News analysis: Bush's 'moral clarity' looks naive in Europe
Todd S. Purdum nyt Friday, January 31, 2003 Evangelical zeal is basic to president WASHINGTON On topics from AIDS and addiction to terrorism and Iraq, President George W. Bush's State of the Union address was shot through with a quality that has come to mark his presidency: an unblinking brand of public moralism that most politicians would shrink from in a largely secular age. . Bush's aides like to call it "moral clarity." World-weary European allies are more apt to call it "moral superiority," or even "moral naďveté." But for better or worse, the concept animates Bush's broadest thinking about a world that he divides reflexively into black and white, wrong and right, day and night - thinking that inspires him to take risks others might avoid. As he has before, Bush spoke Tuesday night of Iraq as "evil." But he also spoke of the moral imperative of fighting AIDS as "a work of mercy," of mentoring the children of prison inmates, and of helping religious programs convince addicts that "the miracle of recovery is possible" - not idle words for a man who says he once drank too much, but stopped years ago. . "Americans are a resolute people who have risen to every test of our time," Bush declared at the end of his hourlong address. "Adversity has revealed the character of our country to the world, and to ourselves," he said, adding, "We exercise power without conquest, and we sacrifice for the liberty of strangers." On Wednesday, in Grand Rapids, Michigan., he called the United States "a moral nation." Such words may be the work of Bush's speechwriter, Michael Gerson, but his advisers say that the evangelical zeal behind them comes directly from the president. His message - of might backed up by right - stands in a long American tradition of such progressives as Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, and it is part of Bush's instinctive and intuitive appeal to a country that likes to think the best of itself and its power. But it also makes for a tough sell in the countries that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld branded "old Europe," where politicians are put off by protestations of rectitude and think in terms of realpolitik and the "entangling alliances" that George Washington urged his countrymen to avoid two centuries ago. . "At the end of the day, this president is talking through a framework that is his," said James Steinberg, who was President Bill Clinton's deputy national security adviser and is now at the Brookings Institution. "The difficulty is that while Americans are not deeply uncomfortable with this way of thinking, it is not a perspective that other countries usually bring to foreign affairs. They are much more cynical about it. . "They see little good in the world," he said, "and therefore tend to see things as grayer, and in terms of interests, rather than right and wrong." . The phrase that stuck in the public mind from Bush's first State of the Union speech last year was his linking of Iraq, Iran and North Korea in an "axis of evil." But some of Bush's closest national security aides have long said that the part of that speech they had expected to draw the most attention was Bush's ringing declaration that: "America will lead by defending liberty and justice because they are right and true and unchanging for all people everywhere." . "We have no intention of imposing our culture," he added, "but America will always stand firm for the non- negotiable demands of human dignity, the rule of law, limits on the power of the state, respect for women, private property, free speech, equal justice and religious tolerance." . Jean-David Levitte, formerly the French representative at the United Nations and now the ambassador to Washington, said in an interview Wednesday that his country had no problem with Bush's tone of moral uplift, acknowledging with a chuckle that "the French tend to have the same view about our role in the world: liberté, égalité, fraternité and so on." But he acknowledged that the United States and Europe had starkly different views of collective security, the war on terrorism and the immediacy of the threat posed by Saddam Hussein. . Bush's aides acknowledge that his streak of what one called "Wilsonian zeal" does not fit neatly with the profile of conservative Republican philosophy that defines so much of the rest of his approach."He's a very interesting blend of a president that is not afraid to use power and believes that power matters," an administration official said, "but who also believes that power can be good, and can lead to good." http://www.iht.com/articles/85199.html Serbian News Network - SNN [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.antic.org/
