Bush Chess

http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=1431 ^ | June 26, 2K2 | Lowell Ponte

[rdb3]

Ponte's right. Chess ain't dominoes.

[rdb3]

I did search for this under its proper title "Bush Chess" and didn't find it. If it is a repost, nuke it.

Thanx.

[Bigg Red]

...the United States is now going all-out on a preemptive offensive against both terrorism and the petty tyrannies that breed future terrorists.

Let's Roll!

[CROSSHIGHWAYMAN]

After Bush's magnificent Sept. 20 speech to the nation, I told my wife that Bush would do for the middle east what Reagan did for Eastern Europe.

If he fulfills his destiny, Bush will bring democracy and the emergence of economic prosperity to the Muslim world. How he gets there depends on the indigenous peoples.

[Charles_Bingley]

KR to KR8 CHECK!

[Kermit]

Lowell Ponte is pretty hard-headed guy. I'm fascinated by his take on this. Has Bush's word got to the Middle East? Syria blanked out the comments dealing with Syria and I heard that Palie TV didn't even broadcast it.

Related to this, what is American world broadcasting doing? What is Voice of America doing? Do we even have a Radio Free Islam set up? If not, why not? It's already 8 months after 9/11 and it's still not up and running?

[rdb3]

What you are asking here goes above and beyond the scope of this article. Arab nations may have not shared this info with their people, but you can best believe that the leaders of these regimes are now on notice.

As for your other questions, I don't know.

[TexasRepublic]

"Democratic" and "Islamic government" are mutually exclusive concepts -- it isn't going to happen. Democratic secular Islamic societies, such as Turkey, perhaps.

[Kermit]

Maybe somebody knows.

[jwfiv]

A past, present and future history ping fer ya, Serb. Very interesting point of view the writer shares with us.

[rdb3]

This is a different approach. I wish I could say with certainly how it will play out.

[traditionalist]

Great analysis, except for the part where he claims the nation state is finished. What's the new state of Palestine going to be, except a nation-state?

[truth_session]

"The Palestinians, for all their violence, are not fundamentalist Muslims. Many of them, like Yasser Arafat’s wife before her Muslim conversion to wed him, are Christian."

Yes fine Christians over there.

[rdb3]

INCOMING!

[Howlin]

I love Ponte. Honestly. This is a very interesting article and I need to digest it before I comment!

[TADSLOS]

Chess is all about strategery and Bush is master strategerist with a whole lot of strong playing pieces and places to move them ;~)

[mafree]

Thanks for the flag.

[Nick Danger]

This is greatness. This is the kind of thing that people look back on after a hundred years and say, "That was a big deal. That move changed the world."

It is also breakthrough thinking. It ought to be obvious, after screwing around with this struggle for fifty years or so, that the solution does not lie in coming up with yet another finely-tuned nine-point plan for peace. We've had a dozen such plans, and the people who created them were not stupid. The problem isn't in the details, it's in the fundamental assumptions.

One reasonable fundamental assumption is that free people do not allocate huge fractions of their resources to building rockets and bioweapons when they don't even have enough food. Only in dictatorships does that happen. Eliminate the dicatorships, and the "peace process" will take care of itself.

This is serious long-term thinking here; comparing it to chess is apt. It's good chess, too; the kind that wins. If the Soviet Union could fall without a shot, so can the Ba'ath party in Iraq, or the mullahFuerhers in Iran. Or the family Saud.

If Bush can win a second term, such that this policy does not change in only three years, it will indeed transform the Middle East.

I suspect that this policy is not the brainchild of Colin Powell, or Condi Rice, or even Dick Cheney. This has the signature clarity of a Dubya move: a Reagan-like "return to first principles" that cuts through the fifty years of accumulated fog and asks one piercing question: What is the right thing to do here? The right thing is to bring the benefits of liberty and free markets to the Middle East. OK, now how do we do that?

This is how sea changes in policy happen, and we've just seen one. This is tantamount to calling on every one of those potentates over there to "tear down that palace." We all saw what happened the last time somebody tried that. It didn't look easy then, either.

[rdb3]

I think we are witnessing the eventual legacy of President G. W. Bush. It's a paradigm shifting legacy not unlike that of Ronaldus Magnus, a.k.a. President Ronald Reagan.

Sometimes we have to hold the line.

[rdb3]

Isn't that the goal?