Critics of the president’s inaugural speech are, I think, misunderstanding it. It’s not a program; it’s not a New Year’s Resolution that will revolutionize America’s relationship with every major country. It was a thematic speech. That’s all. It’s an attempt to provide the president’s own melody to the chorus of his administration. A brief look at the Bush administration’s first four years does not reveal naive utopianism with regard to unfree countries. Fareed Zakaria usefully points this out:
The president said in his speech to the world’s democrats, ‘When you stand for your liberty, we will stand with you.’ But when democratic Taiwan stood up to communist China last year, Bush publicly admonished it, siding with Beijing. When brave dissidents in Saudi Arabia were jailed for proposing the possibility of a constitutional monarchy in that country, the administration barely mentioned it. Crown Prince Abdullah, who rules one of the eight most repressive countries in the world (according to Freedom House), is one of a handful of leaders to have been invited to the president’s ranch in Crawford, Texas. (The elected leaders of, say, India, France, Turkey and Indonesia have never been accorded this courtesy.) The president has met with and given aid to Islam Karimov, the dictator of Uzbekistan, who presides over one of the nastiest regimes in the world today, far more repressive than Iran’s, to take just one example.
And grown-ups – even idealistic grown-ups – know this is inevitable. The problem with Bush is not his ideals. It’s his ability to put those ideals into practice. In the series of screw-ups that was the Iraq war, Bush would have done better to think less about the idea of liberty and more about the nuts and bolts of how to build a nation. Just one.
BLOGGING FOR FREEDOM: A blog that keeps up with bloggers in unfree countries. Check it out.
WHATEVER, HE SMILED: When a sister loses her brother to AIDS, a world cracks. And now, a blog can express the grief and peer forward in hope. Hang in there, Lizzie. Keep the faith. Do you know Leonard Cohen’s song, “The Anthem”? It helped me get through my own AIDS deaths.
The Dish 