spacer
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
 

Home

Articles

Briefs

Photography

Personal Asides

About

spacer
gipoco.com is neither affiliated with the authors of this page nor responsible for its contents. This is a safe-cache copy of the original web site.