Bush flat-footed while Congress falls for knee-jerk reaction

The Washington Times

Plenty of blame to go around this week on the topic of the ports deal. So let’s get busy.

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Deteriorating conditions require Bush’s leadership

The Washington Times

President Bush seems to have surprised some of the officials in his own administration with his forward-leaning comments on a decision in the works to support a substantial increase in the peacekeeping force trying to do something about genocidal conditions in Darfur. Good. It will take no less than the sustained personal engagement of the president of the United States to get something effective done there.

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Cartoon imbroglio not about religion

The Washington Times

In the Danish cartoon imbroglio, does the issue at hand have anything to do with the poor taste of the cartoons themselves? Does free expression always trump taste? My initial inclination was to think that poor taste was an issue. I’ve changed my mind.

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 What does Hamas’s victory mean?

View this article at The Weekly Standard

WITH HAMAS’S SMASHING VICTORY IN free and fair elections in Palestine, the case for democracy-promotion that George W. Bush outlined a year ago in his second inaugural address has been taking on water. Do we really want a political process that results in victory and legitimacy for terrorists? As Palestine goes, so might a democratic Syria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, etc., given the opportunity. All of a sudden, stability–in the form of dictatorial repression keeping a lid on something worse–maybe doesn’t look so bad.

Which makes the Hamas victory an “I told you so” moment for those who have been warning about the dangers of democracy promotion from the beginning–more or less since the end of the Cold War, but especially in relation to the Arab Middle East and in response to the Bush administration’s post-9/11 enthusiasm for democracy promotion there. Given the rise of Islamic radicalism in the late 20th century, the secular dictators of the region and the stability their authoritarian rule provides look like a preferable alternative, runs the critique. Let people vote, and they will vote the radicals in. Such was the sense of danger in Algeria in 1991, when the army intervened to cancel further elections after the fundamentalist Islamic Salvation Front ran strong in the first round of balloting.

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Germany’s Merkel stands firm

The Washington Times

A star is born. Angela Merkel made her debut appearance as German chancellor at this weekend’s Munich Conference on Security Policy, a gathering of NATO defense ministers, ambassadors and current and former policy-makers. The annual meeting is the leading venue for taking the indoor temperature of trans-Atlantic relations, by which I mean the prevailing attitude among those who have responsibility for actually deciding questions like what NATO will or won’t do in Afghanistan, Iraq or Darfur. Mrs. Merkel’s speech, and even more so her unscripted responses to questions from the floor, dazzled the crowd.

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