Lend Me Your Ears: Great Speeches in History by WIlliam Safire

Author:WIlliam Safire
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780795336591
Publisher: RosettaBooks
Published: 2014-04-21T00:00:00+00:00

President George W. Bush Envisions the “Age of Liberty”

“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.”

Six months after American and British forces liberated Baghdad, the flush of victory had been replaced by the dismayed reaction to the guerrilla warfare being waged by terrorists and die-hard supporters of the ousted Saddam Hussein, who had not yet been captured. Nor had weapons of mass destruction been found, and critics led at the time by Democrat Howard Dean derided claims of a link between Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda network and Iraq. President George W. Bush found it necessary to counter his critics at home and abroad by placing the second Iraq war in a greater context than “regime change.”

At a dinner in Washington, D.C., on November 6, 2003, honoring the twentieth anniversary of the National Endowment for Democracy, he delivered what had become a rarity in recent political rhetoric: a thematic speech.

In articulating what had become, after the attacks of September 11, 2001, the central purpose of his presidency, he evoked three of his predecessors in the twentieth century: Woodrow Wilson, trying to make the world safe for democracy in 1918; Franklin D. Roosevelt, in 1941 giving hope to peoples crushed and endangered by nazism; and Ronald Reagan, in 1982 (derogated at the time, as Bush often is, as a “cowboy”) telling the British Parliament that a turning point had been reached in confronting the menace of world communism. “From the Fourteen Points to the Four Freedoms, to the speech at Westminster, America has put our power at the service of principle.” (A copyeditor would have changed “our” to “its.”) He stated his theme in ten words: “The advance of freedom is the calling of our time.”

The speech is structured, like a concerto, on a tripod. It begins with its forceful statement of theme and an optimistic evocation of recent history: “We’ve witnessed, in little over a generation, the swiftest advance of freedom in the 2,500-year story of democracy…. It is no accident that the rise of so many democracies took place in a time when the world’s most influential nation was itself a democracy.” (He chose the adjective “influential” rather than the customary “powerful” to stress our democratic example. And the formulation “It is no accident” parodies, perhaps unconsciously, the communist cliché “As is well known.”)

The second movement turns from the successes of freedom in South Africa, Central America, and a unified Germany to a tour d’horizon of the places where restrictions on freedom are an anomaly in an age of liberty: from the assonant “outposts of oppression”—including Cuba, North Korea, and Zimbabwe—to those Palestinian leaders who are “the main obstacles to peace” in the Middle East. That brings him to the challenge to leaders of nations of that turbulent area: “Will they be remembered for resisting reform, or for leading it?”

The transition to the speech’s third movement is a startling charge of error in previous U.

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