The World Around You

Time and again, Michael Kinsley attacks President Bush with precision,

One simple test of a change of mind is whether it is acknowledged and explained. In his eloquent speech this month, Bush made a gutsy reference to “sixty years of Western nations excusing and accommodating the lack of freedom in the Middle East.” This was taken as a near-explicit criticism of his own father, among others. But there is every reason to suppose that our current Bush also supported this approach for most of those 60 years, including his entire adult life until a few months ago when Iraq started going bad. What caused the scales to fall from his eyes?

A man who sincerely has changed his mind about something important ought to hold his new views with less certainty and express them with a bit of rhetorical humility. There should be room for doubt. How can your current beliefs be so transcendentally correct if you yourself recently believed something very different? How can critics of what you say now be so obviously wrong if you yourself used to be one of them? But Bush is cocksure that active, sometimes military, promotion of American values in the world is a good idea, just as he was, or appeared to be, cocksure of the opposite not long ago.

If you’ve really been thinking about a Big Question recently, you ought to be taking recent evidence into account. But Bush’s eloquent speech is stuck in 1989. In Europe and Asia and “every region of the world, the advance of freedom leads to peace,” he declared. We used to think like that, before Bosnia and Kosovo. These episodes taught us that free people will sometimes vote for bloodshed that the previous government was able to suppress. This doesn’t undo the case for democracy and freedom, but it complicates that case. Acknowledging and addressing such complications is another way to demonstrate that your change of mind is sincere.

There is also an excellent article by Kenneth T. Walsh in this week’s US News and World Report about the pluses and minuses of operating the way this President does. Just as more people had a problem with Clinton’s “way” than with Clinton’s policies. There are those who have a much bigger problem with Bush’s “way” than the policies that result.