The Bush Doctrine
Monday, September 19th, 2005 10:39 pm by NealThe Bush Doctrine is Mark Steyn’s response to a National Review request to comment on the Bush policy in the Middle East on the fourth anniversary of 9/11. This is a few days old, but is still well worth a read. Some highlights:
By contrast, since the end of the Second World War, the US has gone to almost perverse lengths not to promote American ideas of liberty and self-government. Americans don’t have an imperialist bone in their bodies, so instead they created transnational institutions – the UN and its variously malign progeny – explicitly structured to enable groupings of America’s weak rivals to combine into a kind of pseudo-superpower. What benefit has this been?
…
Fifty million Muslims living in freedom is a great start to the Bush Doctrine. What worries me is that it doesn’t seem directly relevant enough to the American people to hold their interest. I’m not speaking of the decayed left, but of those on the right who support the warlike aspects of the war but think the nation-building stuff is wimpsville – as if, in the Second World War, we’d stopped to reconstruct the Solomon Islands before toppling Hitler and Tojo. They’re wrong. This “war†is really one manifestation of a broader civilisational struggle, and it’s the strategy for that that will prove decisive.
And that’s from just the first half! As always, Steyn’s insight is well worth the investment.