Another View on George W Bush

I have made ad nauseum comments and statements about my belief in the greatness of GWB.  I get lot of barbs.  I have thick skin.

 

So it was with some appreciation that I read this editorial in today's Wall Street Journal written by Nathan Sharansky who was a student of Andrei Sakharov.  Sharansky spent nine years as a prisoner in a Soviet Gulag.  He is now a member of the Israeli Knesset.  He knows something of conflict and courage.  He says this about our great President:

 

President George W. Bush is an exception. He is a man fired by a deep belief in the universal appeal of freedom, its transformative power, and its critical connection to international peace and stability.

 

Mr. Bush, faced with overwhelming opposition, stands his ideological ground, motivated in large measure by what appears to be a refusal to countenance moral failure.

 

Today, we are in the midst of a great struggle between the forces of terror and the forces of freedom. The greatest weapon that the free world possesses in this struggle is the awesome power of its ideas.

 

The Bush Doctrine, based on a recognition of the dangers posed by non-democratic regimes.  The democratic earthquake it has helped unleash, even with all the dangers its tremors entail, offers the promise of a more peaceful world.

 

Critics rail against every step on the new and difficult road on which the United States has embarked. Yet in pointing out the many pitfalls which have not been avoided and those which still can be, those critics would be wise to remember that the alternative road leads to the continued oppression of hundreds of millions of people and the continued festering of the pathologies that led to 9/11.

Now that President Bush is increasingly alone in pushing for freedom, I can only hope that his dissident spirit will continue to persevere. For should that spirit break, evil will indeed triumph, and the consequences for our world would be disastrous.

I stand with our great President in his quest.  It takes someone with the courage of his convictions to stand strong in the face of the opposition he faces.  Leadership is not a poll or approval driven function.  Fear of man and needing approval is a weakness other Presidents in the past have been hobbled with.  We can't afford to be hobbled at the top with such timidity in a world out to kill us.