More Steyn on Bush.

Mark Steyn again, from the same article below:

As we “neo-imperialists” quickly learned, there are simply no takers for imperialism in America. This isn’t merely a leftish revulsion. Many on the right also quickly detached themselves from the Bush Doctrine. George Will pointed out that there was no Madison or Hamilton in Iraq. True. But you could say the same for Canada. If the caliber of Madison is a necessary condition for liberty, then almost everywhere on the planet would still be in chains. Had the British waited for an Indian Madison or Hamilton to show up, then the subcontinent would look much like the Middle East does now — a toxic patchwork of decadent sultanates and psychotic dictatorships. But they didn’t wait: They got to work. Sometimes the tough assignments fall on your watch. That was the challenge Bush accepted after 9/11.

To his British hosts at Whitehall Palace in London in 2003, he put it this way: “We must shake off decades of failed policy in the Middle East. Your nation and mine, in the past, have been willing to make a bargain, to tolerate oppression for the sake of stability. . . . Yet this bargain did not bring stability or make us safe. It merely bought time, while problems festered and ideologies of violence took hold. . . . No longer should we think tyranny is benign because it is temporarily convenient. Tyranny is never benign to its victims, and our great democracies should oppose tyranny wherever it is found.”

There is both realpolitik and idealpolitik in there. The West’s unreal “realism” in the Middle East brought us the House of Saud, the Baathists, Arafat, the ayatollahs . . . and ultimately al-Qaeda, 9/11, and Wahhabi subversion around the planet. There’s nothing more pitiful than naïve cynicism: To the old CIA line that he may be a sonofabitch but he’s our sonofabitch, the best response is that he may be our sonofabitch but in the end he’s a sonofabitch, as we should have learned by now in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Egypt, and elsewhere.

Words matter.

To repudiate half a century of American policy in the Middle East is easier said than done. Whether or not the Bush Doctrine would work in Araby, by the second term it was clear it wasn’t working in Washington. Transferred to State, Condi Rice defaulted to Scowcroftian unrealism, and the president himself, while he talked about staying on offense, gave the impression that his eponymous doctrine had been put at the back of the icebox and that the war (as fewer Americans were inclined to see it) had dwindled down into a couple of messy, defensive, thankless, semi-colonial policing operations. The “war on terror” concept will die with his administration: Neither Barack Obama nor the European leaders he finds congenial think it a useful model. But in Iraq, where Saddam’s goons shoveled children into mass graves, and in Afghanistan, where women were prevented by law from feeling sunlight on their faces, 50 million Muslims live better lives because of George W. Bush.