Making the World Safe

Obama is demagoging McCain's serious response on America's role in the world. Democrat Woodrow Wilson spoke of "making the world safe for democracy". John McCain does no less. Jonathan Last, Philadelphia Inquirer:

On Jan. 3 in Derry, N.H., a voter prefaced a question to McCain by saying, "President Bush has talked about our staying in Iraq for 50 years . . ." Here, McCain cut him off, interjecting, "Make it a hundred."

The voter tried to continue his question, but McCain pressed on: "We've been in . . . Japan for 60 years. We've been in South Korea 50 years or so. That would be fine with me, as long as Americans are not being injured or harmed or wounded or killed. It's fine with me, I hope it would be fine with you if we maintain a presence in a very volatile part of the world where al-Qaeda is training, equipping and recruiting and motivating people every single day."

McCain's analysis is, objectively speaking, exactly correct. Throughout history, U.S. troops have remained in the field long after the conclusion of successful wars.

The Philippine-American War was fought between 1899 and 1902. U.S. troops stayed there even as the country took baby steps toward self-governance. The Japanese invaded at the beginning of World War II, but the United States returned in 1945, liberated the Philippines, and granted the country independence in 1946. Yet U.S. forces remained there until 1991, when the last U.S. naval base was closed. During that time, the Philippines progressed from an unstable, newly democratic state, to a semidictatorship, to what now looks like an imperfect, but functioning, democracy.

Can we have some sensible talk, some recognition of the lessons of history? We don't expect this of Barack Obama. But we can always hope.

JFK , a conservative by today's measure, had it right:

Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.

It's a dangerous world out there. We are a part of it. America is the number one target of hate-filled and murderous terrorists, even as we are the beacon of freedom to the world, and its guardian of last resort.

A president who doesn't understand this betrays us.

P.S. David Warren. Understand:

"Blow up the trumpet in Sion." ... At the centre of Buckley's being, was his uncompromising Catholic faith, and in his hand the trumpet of Joshua. And the wall came down. John O'Sullivan recounts, in one of the Internet obituaries, the way in which this man was embraced, visiting Prague after the fall of the Berlin Wall, by men who "told him of how they had read smuggled copies of NR during the years that the Communist regime condemned them to work as stokers and quarry-men."

And Bill Kristol.