In my Collegian bio that ran back in September, I said the most important news item of the last year was the Iraq war because "it fundamentally altered the direction of U.S. foreign policy."
My opinion is that the election next Tuesday will be a referendum on just that.
The election will determine if the United States will continue the president's offensive strategy of pursuing terrorists and their state-sponsors abroad, even if the French-German-United Nations axis of accommodation isn't on board. Or it could show that the United States wants the Kerry approach that would prefer to wait until there is a consensus from the axis of accommodation to go after the threat from terrorists and their state-sponsors.
The election will determine if we are truly committed to the rehabilitation of Iraq, despite the mistakes and the setbacks. If Bush is elected, it will help to transform the political culture of the Middle East, which is a problem. It has offered no opportunities for economic progress, severely suppresses women's rights and has planted the seeds for Islamic radicalism all the while using Israel (America's support for the Jewish state) and Western imperialism as scapegoats for their misfortunes.
In other words, the election will determine if we prefer the status quo in the Middle East.
And this is the kicker, in my view. If this election is about the new direction of our foreign policy then it means it is about our future and the kind of world we will raise our kids in.
When President Bush spoke about Iraq at the Whitehall Palace in London last November, he talked about the "three pillars" of his foreign policy strategy which included strengthening international institutions to combat such things as weapons proliferation, military preemption and expanding democracy worldwide.
But the most telling part of the address was when the president acknowledged America's and Britain's "decades of failed policy in the Middle East." This failed policy, of course, was our longtime coziness with authoritarian dictators, choosing "to make a bargain, to tolerate oppression for the sake of stability."
The president added, "Yet this bargain did not bring stability or make us safe. It merely bought time, while problems festered and ideologies of violence took hold."
And ultimately, these "problems" and "ideologies of violence" manifested themselves into what we watched the morning of Sept. 11.
So will this new direction solve the problems we all face in the Middle East? I have no idea, but it is certainly too early to come to an honest conclusion.
But I think it is also fair to conclude that we really have no other option but to try. Many critics of the Iraq war said it has "destabilized" the Middle East and only helped to create more terrorists, thus already making the Iraq venture pointless.
But wasn't the Middle East already destabilized? Terrorists groups like al Qaeda, Hamas and Hezbollah were already established and frothing with hatred for America. Wasn't there a surging Palestinian intifada that commenced after President Clinton's last-ditch effort to broker a peace agreement between the Israelis and the Palestinians in 2000? How can it be said the almost daily attacks on American and British fighter jets enforcing the no-fly zones in northern and southern Iraq throughout the 1990s and into 2000 was a sign of "stability"?
Nevertheless, if Senator Kerry becomes President Kerry, despite his multilateral fantasy summits and his political opportunism on the Iraq debate, I do believe he'll remain just as committed to Iraq as Bush has been. He has campaigned on just that, even going so far as saying he'll do a better job than the president has done. So if Kerry is elected, I'll definitely give him a chance to fulfill his promise.
But what worries me is whether or not Kerry believes that the democratization of the Middle East is as vital to America's security as Bush believes it is. The senator's emphasis throughout the campaign has been on bringing our estranged allies together to defeat Islamic terrorism together. He has said little about a grand strategy that deals with treating the deadly virus caused by the nexus of Islamic terrorism and authoritarianism in the Middle East with the antidote of consensual government. If we wake up Nov. 3 to the news of a Kerry victory, let's hope it doesn't mean a return to "the decades of failed policy to the Middle East."
We've got the Middle East's future riding on it and ours as well.
