PRESIDENT BUSH’S State of the Union speech on Wednesday night got the usual thumbs down in the perfumed salons of the self-appointed intellectual liberal elites.
The Guardian insisted it amounted to a near-declaration of war on Iran and Syria. The BBC was dutifully sniffy about the very idea of promoting democratic change in the world. You sometimes wonder how the BBC and The Guardian might have reported the Sermon on the Mount: “Self-proclaimed Messiah endorses poverty for all. Says persecuted must grin and bear it.” Or Churchill’s oration on taking office: “Prime Minister promises to fight mighty Germans with nothing more than personal body fluids.”
The visual field of the smart-thinking classes is now so seeped in red whenever the American President speaks that there is not the least possibility any longer that they will faithfully report what he has said. They simply use it as another opportunity to promote their own caricature of him.
If he had announced on Wednesday that he was replacing Donald Rumsfeld with Michael Moore, converting to Islam and seeking permission for the US to join the European Union, the headshaking verdict from the European cognoscenti and the American elite would have been the same: bad, dangerous, foolish man on a religious mission to destroy the world.
What Mr Bush actually said might be incidental to those who seek to convey only a distorted, paranoid image of America, but to the rest of us, or indeed anyone willing to listen, it repays some attention.
I will spare you the lengthy details of the centrepiece of his speech, his ideas about reforming the state pension system to allow the introduction of personal investment accounts, save to say it bears striking similarities to the changes Britain introduced to the state pension in the 1980s — necessary though potentially somewhat painful reforms to address the long-run challenges of an ageing population.
The other elements of his domestic programme are the same as ever — a slightly curious mix of economic liberalism and social conservatism. Whatever else you can say about this latest agglomeration of proposals — a decent measure to lift immigration restrictions, new efforts to expand the federal government’s role in education, support for a constitutional ban on gay marriage — it defies easy caricature.
But the meat of the President’s speech was the same, animating foreign policy goals that he laid out in his inaugural address two weeks ago. Mr Bush restated the ultimate aim of US strategy as ending tyranny on Earth. This time, perhaps anticipating a little better the carping criticism that this is crazy/dishonest/hypocritical, the President added some specifics that are likely to shape US policy for years ahead. In doing so he demonstrated that rhetoric has its own consequences. George W. Bush is slowly, steadily ratcheting up the rhetoric, not to threaten all-out war, as his screaming critics claim, but to create an international climate in which the price of supporting repression is intolerably high.
By calling explicitly on Saudi Arabia and Egypt to liberalise, he made it harder than ever for the US to return to an approach that connives at those regimes’ corruption and autocracy. By challenging Iran and Syria to stop their support for terrorism, and in Iran’s case, its pursuit of nuclear weapons, he emphasised again that the post-September 11 world is not a safe one for dictators and fanatics who thrive through mass murder.
But the entire speech, indeed the entire opening act of this President’s second term, was ventilated by the extraordinary air that has blown around the world from Iraq since Sunday’s elections.
Contrived it may have been, but there was no escaping the emotional symbolism of the moment when Janet Norwood, the mother of a Marine killed in the assault on Fallujah last year, embraced Safia Taleb al-Suhali, the daughter of an Iraqi murdered by Saddam Hussein who had just triumphantly voted in Iraq’s elections. It was an iconic moment. The symbolism was captured by two poignant visual effects — Mrs Norwood clasped her son’s dog tags; Ms al-Suhali waved the purple finger of magnificent defiance.
If the world could only strip away some of its blind resentment it might start to see without prejudice what Mr Bush and Tony Blair are seeking to achieve in their grand and noble venture in the Middle East. But in the end, it will matter not how the world reports a president’s or a prime minister’s words. It will be the inescapable logic and reality of events that will eventually persuade even the most cynical critic.
Sometimes moments of truly historic significance are almost instantly recognisable for what they are. The Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 proclaimed its universal importance right from the start. No one needed to be told that the fall of the Berlin Wall was going to change history. With others the consequences creep up on us slowly, even surreptitiously. Some wise heads see the significance; others resist it or are blind to it. It was not immediately necessarily evident that Hitler’s ascent to power in 1933 would lead to the unrelenting tragedy that unfolded for Europe and the world over the next decade. We all know better now.
Last Sunday I think will quickly fall into the first category. There is an unstoppable momentum for change in the Middle East now. In just two years tyrannies have been felled in Iraq and Afghanistan. In Palestine, the inexorable clock of human mortality has ended another. But the crucial element was always going to be the voluntary and courageous act of self-assertion that democratic and free elections represent — a message heard around the region and the world.
The way is open now, as it has never been, for an end to the servitude and alienation that have been the lot of the people of the Middle East for centuries. Long after the rhetoric has been ridiculed and scorned, the reality will stand as a magnificent monument to the possibilities of liberty.
gerard.baker@thetimes.co.uk
