A single idea dominated President George W. Bush's second inaugural address: the words free, freedom and liberty. Together he used them 48 times.
But what is freedom? It's an abstract concept that means something different to everybody. After years of column writing and debating, I've found that frequently many disagreements and arguments come down to people having different definitions of an abstract concept.
In the abortion debate, it's the definition of life. In the capital punishment debate, it's the definition of justice. In the Iraq war debate, it's the definition of weapons of mass destruction. In the Alberto Gonzales debate, it's the definition of torture. In the sex ed debate, it's the definition of abstinence-only and comprehensive.
In religious debates, it's often the definition of Christian and God.
Just because we all speak English does not mean we speak the same language. Often we have to work hard to truly understand what each other says.
What matters in this instance regarding Bush and freedom is determining how he alone defines it. Given much of the other rhetoric in the speech about tyranny, one reading of it is that, despite the mess in Iraq, Bush will push for more wars in other countries with the hopes of creating more freedom.
According to the Los Angeles Times, Robert Kagan, a neoconservative foreign policy scholar said of the speech, "This is real neoconservatism. It would be hard to express it more clearly. If people were expecting Bush to rein in his ambitions and enthusiasms after the first term, they are discovering that they were wrong."
In the post-Sept. 11, 2001, era, progressives have found unlikely bedfellows with many paleoconservatives.
For example, on Thursday, MSNBC commentator Joe Scarborough accused Pat Buchanan of sounding like Susan Sontag. That has to be a first.
Dimitri Simes, President of the Nixon Center, a realist foreign policy institute, said "If Bush means it literally, then it means we have an extremist in the White House. I hope and pray that he didn't mean it ... [and] that it was merely an inspirational speech, not practical guidance for the conduct of foreign policy."
The president's father tried to deflect such interpretations: "People want to read a lot into it -- that this means new aggression or newly assertive military forces. That's not what that speech is about. It's about freedom," he said according to the Associated Press.
Sorry, 41, but that tells us absolutely nothing about 43's definition of freedom. All we have is this path of logic: Bush wants all people under tyranny to have freedom. Bush claims that the Iraqis now have freedom. In order for them to have that freedom, we had to invade Iraq. Thus in order for all people under tyranny to have freedom, we have to invade their countries.
Now, according to my definition of freedom, the Iraqis are not yet free. When your country is on the verge of civil war, when foreign troops occupy your land, when insurgents commit acts of violence daily and when you're in danger of being murdered when you go to the polls to vote, you are not free. The tyranny of Saddam Hussein has been replaced by the tyranny of violence and chaos.
One last definition seems appropriate, that of insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
Write to David at swimminginbrokenglass@gmail.com
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