Well, It's The Principle Of The Thing

The Anchoress:

I’m remembering that now, because it seems that the Obama Administration’s stated mission for Libya is one of regime change and the establishment of system of governance.

Which sounds so very much like the stated mission of the Bush regime — the mission that the Democrats and the press pushed, and pushed and pushed against, non-stop, for six long years.

It seems, after all, that helping to establish democratic governments in the Middle East might be in America’s best interests, and in the bests interests of human liberty for the rest of the world.

Helping people to claim liberty for themselves, it seems, is a good thing. Who knew?

I guess what I’m wondering is, how much further along would the Iraq government’s stabilization be — how much further along would the quest for democratic governance be, in the Middle East (and how much less reluctant would tyrants be to try to stop it by killing their own people), if only the Democrats hadn’t wasted 6 years politicizing our efforts and another two years bowing and scraping and restarting and gasbagging and doing everything they could to say, “we’re not Bush,” only to become all they said they hated?

In the end, all the politics, all the fury and drama and rhetoric delayed an inevitable desire and movement toward liberty, and perhaps costs lives.

In an era of record-breaking government spending and clear wastefulness, perhaps the past 8 years of politically-expedient dissent has been costliest waste of all.

I won’t even get into the profound media and pundit silence on issues formerly fraught with headline-grabbing fierce moral urgency. It’s just a given, at this point.

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A study in contrasts – I think we’ll be seeing a lot of these. I’m struck how Bush took months and months to “rush to war” while Obama seems have decided to take on Libya between writing his brackets and packing his travel bags, and yet Bush was the impulsive “cowboy” and Obama … sigh, oh, what’s the point…