Where I Stand — Brian Greenspun: Bush forging history

Friday, Jan. 21, 2005 | 5:47 a.m.

Brian Greenspun is editor of the Las Vegas Sun.

WEEKEND EDITION

January 22 - 23, 2005

LET FREEDOM RING.

That is all I could think of this morning after listening to President George W. Bush's speech following his Inauguration in Washington, D.C.

I am writing this on Thursday because I know that with the intervening days comes the sober reflection that always follows such speeches and the picking apart, deservedly so or not, that inevitably follows.

I wanted my thoughts on the matter to be fresh, contemporaneous and free of too much discernment. That's the way most people, here and around the world, will hear our president's words. So, am I excited? You bet. I heard from President Bush the kind of words that practically every president who preceded him would love to have spoken. Many, in their own measured ways, tried to say as much during their administrations but, I suppose, were constrained by the realities on the ground from going so boldly where none had dared to go before.

Abraham Lincoln had to deal with a nation being torn asunder by the morality versus reality of slavery. He managed, as we all know, to choose the right path but with the knowledge that our nation might not survive the price America had to pay. Thoughts of fixing the world at that time were well beyond his or anyone else's thought processes. Franklin Delano Roosevelt boldly made the leap toward world war, but only after the United States was attacked and, even then, there were loud voices in this country urging restraint.

There was no thought given to ridding the rest of the world of its evil leadership -- all the evil reposed in Adolf Hitler -- and the Nazi madman was all anyone could even dream of handling in those days. Fast forward to President John F. Kennedy and the Cuban missile crisis, President Lyndon Johnson and Vietnam, President Richard Nixon and the huge idea of flying to China, and the theme of those presidencies was how to deal with the madness on their plates at that time. Fixing the rest of the world would just have to wait.

That doesn't mean they didn't want to do it but, rather, that they couldn't conceive of our capacity to get it done. Presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan had their hands full of the Russian bear to the extent that even the thought of moving beyond the Iron Curtain to rid the rest of the world of its tyrants was folly and wishful thinking. Dealing with the Soviet Union was more than any superpower could even fathom. And once Communism fell and the fragmented pieces of the world started to rub against one another, creating a friction not yet fully understood, it was all Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton could do to right our own ship in the midst of all the turmoil.

Freeing the world from tyranny would just have to wait awhile until we found out who was on what side if, indeed, there were any sides left but our own. As President Bush alluded to this past week, the United States is the world's only superpower and, as such, we have a responsibility and a vital self-interest in making sure that people the world over are rescued from oppression and allowed to manifest their own destiny as free members of this human race.

He merged a national security interest with a natural human desire and came up with the new foreign policy of the United States of America. "There is only one force of history that can break the reign of hatred and resentment and expose the pretensions of tyrants and reward the hopes of the decent and tolerant and that is the force of human freedom."

Those are powerful words and, more importantly, they express the power of the ideas that created this country over 200 years ago when our forefathers were the oppressed, the enslaved and the powerless. What has changed in the last few years that allows our president to confidently go where those before him felt constrained to travel?

In my view, it is the same event that has changed forever the way America looks at itself and the rest of the world. Sept. 11, 2001, marked the beginning of a brand new world in which Americans realized that people beyond our shores and, yes, even within our borders hate who, what and where we are. So much so that they are willing to kill themselves in order to kill us.

We all awoke that day to a world in which the old adage "kill or be killed" rang true for the very first time on our soil. And we live with the thought daily that it can -- and likely will -- happen again and again. That is why we are in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. That is why we are making some of the right kind of noises toward the tyrants in Iran and North Korea who have made the mistake of using the "N" word when talking about mass destruction. That is why our president is even trying to figure out how to play tough with his buddies in Saudi Arabia.

It is no longer about them, over there, it is about us. Right here in the good old U.S. of A. For the first time in our history, our national security has meshed with our national aspirations. Freedom is not only the responsible treatment for the human condition, it also is the antidote to oppressive leadership which would do its worst to America and her friends.

I am sure there was more to the speech -- like an agenda for the domestic needs of this country -- but I am not certain it made the impact the president would have wanted. That's only because the newly espoused Bush Doctrine was so encompassing, so powerful and so meaningful that other, smaller ideas just pale by comparison.

So there you have it. It is the kind of speech I believe every American should want to hear and every president would want to make. Now comes the difficult part. The president has to put his ideas into action. Now we have to start talking about armed forces, national treasury, nation building, adventurism and a whole host of reasons why George Bush's predecessors did not take the path he has just blazed.

There will be claims of naivete, demands for more realism and a few "who is he kiddings" coming from those whose job it is to challenge power and be more critical in our society. But, for now, for every American who wants to do the right thing and needs to know that our leaders will do the right thing, it was a speech for the history books.

With some luck and a determined America, we will be living that history for a long time.

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