President George W. Bush is going to persevere and prevail in beating world terrorism and bringing stable democracies to both Afghanistan and Iraq.
There will be no wavering and no withdrawal.
These were the heartening words given me by U.S. Ambassador to Canada, David H. Wilkins.
So the mischief-makers, the defeatists, the fellow travellers and the Liberal-Left cabal better get out their handkerchiefs and start sobbing.
Their ignoble cause will fail.
The course of decency and democracy will win.
Now Wilkins, who visited the Sun for an editorial board meeting this past week, is a very astute and articulate fellow.
He spent 25 years in the South Carolina House of Representatives, 11 of them as Speaker of the House.
During those 25 years he was on the cutting edge of most major reform initiatives from welfare reform to property tax relief, and from educational accountability to truth-in-sentencing laws.
Wilkins is an affable, engaging man, but also one with a steel-trap mind.
In that, he’s very much like his boss back in the White House.
As noted by Sun columnist Salim Mansur—the best commentator by far in Canada on the Middle East and Islamic terrorism—Michael Novak, the noted Roman Catholic theologian and philosopher, recently described Bush as “the bravest president” for staying firm in confronting the contemporary barbarians despite the venom of his peers.
The U.S ambassador echoed those sentiments, pointing out Bush will determinedly do what is right rather that what the polls may say is unpopular.
America’s salvation matters more than what the temporarily up-and-down swings in the polls say.
The 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon when Bush had been in the White House little more than one year changed the entire direction of the presidency.
Some 3,000 Americans died in those attacks—more than in the attacks on Pearl Harbor, itself described by then-President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, as a “day of infamy.”
Yet, despite repeated threats by Osama bin Laden and his associated adherents throughout the world, there have been no further Islamic terrorist attacks on U.S. soil.
I note that in the 1930s, Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler and his associated henchmen in other dictatorships believed the western democracies too weak to fight back.
He was wrong. We did.
We won.
After the end of the Second World War, Soviet dictator Josef Stalin and the Communist henchmen who followed him had the same attitude as the 1930s bunch of dictators towards the western democracies.
But they, too, were wrong, and we won the Cold War.
Is the radical Islamic terrorist movement as mistaken in its view of the western democracies being weak as were Hitler, Stalin as their fellow compatriots, I asked Wilkins.
He replied it would be a mistake for the world terrorist movement to underestimate the resolve of the U.S. and its allies.
Instead of the Taliban running Afghanistan, we now have a democratic government there.
And instead of Saddam Hussein running Iraq, and using weapons of mass destruction against his own people, we have a democratic government there, too.
True, these as yet may be fragile governments, and not exactly the kind of democracies with which we are familiar, but they are on their way to succeeding.
Wilkins noted Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, when asked about stability in the Middle East, declared the only way to achieve stability in the region is through democracy.
My friends, we are going to win this fight for civilization, and freedom for millions of men, women and children who never had it before, and George W. Bush will eventually be acclaimed as a great historic leader.
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