On crusade for a democratic Iraq

After Sept. 11, the world seemed turned upside down. But lest we forget, the more things change, the more they stay the same.

One needs look no further than King Henry IV's advice to his son Harry in Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part 2, "I ... had a purpose now to lead out many to the Holy Land, lest rest and lying still might make them look too near unto my state. Therefore, my Harry, be it thy course to busy giddy minds with foreign quarrels."

The echo of these 400 year old words can still be faintly heard.

And they are enticing. When things aren't going well at home, the dying king tells his son, the citizens are becoming restless or a little too critical of domestic policy, start a war in the Middle East. King Roger of Sicily did it in 1146. Richard the Lion Heart as well. So is our president guilty, too?

No.

Rather, he's a victim of circumstance. While the economy was sour and people were questioning Bush's legitimacy, the events of Sept. 11 transpired. To some, they seemed a fortuitous set of circumstances that would enable this supposed one-termer to rise to unthinkable power that he would inevitably abuse.

Even if this were true, it doesn't diminish the fact that the attack on the United States necessitated our present war. Just because there were domestic problems before Sept. 11, doesn't mean that they are the reasons why we went to war. Instead, with the dramatic wake-up call delivered to America, Bush rightly saw it as something that had to do be done.

While the Crusades were fought over hundreds of years as wars of conquest to rid the infidel from the Holy Land, Operation Iraqi Freedom was designed to liberate the Iraqis and to help them, as Bush said, "build a free Iraq." As the President and Defense Secretary have stated, the time that American forces will likely spend in Iraq will only be as long as necessary, probably on the order of months.

The United States' march through the Middle East, then, bears little resemblance other than scenery to those conquests of the last millennium. In the end, it will matter little which murderous terrorist-supporting regime was targeted first or whether we find weapons of mass destruction in the coming weeks.

Meanwhile, the home front has suffered little as a consequence of the war, and indeed may be profiting from it. Its success has driven markets up and the knowledge that Saddam Hussein is no longer able to terrorize his neighbors is something we can all be comforted by.

The ominous tidings that many offered, claiming Iraq would merely provide convenient "distractions of war," have been tossed like jetsam. This notion was predicated on the idea that Bush and his foreign policy magicians conjured the war in Iraq out of the polluted air of the Ohio Valley, that it was just another Republican parlor trick to fool the populace. But even the most obvious examples of this, tax cuts, were a product of pre-war, pre-Sept. 11 ideology.

But we all know that the war wasn't a response to an ailing economy; it was and will continue to be a reaction to the growing tide of Muslim extremism that formed the point that toppled the Towers.

What the president's domestic agenda doesn't do is inspire confidence in Republican domestic policy; on the contrary, it is are neither forward thinking nor even prudent. The House's desire to drill in the ANWR would be a catastrophic loss for America. Tax cuts during a time of war are ludicrous.

But Republican foreign policy isn't. At a point in time when too many people are thirsting to strike at America, only a strongly conservative approach of pre-emptive strike can protect us and provide assurance that the United States will achieve its long-term goals of a stable Middle East that does not continuously espouse hatred of the Great Satan.

A look to the future, then, does show an ongoing presence in the Middle East. America and Syria's new-found common ground does not seem like something that will last. If the United States pursues a course of appeasement in Syria, a nation that is likely hiding many top Iraqi officials and their weapons and openly funding terror groups like Hezbollah, its credibility will once again erode.

The success of the war in Iraq bought Bush and the United States lots of maneuvering room. The threat to unsavory regimes is real. But unlike Pope Urban II's call to arms, Americans fighting overseas are not "servants of God." They are ambassadors of liberty and democracy, heralding a new reign of peace in the Middle East.