Yesterday, in the parking lot at the train station, I saw a car with a bumper sticker that read “BUSH LIED – PEOPLE DIED.” I’ve often wondered why the anti-war movement (if a contingent that can only muster one-eighth the amount of protestors that took to the streets against a fox-hunting ban can be called a movement–I’m sorry, I should be above cheap shots, shouldn’t I?) have stuck so hard to these strident, all-caps claims of mendacity.
Then I listend to Bush’s speech at Whitehall Palace yesterday. Here was the most powerful man on the planet repudiating the realpolitik of decades past that saw the free world coddling Middle Eastern tyrants and thugocracies, repudiating ethnicist claims that Muslims are incapable of participating in democracy, calling for the establishment of an independent democractic Palestinian state, taking Israel to task for provocative and unjust policies yet defending its right to exist untrammelled by random violence, calling for an end to the rising tide of anti-Semitism, defending the removal of genocidal madmen in Serbia, Afghanistan, and Iraq, calling for the rights of women to be respected around the globe, demanding increased levels of freedom and tolerance from our so-called friends in the Muslim world, declaring that dictatorship is always harmful, asserting the need for freedom of speech, press, and religion, citing Woodrow Wilson’s idealistic internationalism as a good to be returned to, and generally declaring his intent to “raise up an ideal of democracy in every part of the world.”
This is the most radically liberal speech I’ve ever heard an American president give. It’s a tremendous break from years of “looking the other way” when it came to the behavior of friends and enemies alike in countries that contain one fifth of humankind. It advocated policies that have been close to my bleeding heart for years, policies I never thought I’d hear advocated by this or any President.
If I were the anti-war left, I’d be yelling “BUSH LIED!” too. The kind of cognitive dissonance a speech like that would engender in me would require nothing less than to deny that the man meant a single word he said.