italy seemed headed the same way, and Berlin was blockaded by the Soviets, who exploded a nuclear weapon the next year; in 1950, North Korea attacked South Korea.

"All of this took place in just the first five years following World War II," Bush noted. "Fortunately, we had a president named Harry Truman, who recognized the threat, took bold action to confront it and laid the foundation for freedom's victory in the Cold War."

Bold action: the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan in 1947, the Berlin airlift in 1948, the NATO Treaty in 1949, the Korean War in 1950. None of these was uncontroversial, and none was perfectly executed. And this was only the beginning. It took 40 years -- many of them filled with angry controversy -- to win the Cold War.

The struggles against Soviet communism and Islamofascist terrorists are of course not identical. But there are similarities.

"Like the Cold War, we are fighting the followers of a murderous ideology that despises freedom, crushes all dissent, has territorial ambitions and pursues totalitarian aims," Bush said. "And like the Cold War, they're seeking weapons of mass murder that would allow them to deliver catastrophic destruction to our country."

The New Republic's Peter Beinart argues that Bush, unlike Truman, has shown no respect for international institutions. But the Truman Doctrine and Marshall Plan were unilateral American initiatives, and Truman used the United Nations to respond in Korea only because the Soviets were then boycotting the Security Council. Otherwise, he would have gone to war, as Bill Clinton did in Kosovo, without U.N. approval. Bush did try to use the United Nations on Iraq, but was blocked by France and Russia, both stuffed with profits from the corrupt U.N. Oil for Food program.

But as Bush pointed out, we have worked with 90-plus nations and NATO in Afghanistan and with 70-plus nations on the Proliferation Security Initiative. We're working with allies to halt Iran's nuclear program.

"We can't have lasting peace unless we work actively and vigorously to bring about conditions of freedom and justice in the world," Harry Truman told the West Point class of 1952. Which is what we're trying to do today -- in Iraq and the broader Middle East, in Afghanistan, even Africa.

Reports of Bush's West Point speech noted that Truman had low job ratings -- lower than Bush's, in fact. But does that matter now? Bush, as Yale historian John Lewis Gaddis has written, has changed American foreign policy more than any president since Truman, and like Truman he has acted on the long view.

"The war began on my watch," Bush told the class of 2006, "but it's going to end on your watch." Truman might have made the same point, accurately as it turned out, to the class of 1952. We're lucky we had then, and have now, a president who takes bold action and braves vitriolic criticism to defend our civilization against those who would destroy it.

For UN, Immigrant Is Not Even a Word

by Cheryl K. Chumley
Posted Jun 05, 2006 For the majority of traditional Americans, the issue of immigration is pretty clear-cut.

It's not one of those complex dilemmas requiring years of study, culminating in Capitol Hill hearing upon hearing, to the point of outlasting everything from congressional terms to constituent attention spans.

Rather, the solution is easily grasped, an almost overnight change-for-the-better type of fix-it that goes something like this: Secure the borders. Punish the infractors. Decline benefits for illegals. Enforce the laws equally.

We get it. Decisive action, problem solved. Law-breakers gone, good prevails, moving on to something more involved, like salvaging the Social Security or social services systems from even further abuse.

That's the perfect world scenario, of course. Add government to the mix, and the reality is this logical progression of events is replaced by a complicated web of political double-speak, politician pandering, and politically correct ideals that have little to do with the real wishes of Americans, or even with the true benefit of America outside of congressional and White House halls of power. And that's just summarizing the state and federal governments' involvement.

Now add the global, and the issue takes an even greater foreboding tone.

In a May 25 gathering of the Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues -- a bureaucracy created by the monster of all bureaucracies, the United Nations, to address immigrant matters but under a different name -- the drumbeat was steady anti-America.

"No human being is illegal," said one, characterizing the U.S. debates over immigration as unfair talks that drew "thousands and thousands of people … (to) the streets calling for just legalization for all," a UN release read.

Just legalization? In America that phrase brings forth such constitutional standards as equality in the eyes of the law, due process, a government of, by, for the people, and so forth. But in UN-speak, where everything is couched in tame language or hidden among official-sounding acronyms and even invented words, the phrase "just legalization" takes a different tone. It means quite the opposite, in fact.

It means for the "Permanent Forum to intercede and demand that the United States repeal recent legislation aimed ostensibly at protecting the country's borders against terrorism," continued the release.

This speaker was among several who reportedly called for the global body to take a more proactive stance on issues of indigenous peoples -- defined, by the way, in the loosest of UN manner, as individuals who are "native, innate, inherent or natural" to a particular region or country. For America, the interpretation would pretty much open borders for all.

But why should our sovereign nation care?

Most importantly, the United Nations finished its forum with a pledge to incorporate indigenous issues into the Millennium Development Goals. This measure is a global pledge to eradicate poverty by 2015 that is upheld by policy, legislation and related commitments from individual and participating nations -- of which the United States is one.

Logic stands that if indigenous issues are incorporated into these goals, then the United States would be compelled to abandon Millennium Development principles in whole or part -- and face the negative political fallout that would surely ensue -- else address, explain, argue, agree, compromise, what have you on a matter that should, according to constitutional principle, remain within sovereign borders.

The United Nations, it's interesting to note, also concluded its meeting with verbal agreements to carry out its help-the-immigrants work via a formal human rights approach. This is clear warning of what's around the bend: More pressure from around-the-world governments for the U.S. to, say, grant amnesty based on pity for the hungry, unemployed or poverty-stricken. And any hope the pressure will lighten is misplaced.

The meeting finished with a brief song and ceremony from the Indigenous Youth Caucus, a UN-sponsored group with a name that speaks volumes. The global body is preparing the youth of the future to carry this latest torch.

The dilemma is that predicting how the America of 2011 or 2032 might react to all this worldly pressure is near impossible.

But from the constituent perspective, the analysis is simple. If mainstream America cannot bid its elected government now to carry out its wishes, just think of the resistance that's on the way from the United Nations.

HOW COME YOU HAVEN'T SEEN THEM?

Because they aren't there. I haven't seen any. So kiss off with the BS

And your name is a misnomer since you appear to be siding with amnesty for the Illegals.

THE PEOPLE have NOT been "disenfranchised" and there is no such a thing as "the People's soverentity(sic)".

Interesting how you managed to mis-spell sovereignty...which was accurately spelled in my post. I can only surmise that you are deliberately inserting a profanity. Which shows you have absolutely no seriousness, and no grounds for denying the U.S. constitutional theory...which you clearly are at war with.

In other words...you are at war with us.

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