The middle east and the world has no hope when you have a zealot like this at the helm...
President George W. Bush delivered a rousing defense of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan on Tuesday, mixing faith and foreign policy as he told a group of Christian broadcasters that his policies in the region were predicated on the beliefs that freedom is a God-given right and "every human being bears the image of their master."
With the fifth anniversary of his invasion of Iraq coming next week, and a decision on troop cuts in Iraq on his plate, Bush used a 30-minute speech before an enthusiastic audience - the National Religious Broadcasters association - to make the case that liberty is on the march, so long as the United States does not lose its nerve.
"The decision to remove Saddam Hussein was the right decision early in my presidency," he said, to rousing applause and a standing ovation. "It is the right decision at this point in my presidency, and it will forever be the right decision."
The speech was the first in a series of three talks that Bush will deliver to "set the table," in the words of one senior White House official, for the upcoming congressional testimony of General David Petraeus, the top American commander in Iraq, and Ambassador Ryan Crocker, the top diplomat there.
The two are expected on Capitol Hill next month to deliver an update on the progress of Bush's troop buildup in Iraq, and to offer recommendations about possible further troop reductions. With the nation's attention turned to the race to succeed Bush, his advisers want the president, rather than the presidential candidates - or, even worse from the White House perspective, Democrats on Capitol Hill - to frame the discussion.
White House aides said Bush wanted to remind Americans of what he regards as the great ideological struggle of our time.
Presidents throughout American history have spoken of spreading freedom as a great calling. Woodrow Wilson talked about making the world safe for democracy; Ronald Reagan often said that freedom was only one generation away from extinction. But Bush has taken his freedom agenda to a new level, and in his speech on Tuesday, he chose to cast it in religious terms, to an audience of Christian conservatives who form the backbone of his political base.
"The liberty we value is not ours alone," he said. "Freedom is not America's gift to the world; it is God's gift to all humanity."
Bush began his talk by offering praise for the Reverend Billy Graham, who is recovering from surgery, saying that Graham "brought the gospel to millions and many years ago he helped me change my life."
Bush's Christian faith is well known, and it has colored his domestic policy decisions on matters from abortion to embryonic stem-cell research. But rarely has the president mixed religion with a foreign policy speech, as he did Tuesday. His talk was punctuated with occasional shouts of amen and frequent applause, as he predicted that freedom and democracy would spread from Iraq and Afghanistan throughout the region.
"We believe that every human being bears the image of our master; that's why we're doing this," he said. "No one is fit to be a master, and no one is fit to be a slave."
