Andrew Sullivan's got a great weblog post about the un-conservativism of President Bush. A quote:
He junked decades of American foreign policy in the Middle East, abandoning attempts to manage Arab autocracies for the sake of a steady oil supply, and forged a new policy of radical democratization of the Middle East. He invaded two countries - one in the grip of a theocratic dictatorship, the other brutalized by a Stalinist kleptocracy - and is in the process of trying to convert them into modern democracies. Nothing this radical has been attempted in U.S. foreign policy for a very long time. And nothing so liberal. In the 2000 campaign, Bush mocked the idea of "nation-building" as liberal claptrap. Now it's the centerpiece of his own administration.
...
On the most fundamental matter, i.e. the war, I think Bush has been basically right: right to see the danger posed by Saddam and the nexus of weapons of mass destruction and Islamist terror; right to realize that the French would never have acquiesced to ridding the world of Saddam; right to endorse the notion of pre-emption in a world of new and grave dangers. But much of the hard work has now been done. No one seriously believes that Bush will start another war in the next four years. And in some ways, Kerry may be better suited to the difficult task of nation-building than Bush.
Domestically, moreover, Bush has done a huge amount to destroy the coherence of a conservative philosophy of American government; and he has been almost criminally reckless in his hubris in the conduct of the war. He and America will never live down the intelligence debacle of the missing Iraqi WMDs; and he and America will be hard put to regain the moral highground in world affairs after Abu Ghraib. The argument Kerry must make is that he can continue the substance of the war, but without Bush's polarizing recklessness.
Posted by Peter at July 30, 2004 08:42 PM