January 29, 2003

The line I took away

The line I took away from last night's State of the Union speech was this: "Free people will set the course of history." Last century, the free people of the United States fought against fascism and communism and won. Now, we deal with Islamists hell-bent on terrorizing Western Civilization to compensate for the failures of their own civilization. But if President Bush has any say (and that's a lot) it won't happen. "Whatever the duration of this struggle," Bush told the world, "and whatever the difficulties, we will not permit the triumph of violence in the affairs of men."

Saddam may not have masterminded or significantly aided in the September 11 attacks, but President Bush clearly linked the magnified threat Saddam brought to terrorism:

Before September the 11th, many in the world believed that Saddam Hussein could be contained. But chemical agents, lethal viruses and shadowy terrorist networks are not easily contained. Imagine those 19 hijackers with other weapons and other plans -- this time armed by Saddam Hussein. It would take one vial, one canister, one crate slipped into this country to bring a day of horror like none we have ever known. We will do everything in our power to make sure that that day never comes.

Some have said we must not act until the threat is imminent. Since when have terrorists and tyrants announced their intentions, politely putting us on notice before they strike? If this threat is permitted to fully and suddenly emerge, all actions, all words, and all recriminations would come too late. Trusting in the sanity and restraint of Saddam Hussein is not a strategy, and it is not an option.

A chilling part of the speech was the listing of Saddam's horrible treatment of Iraqis:

The dictator who is assembling the world's most dangerous weapons has already used them on whole villages -- leaving thousands of his own citizens dead, blind, or disfigured. Iraqi refugees tell us how forced confessions are obtained -- by torturing children while their parents are made to watch. International human rights groups have catalogued other methods used in the torture chambers of Iraq: electric shock, burning with hot irons, dripping acid on the skin, mutilation with electric drills, cutting out tongues, and rape. If this is not evil, then evil has no meaning.

Bush added a whole new moral dimension for going to war. It's in the same vein as when Bush attacked the Taliban for their horrible treatment of women. A liberated Iraq would bring the end to these abuses. They would be a free people with the ability to finally choose their own path. That kind of example would send positive shockwaves through the rest of the Islamic world.

It's interesting that Bush mentioned a bunch of human rights abuses, yet in their new report, the worse crime mentioned by Human Rights Watch was Iraq's "Arabization" policy where non-Arabs are replaced with Arabs in certain areas. The only mention of torture is a brief sentence in the report's introduction to the Iraq section. President Bush wants to publicize Saddam's atrocities more than HRW. Compassionate conservatism on the international front?

On the domestic front, other than the tax cuts there was very little in domestic conservative policy. If not for the war, the Right would be pounding the crap out of Bush for his proposals (subsidized hydrogen car development?). I didn't think compassionate conservatism was a synonym for big government conservatism, but on the domestic front that's what it is.

Under the Bush administration, the attack on Big Government is over. Stephen Goldsmith writes in the Wall Street Journal, "[C]ompassionate conservatism takes us back to the future by acknowledging the huge growth of the state while articulating a better way for government to help those whom prosperity has left behind." No longer should Republicans spout out about how the feds have no role in local education, how property rights are ignored when a government worker declares an area to be a wetland, or how the feds distort agriculture markets with a cacophony of subisides and quotas. The irony is that a Democrat, Bill Clinton declared the era of Big Government to be over, while a Republican accepts the huge growth of the federal government over the past 70 years.

What Goldsmith attempts with his article is to redefine conservatism. I'm sure malice isn't intended, but accepting the massive intrusion of the federal government into private lives changes the very meaning of conservatism. That's not the conservatism of William F. Buckley, Barry Goldwater, or Ronald Reagan. It appears Bush is not only trying to create a long-term Republican political majority, but through Goldsmith, he's trying to make the big government wing the dominant conservative strain. Is that John McCain smiling in the background?

But quarrels over domestic policy have to be put aside while the nation is threatened--at least for now. One day, limited government conservatives will remind President Bush that he was correct that "Free people will set the course of history."

"State of the Union Address by President George W. Bush"