George W. Bush Nostalgia

Suddenly, the world is missing George W. Bush's muscular, pro-democracy foreign policy. Frankly things have gotten so bad, that I'm not just suffering from Bush nostalgia. I'm even feeling a little Jimmy Carter Nostalgia.

Voices around the world, from Europe to America to Libya, are calling for U.S. intervention to help bring down Moammar Qaddafi. Yet for bringing down Saddam Hussein, the U.S. has been denounced variously for aggression, deception, arrogance, and imperialism.

A strange moral inversion, considering that Saddam’s evil was an order of magnitude beyond Qaddafi’s. Qaddafi is a capricious killer; Saddam was systematic. Qaddafi was too unstable and crazy to begin to match the Baathist apparatus: a comprehensive national system of terror, torture, and mass murder, gassing entire villages to create what author Kanan Makiya called a Republic of Fear.