Leon Wieseltier, literary editor of The New Republic,... | Yogthos

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Leon Wieseltier, literary editor of The New Republic, 3 March 2003 https://newrepublic.com/article/66773/iraq-liberal-bush-imperial

So can a liberal support this president in this war? I do not see why not. The United States, its needs and its duties, is larger than any of its leaders. The war against Saddam Hussein is just, and it is truly a last resort. (Saddam Hussein has been in violation of the Security Council for twelve years. It is his unrestrained contempt for the United Nations, and not the Bush administration's restrained contempt for the United Nations, that may destroy the institution.) There were some Republicans who despised Bill Clinton as much as some Democrats despise George W. Bush, but they supported the American interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo, and thereby they rose above politics to history, above sectarianism to Americanism. I cannot imagine any strenuous construction of liberalism that does not include the injunction to fight terror and to fight genocide. Liberalism is not a philosophy of innocence; and it should make tyrants quake, not smile.

Like 21 Mar 2023 at 17:23 | Open on mas.to

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Yogthos

Lawrence F. Kaplan, New Republic senior editor, 3 March 2003 https://newrepublic.com/article/66763/bush-middle-east-conservative-woodrow-wilson-liberalism

Lawrence F. Kaplan / March 3, 2003

Regime Change

Bush, closet liberal.

"Ideas have consequences," the conservative intellectual Richard Weaver wrote half a century ago. The truism comes to mind as another group of conservative intellectuals, this one guiding foreign policy inside the Bush administration, prepares to launch a war in the Middle East--not for oil or geopolitical advantage but on behalf of an idea. The idea is liberalism. According to President Bush, "Liberty for the Iraqi people is a great moral cause," and, as such, he routinely casts the impending war as an effort to bring democracy to a land that has known only dictatorship. Nor, in Bush's telling, will America's duty be discharged when Iraq subsequently has a decent government. Instead, he suggests the war will be the beginning of a campaign that will "bring the hope of democracy ... to every corner of the world." If this sounds familiar, it's because it almost exactly echoes Woodrow Wilson's pledge to "make the world safe for democracy." Which stands to reason: In word, if not yet in deed, Bush is becoming the most Wilsonian president since Wilson himself. True, Bush has fallen short of his moralistic rhetoric in postwar Afghanistan, and many in his administration are Kissingerian devotees of realpolitik.

21 Mar 2023 at 17:24 | Open on mas.to