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It would be very nice if this is true:



What Bush Expects (washingtonpost.com)



On April 4, George Bush gave a lecture to the Middle East in which he (already famously) said that he expected results. Given the results to date, it is tempting to look upon the president's demand as ill conceived and his nascent initiative as a failure. But the results Bush really expected were not exactly those he called for. ...



... On the day that Bush gave his speech, the smart betting in the White House was that (1) Arafat would not suddenly develop honesty and rationality; (2) the Palestinians would probably not throw the old recidivist killer overboard in favor of someone the Israelis could do business with; (3) far from ending the bombings, the new American initiative would almost certainly provoke fresh outrages; (4) the Arab regimes would, again, dis us.



The point of Bush's speech was not to deny these realities but to expose them. This government is doing something large and important that the preceding two administrations failed to do: It is defining the new American position in the new world. This world's essential fact is the revivification of the 19th-century cultural and territorial conflicts previously frozen in the hundred years' war of giants between democracy and totalitarianism. On a running basis, but as a matter of fundamental philosophy, the Bush White House is demonstrating an understanding of this truth, and an understanding of the corollary truth that America must make clear its position in this world.



The position is this: The United States is for democracy and order, not necessarily always in that order. It is against threats to this of any sort. It is against all forms of fascism, including Islamic. It is against those who would seek to destroy democratic nations or to drive the United States from its position in the world as the paramount protector of democracy. It regards those who are friendly to these aims as friends and those who are inimical to them as enemies.



At some point in the next year or so, the United States will go to war against Iraq. It will do so with friends, or alone. It will do so with a clear and cold-eyed knowledge of where it stands and who stands with it, and that understanding will have begun with Bush's speech of April 4 and with his "failed" expectations.



Oh -- and the United States will win.

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