Our victory in Iraq will change the rules in a region still frozen in the Cold War era standards of strongmen who rule without regard to their people or their well being. When the history of the Middle East in this era is written, President Bush may well be known as George the Liberator.
I added to this idea here and here, noting a speech the President gave in Prague and coincidentally commenting just before the President gave a speech at the Heritage Foundation on the very subject. Our destruction of Saddam's Iraq made sense even under the old rules of realism by eliminating an enemy and creating an ally. But the Long War we are in is not just about Iraq. It is about the backwardness that allowed Saddam's Iraq to thrive and which allows jihadis to claim they represent Islam. This sickness must be defeated as the root cause of this latest jihad.
Ajami writes similarly:
George W. Bush was at the helm of the dominant imperial power when the world of Islam and of the Arabs was in the wind, played upon by ruinous temptations, and when the regimes in the saddle were ducking for cover, and the broad middle classes in the Arab world were in the grip of historical denial of what their radical children had wrought. His was the gift of moral and political clarity.
In America and elsewhere, those given reprieve by that clarity, and single-mindedness, have been taking this protection while complaining all the same of his zeal and solitude. In his stoic acceptance of the burdens after 9/11, we were offered a reminder of how nations shelter behind leaders willing to take on great challenges.
We scoffed, in polite, jaded company when George W. Bush spoke of the "axis of evil" several years back. The people he now journeys amidst didn't: It is precisely through those categories of good and evil that they describe their world, and their condition. Mr. Bush could not redeem the modern culture of the Arabs, and of Islam, but he held the line when it truly mattered. He gave them a chance to reclaim their world from zealots and enemies of order who would have otherwise run away with it.
Bush didn't create the environment that has put the Arab Moslem world in flux. Jihadi revivals have happened many times in the past as jihadis gain influence within the Islamic world and lash out at the non-Islamic neighbors. Thailand, Kashmir, Darfur, Gaza, Lebanon, and 9/11 are just examples of these border clashes. But the president has risen above tactics and used our power to try to edge these societies toward a more stable and secure future rather than treating the symptoms of jihadi violence with the objective of tamping down the jihad for another generation or two.
This may or may not be the last jihadi revival that lashes out without using nuclear weapons. So it would be in our interest to make sure this is the last jihadi revival.
His opponents misunderestimate Bush time and again. History may very well remember him as George the Liberator for his refusal to abandon the prospect of democracy for the Arab world even as self-styled "progressives" argue either that mere Arabs are unready for democracy and freedom or aren't worth the price to save from savage misrule that holds them in the seventh century servitude even as we embark on the 21st century.
Our President has boldly broken from the past emphasis on realism and stability that has given the Arab world nothing but poverty and misery (and resentment) amidst increasing prosperity; and instead offered the hope of a better future that includes freedom.
The audacity of hope that some Americans value so much these days is strangely limited in who may have hope and what they may hope for. They have a lot of nerve, that's for sure.
The Arab world has a revolution--if they can keep it. I remain audacious enough to hope that the Arab world will embrace this chance that America (and our allies who have fought with us, of course) under Bush's leadership, bought with the sacrifice of thousands of young Americans in uniform, has given their society for a better future. I think the Arab people deserves better than what they've endured. I guess that makes me a reactionary.
