I’m with Jonah. We may yearn to be free, but we have all sorts of other yearnings too. We need institutions and culture to guide us in ways that make true freedom–as opposed to license–possible and keep all the other yearnings reasonably in check. This isn’t merely a theoretical discussion. I think part of our difficulty in Iraq was that administration believed in the freedom-as-absence-of-constraint theory. Remove the dictator, and you have freedom. Not so, unfortunately. You have to have the institutions and culture to support freedom. We are working on building the institutions and changing the culture, but it’s very difficult work.
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About the Author
Rich Lowry is the editor in chief of National Review.
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