Sunny Reaganite message greets a freed people

The Australian ^ | February 02, 2005 | JANET ALBRECHTSEN

[Eurotwit]

LAST year Peter Robinson, a former speechwriter to Ronald Reagan, recounted a conversation in 1977 between Reagan and Richard Allen, who would become Reagan's first national security adviser. Reagan asked if Allen would like to hear his theory of the Cold War.

"Some people think I'm simplistic," Reagan said, "but there's a difference between being simplistic and being simple. My theory of the Cold War is that we win and they lose. What do you think about that?"

"I was flabbergasted," Allen recalled later. "I'd worked for Nixon and Goldwater and many others, and I'd heard a lot about ... detente and the need to 'manage the Cold War', but never did I hear a leading politician put the goal so starkly."

If Reagan ushered in "Morning in America" (his 1984 campaign theme) with an optimism that was to defeat the Soviet empire, then perhaps, just perhaps, George W. Bush and his coalition partners have ushered in morning in Iraq, offering Iraqis an optimism that will allow them too to succeed.

Of course, it is too early to declare success. But it is also too early to cry defeat. Quiet optimism ought to be the order of the day. Iraqis stared down violence, casting their votes in numbers that should put the complacent West to shame. Allow us a moment to marvel at their mettle.

Perhaps, just perhaps, Bush - and John Howard - understand the big picture here in a way that is beyond the foreign policy experts, the journalists and the reflexive anti-US commentators. Presidents and prime ministers are paid to look for the big picture, for the history-making change. Others, especially journalists, deal in today's minutiae, not the macro movements. They analyse and agonise over tomorrow's fish wrappings. Political leaders must deal with history.

And history suggests that the simple ideas are usually the most powerful. So just as Reagan thought of the Cold War in terms ("we win, they lose") utterly beyond the foreign policy intelligentsia - and was proved right - perhaps Bush will be hailed for a profoundly simple, but profound insight. Not only does everybody want liberty, but liberty is ultimately good for everyone. And even better, it's an idea that has actually worked in the past. Unlike, say, Marxism.

Of course, saying Bush could be right and that only time will tell only provokes more paroxysms of intellectual outrage. "How can you trust the future of the world to a hick dunderhead from Texas on the off chance he is right?" the critics wail. Then follows the usual tirade about how dumb Bush is (and, by implication, how smart his critics are). As if the intensity of their insults by itself proves them right.

What his critics conveniently ignore, though, is that to the extent they have a plan at all (as opposed to just being anti-Bush) it hasn't worked in the past and would almost certainly fail now.

Leaving the Islamic extremists alone - the past policy of choice for the intelligentsia - led to September 11 and Bali. Withdrawing from Iraq now and leaving the brave majority of pro-democracy Iraqis to their fate - apparently the present prescription of the anti-Bush team -- seems equally disastrous. And if there is another solution, it hasn't yet been aired, at least in Australia. All one hears is that Bush, like Reagan, isn't smart enough to be trusted.

For some critics, their wishes are father to their thoughts. The Australian Financial Review's Geoffrey Barker warned us on Monday that Sunday's Iraq election did not mark a turning point, was not a historic moment, or a vital step towards peace and democracy. Barker and his colleagues have missed the news. The January 30 poll proved the power of the simple idea that is democracy. As it turned out, the Iraqi people failed to listen to Western doom merchants and snubbed also the notion, spread by their own bleak house mob, that democracy was anti-Islamic.

Last Sunday's Iraq election was a credibility moment for the US President, confirming that Iraqis agree with his simple idea - that liberty and democracy are the most powerful engines for good that nations have yet devised.

And while the "misunderestimated" Bush understood the big picture - that Iraqis wanted freedom and would courageously move to grab it - the ABC's AM program was interviewing the mother of the Australian serviceman, Paul Pardoel, killed when his plane was shot down in Iraq. It was another case of concentrating on the cost of the war, not its rewards. You could almost hear the ABC gloat as the grief-stricken mother, not surprisingly, denounced Bush and the war. The mother is entitled to her anger and her views - but unfortunately this is the micro story. The bigger story is that democracy took its first, admittedly shaky and uncertain, steps in Iraq this week.

As the so-called intellectuals are parsing trivia, carping, analysing and bemoaning, you can almost hear Reagan applaud. "Attaboy, George. Stick with the simple things, son. Democracy ain't perfect but it sure beats all the other ideas."

[dead]

Great article. Not usually to be expected from an Aussie journalist, the majority of whom seem to be as droolingly leftist and short-sighted as our own.

Obviously, Janet Albrechtsen is a misfit amongst her peers. Good for her.

[Question_Assumptions]

The reasons why liberals like the "cut and run" approach is that they think it worked in Vietnam. They think it worked because they conveniently ignore all of the people murdered by the North Vietnamese when they took over, the boat person exodus, and the Stalinist Hell tht the Vietnamese people have had to ignore while non-Marxist Asian countries like South Korea, Japan, Singapore, and even Thailand have boomed. They also ignore the results of their drive to stop support for the right-wing military government in Cambodia and let the Khmer Rouge win. Because they "meant well", liberals simply wash their hands of all of the blood that they cause.

[hermgem]

As clear and simplistic as it will ever get.
Will Senator Kennedy retract? Don't bet on it. He'll fixate on another micro event.

[milagro]

Add to that the number of people who perished because the "peace at any price" voices in England and America during the early and mid 30's prevailed over the stern warning voice of Winston Churchill. If England and its European allies had stopped Hitler during his Anschluss just think how many thousands would NOT have died! But these "no war" sentimentalists could not handle the grim reality Churchill understood--and they have never been held accountable for the cost in human lives their sentimentality caused.

Would LOVE to have a bumper sticker that says: "There is NO PEACE in appeasement!"