If, as I believe, one of a President’s key responsibilities is to be “teacher-in-chief”, George Bush was in top form for his State of the Union message. Plainer words are rarely as well spoken by a political leader and critical passages of the speech about war and the evil we face could not have been more instructive. The clarity was as stunning as it was refreshing, and it was disturbing to some, even in our own State Department, who cringed at Bush’s reference to the “axis of evil”. Kent Guida, a friend from my political philosophy group, sent along a piece by Victor Davis Hanson that draws the distinctions between two types of necessary military leaders—the organizational men and the warriors. We need both but not always at the same time, and rarely do the same skill sets reside in the same leader. So now the President is preparing us for the next, much more difficult, step–to move pre-emptively against Iraq. The organizational men urge restraint, multilateralism, and pretext, but the warriors know that this war is for all the marbles and that restraint and hesitation will be disastrous. After Bush’s speech, there should be no question in which direction the strategy now tilts. He did not mince words in characterizing this decade as “decisive in the history of human liberty.” As Peggy Noonan noted, this speech was about as big as presidential statements get.
