What is George Will Saying here... ????

[salin]

His column today in the local paper left me scratching my head. It's title here was: Freedom and other values less universal than Blair thinks

But in the Washington Post it was: . . Or Maybe Not at All

I think our local title softened the blow to bush and the neocon's by focusing falacies as being Blair's then equating them to the neocons.

So Will doesn't see himself as a neocon?

More I was struck - that the column was just plain confusing (anyone else see this) especially when thinking (as I couldn't help but do)... What is he really saying? That "Moral Certitude" (as opposed to the Bennet led attack on Moral Relativism - which Will used to echo) is BAD... or worse yet... doesn't catch the complexity of context? George, George, George - are you just figuring that out now?

I am very interested in other people's take on this column.

Where is he going with this? Why? and Why Now?

----------------
. . . Or Maybe Not at All

By George F. Will
Sunday, August 17, 2003; Page B07


U.S. warships carrying 2,300 Marines are off Liberia's coast, U.S. forces still are in harm's way in Afghanistan, and the number of U.S. military deaths in Iraq since May 1, when President Bush declared major combat operations over, is drawing closer to the total military deaths before May 1. But some people think America is underengaged abroad.

For example, the presidents of Oxfam America and Refugees International, writing in The Post in support of intervention in Liberia, urge the Bush administration to confront "head-on" many crises: "Central Asia, the Balkans and Western Africa are areas of the world that provide too many examples of what happens when U.S. power is not used proactively." Such incitements to foreign policy hyperkinesis can draw upon the messianic triumphalism voiced by British Prime Minister Tony Blair in last month's address to a rapturous Congress:

"There is a myth that though we love freedom, others don't; that our attachment to freedom is a product of our culture; that freedom, democracy, human rights, the rule of law are American values, or Western values; that Afghan women were content under the lash of the Taliban; that Saddam was somehow beloved by his people; that Milosevic was Serbia's savior. ...

"Ours are not Western values, they are the universal values of the human spirit. And anywhere, anytime ordinary people are given the chance to choose, the choice is the same: freedom, not tyranny; democracy, not dictatorship; the rule of law, not the rule of the secret police."

Neoconservatives seem more susceptible than plain conservatives are to such dodgy rhetoric and false assertions.

---------read it: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A1214-2003Aug15.html (may require registration).