"The best hope for peace in our world is..."

This excerpt from today's inaugural address is an intriguing summary of the philosophical motivation behind the president's prosecution of the War on Terror:

We are led, by events and common sense, to one conclusion: 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.

Among other things, this helps to shed light on why Bush decided to deal with Iraq now, rather than wait for an imminent threat. If what Bush says above is true, then the stability of the Middle East is an essential prerequisite to the safety and stability of the U.S.

Long experience has shown that stability in the Middle East can not be achieved through the propping up of authoritarian rulers -- in fact, it can be argued that such policies have contributed to the unrest and religious extremism that have now boiled over into the rest of the world. Essential transformation is necessary -- political and cultural. The president is betting the farm on the proposition that such transformation is possible.

From a strategic point of view, Iraq was a good place to start -- partly because of the festering boil of a problem that Saddam was, but also because Iraq borders two of the other bad boys, Iran and Syria. Our game plan seems to be to gain a decisive victory -- first militarily, then politically and culturally -- and then to encourage neighboring countries to reform themselves. If they decline to play ball... well, we're already deployed on their border, and it would be relatively easy to use Iraq as a base for operations against them (as Iran no doubt knows by now).

History will judge the wisdom of what President Bush has undertaken. Given what's at stake, I admire his determination to press on in the face of worldwide opposition that would have withered a lesser man.


UPDATE: Saul Singer in the Jerusalem Post:

In laying down his revolutionary gauntlet, Bush must know that he will be derided as a hypocrite and a reckless dreamer. No American can be against the ideal of spreading democracy, but to stake national security on it, that's another matter. In front of the Capitol on Thursday, Bush called not merely for a remaking of other nations' foreign policy, but that of his United States.

We cannot know now whether Bush will succeed in turning his own ship of state onto the course that he has charted, much less whether allied ships will grudgingly follow or continue to drag in an almost opposite direction. We do know that he has chosen an audacious strategy of leadership, one based, ironically, on what his father derided as the "vision thing."

Second term presidents are traditionally expected to coast, anxious not to jeopardize their place in history. Not so, apparently, George W. Bush. Hold on to your hats, this may be the most ambitious second-term – or any term – presidency ever.

UPDATE: In my remark regarding the ease with which the US could stage operations against Iran & co. from Iraq, I linked to an article in which the Pentagon denied claims by journalist Seymour Hersh that we already have covert ops teams working inside Iran. Hersh hasn't really come up on my radar in the past, so I'm not very familiar with his track record, but many others are quite familiar with him. Michael Ledeen, who is practically obsessed with seeing regime change occur in Iran, spared no effort in demolishing Hersh's arguments. It's possible that the covert-ops information was deliberately leaked to Hersh by the Pentagon in an ongoing effort to rattle Iran's cage (which is also how many are seeing VP Cheney's remarks on Thursday that Israel might take unilateral action against Iran's nuclear program).