Clear-thinking British liberal Oliver Kamm makes "the liberal case for returning Bush to the White House."
Senator Kerry’s line of attack against the Administration’s foreign policy is misconceived. Sceptical of the malleability of the international order, it echoes the traditional conservative incantation against “nation-building”. But America is not trying to build nations, which take generations to evolve. It has the more limited aim of replacing failed states and tyrannies with institutional arrangements that protect people from capricious rule and violence.Posted by Alan at July 13, 2004 06:20 AMNo more facile remark has been uttered about the Iraq war than John Kerry’s lament that it diverted the focus of the War on Terror. Overthrowing Baathist totalitarianism was a humanitarian cause, but it also buttressed Western security. Recent academic research suggests that — contrary to numerous confident episcopal assertions — the “root cause” of terrorism is not poverty but political repression. Societies where dissent is confined to religious absolutism are incubators of violent anti-Western fanaticism.
Democrats had the chance to avoid the type of embittered and personalised partisanship that characterised Republican attacks on President Clinton’s Kosovo intervention. They could have offered a thoughtful critique of the flawed execution of Bush’s foreign policy. Instead Kerry ululates about the President’s perfidy in exaggerating Saddam’s military threat. But European liberals should have scant reason to wish for this obscurantist reactionary Democrat in the White House.