So it’s clear from the speech: The next four years will be four more years of Christian jihad.
What’s most ironic about Bush’s speech is this: It’s as if suddenly all of the hundreds of tyrants and despots and dictators that the United States created, supported and sustained during the Cold War didn’t exist. As if the United States has always stood for freedom and democracy around the world, rather than tyranny. As if the government of South Vietnam, the Greek colonels, the Brazilian generals, the Central American death squads, the South African apartheid regime, Indonesia’s military thugs, General Zia of Pakistan, and the countless others who were warmly embraced as freedom-loving leaders by U.S. presidents from Truman to Clinton didn’t ever exist.
Now we have God on our side. Listen to W:
From the day of our Founding, we have proclaimed that every man and woman on this earth has rights, and dignity, and matchless value, because they bear the image of the Maker of Heaven and earth. Across the generations we have proclaimed the imperative of self-government, because no one is fit to be a master, and no one deserves to be a slave. Advancing these ideals is the mission that created our Nation. It is the honorable achievement of our fathers.
During the Cold War, millions deserved to be slaves, though, as long as their leaders were deemed to be sufficiently anti-communist.
Bush nodded in the direction of how that’s changed: “America's vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one.” Someone needs to ask him: Were they one before? Or is this new? Were they one when we supported scores of dictators? Is that all in the past?
I don’t think so. Bush outlined a crusade that will lead to many Iraqs:
We will persistently clarify the choice before every ruler and every nation: The moral choice between oppression, which is always wrong, and freedom, which is eternally right. America will not pretend that jailed dissidents prefer their chains, or that women welcome humiliation and servitude, or that any human being aspires to live at the mercy of bullies.
That’s not just rhetoric. Bush is clearly intent on “persistently” enforcing his Christian-soldier brand of freedom on anyone who opposes it. And let’s be clear: For Bush, freedom doesn’t mean the freedom to oppose the United States, or the freedom to have a socialist government, or the freedom to wage an insurrection against the oppressive rule of an Israeli occupation. What Bush means is economic freedom, the freedom of the marketplace, the freedom of privatization and free enterprise. That’s the only thing that will “persistently” be imposed by this president. And that goes for the United States too: an ownership society in which Social Security, Medicare and even health insurance is free-marketized, atomized and enterprised.
There are a lot of outlaw regimes, I guess, that will be “next” after Iraq.
The rulers of outlaw regimes can know that we still believe as Abraham Lincoln did: "Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves; and, under the rule of a just God, cannot long retain it."
And the “just God” will smite them. Strangely enough, most of these regimes are likely not only to be run by outlaws but sit on top of oil: Iran, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela. Coincidence? I think not.
