Are you HEARING what W is saying?

Christian Science Monitor has a great piece today on the President’s speech acouple of weeks ago to the National Endowment for Democracy. Say what you will about the President’s domestic policies, but his foreign policies direction is an ambitious one and, if successful, will indeed benefit the world for years to come:

You can protest against the manner in which Bush has gone about bringing freedom to Iraq. That is a legitimate issue for debate. You can rail, with European hauteur, against the style of an American president who wears cowboy boots with his tuxedo and bestows folksy nicknames on foreign leaders.

But nobody, after reading that democracy speech, can doubt the man’s passion for bringing at least some form of democracy to those parts of the world where people are still denied it.

Some will dismiss this as simplistic and naive. That, of course, was what some Europeans thought of Ronald Reagan’s Palace of Westminster speech in 1982, when he told a British audience that a turning point in history had arrived – that Soviet communism had failed because it did not respect its own people, their creativity, and their rights.*snip*

The President may not get a chance to finish the job – depends on next year’s elections, but he will definately be credited for planting the seeds for democracy in the Middle East. Soon, hopefully, the rest of the world will follow suit.