At 10 o’clock this morning, Barack Obama and four of his predecessors in the Oval Office will stand together in Dallas to dedicate The George W. Bush Center.
There is a special poignancy to this gathering, given that its commemoration of a president who was defined by 9/11 comes at a time when the nation is reeling from another attack on another American city by terrorists also inspired by radical Islam. In this sense, what might otherwise be thought dry exhibits from the political past take on a present urgency.
Even Bush’s critics credit him (or blame him) for his willingness to use all aspects of US power to go after al Qaeda and its like wherever they were hiding or being sheltered. That was part of defending the homeland, and President Bush — rightly — never apologized for it. Still, that was only one part of the Bush anti-terror program.
The center’s opening reminds us of the other great weapon in the Bush arsenal: “a forward strategy of freedom in the Middle East.” Bush believed the stability of authoritarian regimes prized by “realists” was brittle. And while he didn’t shy away from calling Islamist terror by name, he also believed these terrorists fear democratically empowered Muslims as much as they do US Marines. You can get a taste of how this played out at freedomcollection.org even if you can’t make it to Dallas in person.
Many thought Bush’s view dangerously naive. Certainly it stands in contrast to President Obama’s. And both have costs.
But when you look at, say, Iraq and Syria, ask yourself this: Which approach has brought more stability — the one that led to taking down an Iraqi dictator and replacing him with a government elected by that nation’s people, or the “lead from behind” one that has left Syria’s dictator free to order murderous rampages on his Muslim citizens and has left that nation vulnerable to an even more menacing future?
With Islam again in American headlines, it strikes us as noteworthy that a president derided as a cowboy for his willingness to fight also believed, as FDR and Truman did with Japan, that America’s best guarantee of security is a free Middle East where ordinary Muslims can prosper and look to the future with hope.