Calpundit and Drezner get results from President Bush!

A lot of commenter to this post seemed irate that I agreed with Kevin Drum that President Bush hadn’t articulated the case clearly enough for why the U.S. should be in Iraq regardless of the WMD question. Several mentioned the February AEI speech. Now, I’ve linked to that speech in the past — my point was that according to the Feiler Faster Thesis that I mentioned in my previous post, this point needs to be made and remade for it to sink in, and I didn’t think the President had done this since the end of the war. Which brings us to his speech today commemorating the 20th anniversary of the National Endowment for Democracy. Read the whole thing, but here’s the part I wanted to see:

Securing democracy in Iraq is the work of many hands. American and coalition forces are sacrificing for the peace of Iraq and for the security of free nations. Aid workers from many countries are facing danger to help the Iraqi people. The National Endowment for Democracy is promoting women’s rights and training Iraqi journalists and teaching the skills of political participation. Iraqis themselves, police and border guards and local officials, are joining in the work and they are sharing in the sacrifice. This is a massive and difficult undertaking. It is worth our effort. It is worth our sacrifice, because we know the stakes: The failure of Iraqi democracy would embolden terrorists around the world and increase dangers to the American people and extinguish the hopes of millions in the region. Iraqi democracy will succeed, and that success will send forth the news from Damascus to Tehran that freedom can be the future of every nation. The establishment of a free Iraq at the heart of the Middle East will be a watershed event in the global democratic revolution. Sixty years of Western nations excusing and accommodating the lack of freedom in the Middle East did nothing to make us safe, because in the long run stability cannot be purchased at the expense of liberty. As long as the Middle East remains a place where freedom does not flourish, it will remain a place of stagnation, resentment and violence ready for export. And with the spread of weapons that can bring catastrophic harm to our country and to our friends, it would be reckless to accept the status quo. Therefore the United States has adopted a new policy: a forward strategy of freedom in the Middle East. This strategy requires the same persistence and energy and idealism we have shown before and it will yield the same results.

Indeed. UPDATE: Drezner also gets results from Kenneth Pollack, who properly frames the current stakes in Iraq in this comment on CNN:

KAGAN: You can’t have this conversation without talking about Iraq and what’s taking place in Iraq over the last year. The focus on it, it has not gone exactly like this administration had hoped it would. And many people believe this is the make-or-break country and operation in terms of whether this spread of democracy will go throughout the Middle East. POLLACK: I think there’s no question about that, Daryn. And the president hinted at it in his speech. I would have liked to have seen him put this more front and center. Whether you wanted to go into Iraq or not, whether you thought it was right or not, the simple fact of the matter is, that the entire region, the entire Middle East is now watching to see what unfolds in Iraq. For the longest time, they basically had two options. They had the autocracy offered by their government and they had the Islamic republics offered by the Islamic fundamentalists. And here comes the United States and says, “We’ve got another idea. We’ve got another way of doing things, and that’s democratization.” The U.S. is trying to do that now in Iraq. We’re doing it with 130,000 troops and 100 billion of our own dollars. The rest of the region is watching to see if it succeeds. And if it succeeds, there is the chance that others will start to accept and start to move in that direction. If it fails, every Arab is going to look at it and say, the Americans tried, they tried with $100 billion, and 13,000 troops, and if it can’t work in Iraq, there’s on way it can work here. (emphasis added)