09/04/2003 Archived Entry: "All of our best"

Bush wants Iraq to have the best thing that we have, because it is good and because Iraq will be dangerous to us so long as they don't have it. He thinks that the most precious things we have are good values and institutions that make it easier to act on them than to act against them. Bush wants the Iraqis to live in a free society with institutions and values that make it possible to run things well and make continual improvement. He wants improvement to be a normal part of the political process, rather than something is not possible short of a revolution. He wants Iraqis to be able to create knowledge and build on the ideas of the past as part of normal life. He wants them to be able to run businesses in a free market rather than being forced into poverty. He wants the Iraqis to have all of this and more. He is on the side of Iraqis who have good values and want to be able to act on them better. He wants Iraq to be ruled by the decent and half decent Iraqis rather than inhuman dictators. He wants to defeat those who want to destroy us and keep places like Iraq in squalor. In his terms, he wants God to bless Iraq.

American villepinists, in a twisted sort of way, also want to share our best with the Iraqis. These villepinists think that we have lost our soul, and that the best thing we have is a memory of rebellion. They think that the highest thing we ever did as a nation was to through off British rule and declare liberty. They think that we've betrayed the vision and allowed our nation to be taken over by the values that we once nobly fought against. Accordingly, they think that the most sacred thing anyone can do is to keep fighting the bastardized values, literally and figuratively.

The villepinists think that our enemies are deeply flawed and not quite worthy of approval, but they also admire them a bit. They think it is deplorable that our enemies suicide bomb and force women to wear burkas and torture people and destroy their own holy sites, but they are willing to ignore all of that. They are willing to forget it, because they think the enemies have the soul that we have lost. The enemies are fighting the American values that the villepinists consider to be a bastardization of the real America. The villepinists wish they could fight these values too, but they don't know how, and they can't quite want to. For those who seem to be willing and able to fight these values, these villepinists are willing to forgive almost anything.