Bush on liberty
I didn't really get the chance to see Bush's inaugural speech today (hopefully there will be excerpts on the news tonight, but I managed to read a little about his remarks here beforehand), but from the sound of it, I think Bush was definitely playing the JFK card when he said, "The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world." Of course, I wasn't alive in the 60's, but I do recall Kennedy saying similar things in regards to the Communist bloc. Isn't it interesting how presidents piggy-back off each other? Politics as usual.
The only difference here is that we are dealing with an entirely new enemy, one that is not organized to the same extent as the Soviet Union once was, which makes it harder to deal with directly. We don't have any direct line with our enemy the way we did during the Cold War. No embassies to spy on or hotlines to Osama. But then again, I don't really see Bush on the phone with Osama anyway, even if there was some kind of jack installed in his cave.
The thing here is, there's this whole debate on whether the Islamic world could even "handle" democracy to begin with. Just take a look at this. It's pretty clear to me that many of these conservative Muslims in the Islamic world that speak out against democracy are only doing so because they associate the word itself with the West, which they see as corrupt, secular, immoral, and worse of all, pro-Israeli. So it is not so much that democracy is incompatible with the Islamic religion (in fact it is quite the opposite), but that it is incompatible with current Arab prejudices. And how does one go about getting rid of those? Hmm...well, for a start, Rummy can step down as SecDef and apologize for Abu Ghraib. But, like I said, that's just a start.
The only difference here is that we are dealing with an entirely new enemy, one that is not organized to the same extent as the Soviet Union once was, which makes it harder to deal with directly. We don't have any direct line with our enemy the way we did during the Cold War. No embassies to spy on or hotlines to Osama. But then again, I don't really see Bush on the phone with Osama anyway, even if there was some kind of jack installed in his cave.
The thing here is, there's this whole debate on whether the Islamic world could even "handle" democracy to begin with. Just take a look at this. It's pretty clear to me that many of these conservative Muslims in the Islamic world that speak out against democracy are only doing so because they associate the word itself with the West, which they see as corrupt, secular, immoral, and worse of all, pro-Israeli. So it is not so much that democracy is incompatible with the Islamic religion (in fact it is quite the opposite), but that it is incompatible with current Arab prejudices. And how does one go about getting rid of those? Hmm...well, for a start, Rummy can step down as SecDef and apologize for Abu Ghraib. But, like I said, that's just a start.
posted by Remz Pokorny @ 4:24 PM
1 Comments:
At 9:41 AM,
Robert Taylor said…
I really wouldn't relate Bush's speech to Kennedy's. I mean come on, let's not kid ourselves. Kennedy was a democrat, not a republican. Kennedy instated affirmative action, not tried to get rid of it (like Bush). No, if I had to relate Bush's speech to that of any former president, I would say it sounded like that of President Monroe, who instated the Monroe Doctrine of 1823. It states roughly, "The steady aim of this nation, as of all enlightened nations should be to strive to bring ever nearer the day when there shall prevail throughout the world the peace of justice. ...Tyrants and oppressors have many times made a wilderness and called it peace. ...The peace of tyrannous terror, the peace of craven weakness, the peace of injustice, all these should be shunned as we shun unrighteous war. ... The right of freedom and the responsibility for the exercise of that right cannot be divorced."
Now just for reference, it was this doctrine that was elaborated by Theodore Roosevelt to stop the Spanish in Cuba, and along with the Kennan Corollary and the help of Senator McCarthy to go against the communists in Russia and other countries.
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