Jan. 21, 4:05 p.m.: Another four years

The president outlines some lofty goals that are likely to mean more military misadventures.

By: Hank Kalet
   
   OK. As Jon Stewart pointed out on last nights "The Daily Show," we’ve officially reached the midpoint of the Bush presidency. And if Thursday’s festivities were any indication, we are about to face another long four years.
   President George W. Bush used his inaugural address yesterday to set some lofty goals, perhaps looking well into the future when his legacy will be set in stone.
   But are the goals realistic or even desirable? The president, as Mr. Stewart pointed out, used the word "freedom" 27 times in his 21-minute speech and "liberty" another 15 times. That’s a lot of cliches for such a short address. The speech, of course, was consistent with the president’s approach to public speaking during his tenure in office. He has made it a habit to find that one theme and hammer it home, understanding, perhaps, that by doing so he can control the way in which his speech plays out in the world of soundbites. It would be difficult not to run a clip of him mouthing "freedom" and "liberty," givent he structure of the speech.
   In any case, there are questions about what this speech actually portends for the future. An analysis piece in The Washington Post gets at these questions pretty simply:
   "If taken at face value, Bush’s words would imply nearly limitless obligations to confront all manner of autocrats around the planet, even in cases in which anti-democratic governments in the Middle East and elsewhere support U.S. interests," he writes. "He made scant acknowledgment of the trade-offs he has regularly made, such as supporting repressive regimes in Asia as payback for their support in Afghanistan.
   "More plausibly, most of the president’s supporters maintained, he was intending not so much to describe a road map for the next four years as to make a provocative statement about the nation’s long-term mission over the next several decades — the ‘concentrated work of generations,’ as Bush put it.
   "The implications of the speech were uncertain because the celebration of democratic values was harnessed to almost no specifics. Though dominated by foreign affairs, the address did not mention Iraq, Iran, North Korea — or indeed any country, friend or foe, occupying his second-term agenda. Sept. 11, 2001, was mentioned once obliquely as a ‘day of fire,’ but the word ‘terrorism’ did not appear, nor was there mention of the al Qaeda terrorists whose attack altered history and transformed Bush’s presidency.
   "Rather than terrorism, Bush spoke of a much broader struggle against ‘tyranny.’ And with a single rhetorical stroke, he declared moot the long-standing tension between universal human rights and narrow national interests — the balance of ‘idealism’ versus ‘realism’ — that has been perceived by several generations of his White House predecessors."
   The rhetorical move from a war on terror to a war on tyranny places the president in new territory. A war on terror is, by its very nature, a war based on fear, a national effort that uses the fear of its citizenry to keep the nation motivated. If Americans are afraid, then they are more willing to fight against the thing that scares them.
   But a war on tyranny is far more theoretical. Tyranny, unlike communism or terrorism, is an elusive concept, one not tied to the American experience, or at least not tied to the modern American experience.
   As much as we like to believe our participation in World War II was based on our democratic values, it took a direct attack on American soil to move us. It was only after our fear and anger were engaged that the "Greatest Generation" had a chance to demonstrate its greatness.
   In any case, this new Bush doctrine, if that is what he has offered, is fairly ominous (and contradictory, as this Post article points out). While the goal of spreading freedom and liberty is lofty and admirable, the fact is what the president seems to be endorsing is the Iraq war on a much larger, worldwide scale — tyrants and dictators who refuse to step down, it would seem, will then face the military wrath of the United States. Call it democracy at the point of a gun.