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January
29, 2003 11:00 a.m.
The
Train Is Moving
Do
the rest of you want tickets?
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 resident
Bush's State of the Union address was a triple. The reason it wasn't a
home run has to do with the rhetorical legacy of Bill Clinton — the
apparent need now to provide a laundry list of domestic programs that
the president wishes Congress to fund. Accordingly, the first part of
the speech was a reminder that "compassionate conservatism"
can be almost expensive as unvarnished liberalism.
The second half of
the speech however was magnificent. It provided one more illustration
of the danger of underestimating George W. Bush. He laid out the case
against Saddam so clearly that even the French could understand it. Once
again, he challenged the United Nations to be something other than a debating
society. The point, he said, is not the process but the result. Inspections
were not a "scavenger hunt" but a means of verifying Saddam's
compliance with resolutions the U.N. has already passed
Rhetoric must be
judged in terms of both form and substance, and the foreign policy portion
of the address was noticeably superior in both categories to the first
part of the speech. President Bush stated that the United States would
"consult" with the Security Council, but that the nation's course
would not depend on the decisions of others. He observed that the United
States was all that stood between a world of peace and world of chaos.
But he ended his speech with a remarkable observation that vindicates
the perspective of many conservatives: "the gift of liberty that Americans
prize is not their gift to the world but the gift of God to humanity."
Tuesday night's address
restores the momentum that had been lost as a result of the inspection
process. With Secretary Powell's session at the U.N. next week and another
address by the president to a joint session of Congress, the train is
moving. The French might want to buy a ticket.
—
Mackubin Thomas Owens, an NRO contributing editor, is a professor of strategy
and force planning at the Naval War College in Newport, RI. His observations
do not necessarily reflect the views of the Naval War College or the Department
of Defense.
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