Free Republic

Democracies & double standards Posted: February 23, 2005 1:00 a.m. Eastern © 2005 Creators Syndicate, Inc. "Magnanimity in politics is not seldom the truest wisdom; and a great empire and little minds go ill together," Edmund Burke admonished the haughty rulers of the British Empire of his time. Our American empire is suffering from a similar want of wisdom and plenitude of the hubris that cost George III his 13 colonies. Consider how this generation of politicians is undoing the great work of Ronald Reagan. When Reagan took office in 1981, the Soviet Union of the aging autocrat Leonid Brezhnev...

With the failure to find stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction and the continuing difficulties in post-Saddam Hussein Iraq, it's reasonable to ask: Has a death blow been delivered to the idea of military preemption and, more broadly, to the idea of preventive wars? Has our experience in Iraq effectively removed from play a policy option that many here and abroad believed was the cornerstone of the Bush administration's new strategic doctrine? For the foreseeable future, the Iraq war and its aftermath cannot help but put a hitch in the step of any president contemplating similar action. People can continue...

Vanity: An Open Message to the Republican Party Cheerleaders on this Forum...