Be sure to read Paul Kengor's essay at National Review Online on the importance of what George W. Bush has begun in bringing the hope of democracy to the tyrannical Islamic regimes of Iraq and Afghanistan.
If such countries become 21st-century democracies, historians will struggle to explain how impossible democracy's prospects once seemed in these nations, and thus how boundless and rare was Bush's optimism. His assessment may have been more farfetched than Ronald Reagan's predictions on the end of Communism in the early 1980s, which Bush referred to in this speech. Speaking specifically of Reagan's June 1982 Westminister Address, as well as Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points and Franklin Delano Roosevelt's Four Freedoms, Bush concluded: "The advance of freedom is the calling of our time; it is the calling of our country.... We [Americans] believe that liberty is the design of nature; we believe that liberty is the direction of history.... [T]his is, above all, the age of liberty."Kengor also writes (after John Lewis Gaddis) ---as I, too, often remind my so-called liberal friends (who are nothing but isolationists now) that
by seeking to spread democracy everywhere, Bush aimed to finish the job Woodrow Wilson started a century earlier. "The world," writes Gaddis, "quite literally, must be made safe for democracy, even those parts of it, like the Middle East, that have so far resisted that tendency." (This was the kind of thing that liberals once championed, before blind rage at Bush precluded their better angels.)Please remember what is at stake, folks. Remember that a vote for John Kerry is a vote for those who hate America.