The Washington Times

The twists and turns of the Bush administration’s Middle East diplomacy are the product of the interaction of two basic truths: Everybody knows what the final status looks like, and nobody has the foggiest idea of how to get from here to there.

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The smart politics behind Bush’s new cabinet agency proposal.

View this article at The Weekly Standard

WHO SAYS YOU CAN’T have more than one good reason to do something? Of course, the proposition that disparate federal agencies with homeland security responsibilities should be combined into one massive cabinet department ought first to be judged on the contribution such consolidation will make to security. But if it also happens to be smart politics — a way for a wartime president to get some control over a domestic agenda that was badly adrift — well, what’s wrong with that?

Democrats have been warning since shortly after September 11 that George W. Bush would risk the bipartisan support he enjoys in the war against terror if he tried to leverage his high job-approval ratings to advance a conservative domestic agenda. Meanwhile, Democratic strategists looking at upcoming congressional elections were urging their clients to concede the war to the president and open up differences on domestic policy in areas of traditional Democratic strength. Here again, if Bush opposed Democratic initiatives or propounded conservative policies of his own, he might be vulnerable to the charge that he was trying to exploit the war.

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The Washington Times

Here’s a question that’s not especially pleasant to think about: Where should the new Department of Homeland Security be located? And no, I’m not asking whether it should be off Independence Avenue or off Constitution Avenue, but rather, whether it should be in Washington at all.

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The Washington Times

Last week in this space, I wrote about President Bush’s remarkable June 2 speech at West Point, in which he laid out, in effect, a liberty doctrine according to which the United States will no longer be satisfied to stand as a symbol of freedom and the success that flows from it, but instead will seek to protect and promote liberty in all parts of the world as the “single . . . model of human progress.”

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The Washington Times

In a speech at West Point in June, President Bush gave his richest account yet of what we are fighting for. He in effect proclaimed what my Hoover Institution colleague Michael McFaul has called a liberty doctrine, wherein American power has been harnessed, not just for the purpose of the protection of the United States but also for the protection and spread of liberty across the globe.

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The Washington Times

At West Point on Saturday, President Bush gave his richest account yet of what we are fighting for. He in effect proclaimed what my Hoover Institution colleague Michael McFaul has called a liberty doctrine, wherein American power has been harnessed not just for the purpose of the protection of the United States, but also to the protection and spread of liberty across the globe.

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