President Bush and Nation Building

Michael Kinsley writes today on President Bush's changing foreign policy, pausing only to take several swipes at the legitimacy of Bush's presidency.

"In 2000, Bush said that the Clinton-Gore administration had been reckless in overcommitting the United States, and the military in particular, to exercises in "nation-building." By that he meant trying to establish institutions of democratic government and civil society. The intervention in Somalia, for example, begun by Bush's father, "started off as a humanitarian mission and it changed into a nation-building mission and that's where the mission went wrong." Just as with his current nearly opposite philosophy, Bush stated the principle in the categorical terms of someone who has adopted it and checked it off his list without diving for subtleties.

. . . A man who sincerely has changed his mind about something important ought to hold his new views with less certainty and express them with a bit of rhetorical humility. There should be room for doubt. How can your current beliefs be so transcendentally correct if you yourself recently believed something very different? How can critics of what you say now be so obviously wrong if you yourself used to be one of them? But Bush is cocksure that active, sometimes military, promotion of American values in the world is a good idea, just as he was, or appeared to be, cocksure of the opposite not long ago."

What Mr. Kinsley apparently forgets is that as President Bush has no need to explain himself to us. Others might have to explain themselves to him, but he doesn't need to answer to anybody. He said so himself, to Bob Woodward. Certainly he doesn't have to explain himself to the American People (at least not till about a year from now).