The Washington Times

This is the second year I’ve attended the Munich Conference on Security Policy, a venerable gathering of defense ministers, generals, eminences and (my role) assorted hangers-on dedicated to two days’ of jawboning the state of trans-Atlantic relations and international security. The first time you do something, it’s all new; the second time, you’ve got a baseline against which to be surprised. This one was full of surprises.

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The Washington Times

That President Bush’s second inaugural address is still being parsed and argued over is itself an indication of the consequence sober listeners attributed to it at the time. Nevertheless, there was a passage in the “Freedom Speech” that hasn’t received much attention and probably deserves more, especially in light of the most memorable moment of Mr. Bush’s State of the Union speech – the extended embrace between Janet Norwood, mother of slain Marine Sgt. Robert Norwood, and Safia Taleb al-Suhail, whom the president described as “one of Iraq’s leading democracy and human rights advocates” and whose father was killed by Saddam Hussein.

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The Washington Times

No, I’m not really expecting apologies from the people who told us we needed to postpone the elections in Iraq. But those counseling delay were clearly wrong.

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The Washington Times

It’s a little odd that the most vehement support for President Bush’s proposition that democracy is the best cure for terrorism came from the curling lips of Mr. Abu Musab Zarqawi.

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The Washington Times

Let’s see, how did that Elisabeth Kubler-Ross ditty go? Ah yes, “anger, denial, bargaining, depression, acceptance.” This has resonance not merely in terms of coping with the prospect of dying, but also with regard to coping with George W. Bush. In what I suppose is progress, his critics seem to be making the passage from “anger” into “denial.” His second inaugural address last week was intellectually the richest such speech since Lincoln’s second, to which it bears comparison. Lincoln wrote his own, of course, and that will always be taken into consideration. On the other hand, it is the essence of Mr. Bush’s claim that the call of freedom is something everyone yearns for and can hear – and something more and more people recognize that everyone yearns for and can hear (the latter being the neglected critical point).

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The Washington Times

During the remarkable round of interviews he gave to major newspapers last week, President Bush spoke often of his commitment to the spread of democracy, sometimes in startling terms. As he told the Wall Street Journal in an aside after the end of the formal interview, “I understand there are many who say ‘Bush is wrong.’ I assume I’m right. It’s exciting to be part of stimulating a debate of such significance. It really is the philosophical argument of the age.” I don’t know which is the more remarkable: An American president who thinks in terms of “the philosophical argument of the age.” Or that, well, yes, Mr. Bush is right, the question of the spread of democracy really is the philosophical argument of the age.

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The Washington Times

Would-be tyrants and freedom fighters alike take note: The essence of democracy is not simply an election. It’s an election held in the expectation that there will be a subsequent election.

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The Washington Times

Have you noticed that the possibility of the reinstatement of the draft, so much a matter of worried if not fevered discussion and speculation a couple of months ago, seems to have disappeared? That’s about all the evidence anyone should need to see just how phony the issue was in the first place.

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The Washington Times

New Republic editor Peter Beinart has written an essay that is causing a stir among Democrats busy rethinking policy and political strategy. In “A Fighting Faith” in the Dec. 13 edition, he argues that Democrats need to reclaim for liberalism the tough-mindedness on foreign affairs that characterized the emergence of liberal anti-communism in the late 1940s and ’50s. Without a clear sense of purpose and message in defense of America updated for the age of mass terror and “totalitarian Islam,” Democrats will find their electoral appeal foundering for lack of “moral purpose.”

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The Washington Times

When George W. Bush presented the Presidential Medal of Freedom earlier this month to three former officials intimately involved in his Iraq policy, the news was greeted by his political opponents with all the suave grace characteristic of Howard Dean and MoveOn.org. One could almost be forgiven for thinking the awards had been bestowed upon the three as part of a clever Karl Rove plot to keep the administration’s opponents in a permanent state of self-discrediting hyperventilation. On the other hand, Mr. Bush would probably provoke the same state of excitation merely by reading the first three names in the DC phone book.

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