When he talks about principles these days, of course, Bush is mainly thinking about the War on Terror. He repeatedly says that the war is an ideological struggle, and liberty is our best ideological weapon. He makes as good a brief, informal explanation of the negative and positive aspects — both necessary, in his view — of the War on Terror as you will hear: “The issue and debate is, can liberty work? That’s really the fundamental question in many ways in the long-term strategy. Short-term strategy is to deny: Deny safe haven, deny money, deny weapons, and get them. The long-term strategy is to change the conditions that enable this ideology to flourish, to out-compete it with better ideas. And that’s the fundamental — the fundamental question of my approach.” ~Rich Lowry, National Review

Good grief.  The man talks about ideas out-competing one another as if a marketplace of ideas actually existed, or as if the marketplace of ideas in the Near East wasn’t controlled by the local oligopoly that sets all the “prices” and makes all the “products.”  If have ‘better ideas’, we win.  Oh, okay, why didn’t anyone ever think of that before?

Can liberty work?  Work to do what?  For whom?  To what end?  In other words, what is he talking about?  Is he asking if it can reduce terrorism?  Maybe, if we assume that all the people who have elected governments are somehow cured of the desire to solve political grievances by the use of violence, which is a very difficult habit for people to shake–it is the habit that a large proportion of all people has always had. 

It is entirely conceivable that the successful establishment of free, democratic governments will irk and outrage the dedicated Islamists as much as the repressive dictatorships our government has sponsored in the past–these democratic regimes, if they are not themselves taken over by the Islamists in elections, will probably be regarded as just as repressive–because they will be seen as imposed and alien in origin–as the secular dictators and monarchs the West has backed before them.  Perhaps then we might see that it is not stability vs. freedom, but intervention vs. nonintervention that will really determine whether Islamic terrorism increases or decreases.