While America should support the growth of freedom across the world, President Bush was dead wrong when he said, in his inaugural address, that “the survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands”.
America’s security demands only the willingness to act against any threat to the United States with an immediate, unilateral and ruthless military response. It means ceasing to evade the fact that countries harboring terrorists have already declared war on the United States. It requires refusing to place America’s national security at the mercy of other nations’ approval, and holding America’s defense above any concern for civilian casualties.
From Cox and Forkum
A real defense against terrorism would have named the enemy clearly and unequivocally: militant Islam. It would have involved raining massive destruction on the prime state sponsor of Islamist terror–Iran–then announcing: “Any further threats and we’ll do it again,” leaving the enemy to deal with the wreckage it had brought on itself.
But Mr. Bush is too much of an altruist to support such an unapologetically self-interested policy–which is why, for him, victory against terrorism can come only in some distant future.
Instead, he has allowed the national security of the United States to be held hostage to the success of a vote in Iraq. Small wonder that so many Arab nations are interested in making Iraq a quagmire for us: Bush’s policies have made it possible for them to weaken America in a way they never could have achieved on their own.
Mr. Bush stated that “the exercise of rights is ennobled by service, and mercy, and a heart for the weak. Liberty for all does not mean independence from one another.” But that is exactly what liberty does mean. Freedom means that people’s lives are not the property of others and that they have a right to live for their own sake, without being slaves to the needs of the race, the nation or the community. If Mr. Bush is asking Americans to fight and die to bring welfare statism to the Arab world, they should stay home.
