Why am I a supporter of the United States in general, and George W. Bush’s foreign policy in particular?
First, I admire the US’s system of government, which is unparalleled in the liberty and prosperity it has freed and empowered its citizens to achieve for themselves.
Second, because I admire the Bush Doctrine of pre-emptive involvement against those who have made it their goal to destroy civilization itself, and chosen terrorism — targetting innocents rather than military forces — as their chief tactic. It sweeps away the compromises and deals with the devil that were the unfortunate corollaries of nuclear standoff in the Cold War. But the best thing about the Bush Doctrine is that its chief tactic is liberation. In order to defeat Islamic terrorism in the long run, freedom and prosperity will have to take hold in the Middle East.
A very good (and long) essay by Norman Podhoretz outlines the strategic situation of the last few years:
As a “founding father” of neoconservatism who had broken ranks with the Left precisely because I was repelled by its “negative faith in America the ugly,” I naturally welcomed this new patriotic mood with open arms. In the years since making that break, I had been growing more and more impressed with the virtues of American society. I now saw that America was a country in which more liberty and more prosperity abounded than human beings had ever enjoyed in any other country or any other time. I now recognized that these blessings were also more widely shared than even the most visionary utopians had ever imagined possible. And I now understood that this was an immense achievement, entitling the United States of America to an honored place on the roster of the greatest civilizations the world had ever known.
…
the Bush Doctrine revealed itself as an extremely bold effort to break out of the institutional framework and the strategy constructed to fight the last war. But it was more: it also drew up a blueprint for a new structure and a new strategy to fight a different breed of enemy in a war that was just starting and that showed signs of stretching out into the future as far as the eye could see. Facing the realities of what now confronted us, Bush had come to the conclusion that few if any of the old instrumentalities were capable of defeating this new breed of enemy, and that the strategies of the past were equally helpless before this enemy’s way of waging war. To move into the future meant to substitute preemption for deterrence, and to rely on American military might rather than the “soft power” represented by the UN and the other relics of World War III. Indeed, not even the hard power of NATO—which had specifically been restricted by design to the European continent and whose deployment in other places could, and would be, obstructed by the French—was of much use in the world of the future.
In addition, he succinctly puts paid to the Big Lies of the Liberal catechism:
Among the lies through which Bush supposedly misled John Kerry and everyone else was that there might have been some connection between Saddam and al Qaeda. Now, even those of us who believed in such a connection were willing to admit that the evidence was not (yet) definitive; but this was a far cry from denying that there was any basis for it at all.10 So far a cry, that according to the reports that would be issued both by the Senate Intelligence Committee and the 9/11 Commission in the summer of 2004 (and contrary to how their conclusions would be interpreted in the media), al Qaeda did in fact have a cooperative, if informal, relationship with Iraqi agents working under Saddam.11
It was the same with another of the lies Bush allegedly told to justify the invasion of Iraq. In his State of the Union address of 2003, he said that “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.” Then an obscure retired diplomat named Joseph C. Wilson IV, who had earlier been sent to Niger by the CIA to check out this claim, earned his 15 minutes of fame—not to mention a best-selling book—by loudly denouncing this assertion as a lie. But it would in due course be established that every one of the notorious “sixteen words” Bush had uttered was true. This was the consensus of the Senate Intelligence Committee report, two separate British investigations, and a variety of European intelligence agencies, including even the French.12 Not only that, but it turned out that Wilson’s own report to the CIA had tended to confirm the suspicion that Saddam had been shopping for uranium in Africa, and not, as he went around declaring, to debunk it.13 The liar here, then, was not Bush but Wilson.
But of course the biggest lie Bush was charged with telling was that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction. On this issue, too, those of us who still suspected that the WMD remained hidden, or that they had been shipped to Syria, or both, were willing to admit that we might well be wrong. But how could Bush have been lying when every intelligence agency in every country in the world was convinced that Saddam maintained an arsenal of such weapons? And how could Bush have “hyped” or exaggerated the reports he was given by our own intelligence agencies when the director of the CIA himself described the case as a “slam dunk”?
To be sure, again according to the Senate Intelligence Committee report, the case, far from being a “slam dunk,” actually rested on weak or faulty evidence. Yet the committee itself “did not find any evidence that administration officials attempted to coerce, influence, or pressure analysts to change their judgments related to Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction capabilities.” The CIA, that is, did not tell the President what it thought he wanted to hear. It told him what it thought it knew; and what it told him, he had every reason to believe.