Tony Snow just spoke at a Hudson Institute event in New York. His topic: the Iraq War. He offered an omnibus argument in favor of staying, touching on moral and strategic points, as well as recent successes (cf. Anbar). Very persuasive, and very rousingly delivered. It is a mark of his oratorical skills that when somebody’s cell phone started playing Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” during the peroration, this sounded appropriate rather than absurd.

Main ideas:

–We can win in Iraq if we want to.

–What happens in Iraq will change the world for a very long time to come; it is the most consequential strategic question of our generation, possibly our century.

–We should be proud of an administration that is willing to lean against the winds of history for the sake of the right principles and policies.

–If we defeat al-Qaeda and establish something approximating democracy in Iraq, then the Islamist political alternative will have been publicly humiliated and refuted by counterexample.

This last point strikes me as both true and important. The Bush administration’s naïveté in thinking it could quickly set up a functioning Iraqi state has had the sad consequence of discrediting the whole cluster of ideas that fall under the umbrella of “democracy promotion.” But surely it is true that the War on Terror is, at root, a war of ideas, and that our success or failure in Iraq will have tremendous reverberations in Islamic society as it grapples with its political future. The Arabs’ pre-modern obsession with public honor will only heighten the dramatic impact of the Iraq finale, whatever it be.

About Tony Snow: He is tremendously effective at what he does. His gift is to talk over the heads of his journalistic audience and speak the idealistic, slightly populist language of normal Americans. (Someone like Mike McCurry, by contrast, speaks the rather cynical, or at least ironic, language of Washington.) Snow can be mildly demagogic—as when, for example, he says that Democrats want to lose in Iraq (discounting the possibility that they believe we cannot win). But on the whole he is both thoughtful and persuasive.