Itinerary Michael Ubaldi, May 5, 2004.
I'm home from running a local Republican board meeting (read: leading with the irreplaceable help of my officers) and don't particularly feel like the type-type after an evening of jaw-jaw and note-note. Glenn Reynolds, like a legal man would and should, has enumerated America's reasons for liberating Iraq. The most important objective, I believe — derided these days as "Wilsonian," as if to say "unrealistic" — is the foundation of a free society. Just think, Glenn (and Ed Cone, to whom Glenn is responding): the Japanese have, as Asia's first democracy, come to stand alongside the United States in the effort to bring more countries into the fold of self-government. Once an enemy, now an ally, helping the Iraqis (and likely the Afghans) as America helped them. To answer Ed's point about "bad guys": the less dictatorships America tolerates in power, the less dictatorships we are forced to deal with. National security could not be better served by this example — yet the success of Japan is unquestionable only in hindsight. Creating a free Iraq is painfully difficult, as any democratization has been and will ever be. No such thing as a perfect run. The good nature of man is never a bad investment. It's worth America's promise. This happens to tie into Abu Ghraib, about which I have a final remark (so much for no type-type). Abu Ghraib is not about a failure of America or democracy. Through the travesty and tragedy, we see strength in our way of life. And we demonstrate it, humbly, to the rest of the world. Self-governance cannot be expected to prevent all of the worst of what humanity commits; it was never intended to do that, to change what men are and what they are sadly capable of. Self-governance was meant to establish a common good not possible without freedom — the freedom to do what we ought. When honesty, loyalty, honor, courage, fairness and justice are rewarded, acts of evil — the domination and consumption of the weak — carry little value, bringing only condemnation and punishment. In tyranny, these idiots who hurt their prisoners would gain stature. But they're Americans, and will pay dearly like any other criminals; and the "new nation, conceived in Liberty," will be preserved. See more: The War for FreedomThe War for Freedom |
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