Whatever you believe about the war against the terrorists or the occupation and liberation of Iraq, that belief ought to be based on a system of morality, and not merely on partisan reaction. That is to say, we must each make value judgements about what is right and wrong for ourselves and our society. Those who are indifferent to the great issues of our times are beneath contempt because they are disengaged from their obligations as citizens. Such people are worms' food before their time.
When we make and act upon these judgements, they are presumably the outward expression of our own moral standards. In the public sphere, one such manifestation is ideology. And ideologies are made to compete. I say they are open to an objective scale of value wherein this system is to be held above that one. Those who cannot grasp the importance of making distinctions between competing value systems are moral relativists ---a very dirty term. Such people are cowards. They do not participate in politics, they do not educate themselves about the world around them, and they say (because they really don't think) that it is "mean" and "bigoted" to hold certain systems above others. But this is what must be done.
Now, in addition to a lot of other reasons (paranoiac at worst and superficial at best), many people hate President Bush because they believe he is a simple-minded warmonger who can only talk in terms of black and white. The people who hate him want only a world in shades of grey. They want no distinctions, no competeing ideologies, and no value judgements. And why should they? They have no stake in the body politic but their own convenience. They do not have the knowledge or the analytical ability to understand the bases and origins of their own society's structure. In short, they do not appreciate the rights and privileges before them because they did not work for them. Consequently, they cannot know what their absence would entail.
Thus, it cannot be a surprise that those who hate the President for waging a war against terrorists and tyrants are ignorant of what it is that he is trying to accomplish. Maybe the fault is his, but what use is communicating the importance of such an object to those who hate him because he "lied" about weapons of mass destruction? What difference does it make trying to convince those who would fault him and his Administration for somehow not preventing the awful events of 11 September 2001 when they refuse to hold his predecessor responsible for every other act of terrorism leading up to that day? Such people are partisans who are unwilling to support the hard decisions that will make us safer. They are moral cowards who don't want to put anything above another.
But what will make us safer? That is the essential question behind the President's vision. And the answer is that we must act to destroy the ideology of radical Islam. It is a diseased system that oppresses its own people and reduces them to ignorance and poverty that Leftists and liberals can only struggle to imagine. Islam on the whole must be secularized because wherever it exists, there are those who would use it to terrorize the world. And it is the radical parts of Islam above all that must be burned out and crushed. We must act as Sherman did and make war (and, by extension, slavery) so terrible and so painful that Islamofascism may never rise again.
I would have thought before these wars against terrorists and tyrants began that the reason why Islam must be changed is self-evident. But so many people throughout the West are so blind to the necessity that it stands to be said again and again: if we do not change Islam at its roots, it will only metastasize into something that we cannot stop. It will threaten the very existence of mankind. If that strikes some as an exaggeration, they should look to where Islam holds sway and ask themselves how those societies function. By and large, they do not. Islam teaches the mistreatment of women and girls. Unless, of course, you think it's normal to make women cover themselves from head to toe and deprive them of their liberties and the sanctity of their own minds. And you won't have a problem with Islam so long as you submit your will to that of imams and mullahs who reject modernity in all of its excellence and potential. There's no First Amendment in Saudi Arabia, friend. There's no Constitution at all. There's only an oppressed underclass of unemployed and angry young men all over the Muslim world. Whatever system it is that they have, it isn't making them happy or be fulfilled.
Thus, people of conscience must be in the business of making value judgements. Westerners must stand up and say that our system is superior to radical Islam. We must support our President and our troops when they act to liberate those who cannot liberate themselves. We must support and extol our system when it stands for the essential dignity of mankind and for the rights of individuals.
And when we do not, we betray the genius of our society and the promise of our ancestors. We become unhinged and rootless. And, at that point, we will find ourselves on our knees.