Listening to a foreign policy speech of George Bush's, when in general agreement with him, leaves one encouraged but not without a sense of anticlimax. If what the man talks about is patent, when is it more of a tautology than a reminder?
Addressing the United Nations General Assembly today, the president avowed that a) electoral democracy is the only acceptable form of government, and that the claim has both moral and evidentiary standing; that b) many countries have denied inalienable rights to citizens, but not so uniformly as the Near East; and c) what come of said privations are often violent political or cultural movements, today manifested as, for one, Islamist fascism. Bush identified three national actors: Iran, for its terrorist machinations; Syria, for the same; and the Sudan, for a domestic brand of religious counterfeit instructing genocide. Enemies of freedom, Bush warned, would be combated. The president might even have confronted a popular saying and explained how the only "opportunity" five years ago that he "squandered" was the United States' indefinite residence in national victimhood.
OK, we knew all of that. Keep in mind, it was a United Nations audience to which the president spoke, the common language at Turtle Bay a euphemistic dialect of English. George Bush actually used it just twice, once about Israel and its neighbors and again to praise the military pledges of Paris and Rome — otherwise he referenced it to refute it. Several paragraphs into such a castigation comes the thought, How can they keep quiet while he tells them what they really are? Those who heard the radio broadcast wouldn't have been able to see the delegates knit their brows, shuffle their feet, and fold their arms.