One observation about President Bush's critics that can be made in brief is that the most prominent arguments against the president's inaugural vision employ circular reasoning.
The dedicated left, led by the Washington Post editorial staff, castigates the United States for its alliances of convenience or necessity with dictatorships but rebuffs the president's clear ambition to ultimately end such moral ambiguity in American policy. Why? Because, goes the argument, the United States can't possibly be serious, what with its past and current alliances with dictatorships — for which it should be, of course, castigated for not having abandoned.
The second vicious circle is an unfair toggle between wide-angle and telephoto lens, as expressed in pedantic, stream-of-consciousness pans from traditionalists-turned-parochialists Peggy Noonan and William F. Buckley. At first they claim the speech was too abstract, too philosophical, before both Cold War intellectuals recoil at the obvious, logical path Bush's doctrine would take: remove belligerents and obvious threats first, then, with traditional allies and newly converted countries, pressure relatively non-hostile despots to reform, accelerating as the world grows freer. That would be too laborious, too confusing, say Noonan and Buckley, trying to pick apart details. Then they forget what they just wrote: what's Bush's concept, they ask? Each builds his and her own Biblical straw man: Noonan, saying "this is not heaven," would convince us that Bush promised to abolish pain and death, build cities on clouds and hand everyone a tax-exempt golden harp. Buckley offers his caveats on the premise that Bush would raise the temple in three days and tell China to go to hell on the fourth. That Buckley and Noonan do not like this executive solution to the ages' dilemma is hardly a basis for accusing the president of obfuscation and inconsideration.
This is simple stuff. The clumsiness of the president's critics should embolden him: they want to be saying "you don't make sense," but are instead muttering, "we don't agree." That's preference, not pertinence.