Opinion/Mark Steyn: I picked up the Village Voice for the first time in years this week. Couldn't resist the cover story: "The Eve Of Destruction: George W Bush's Four-Year Plan To Wreck The World". Oh, dear. It's so easy to raise expectations at the beginning of a new presidential term.
The Village Voice is New York's "alternative" newspaper, but when it comes to the world's most cunning moron they're happy to peddle the conventional wisdom.
Still, at least he's got a four-year plan. Over on the Democratic bench, world-wise they don't seem to have given things much thought.
The differences were especially stark this past seven days: in the first half of the week, Senate Dems badgered the incoming Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice - culminating in the decision of venerable West Virginia Democrat porkmeister Robert C. Byrd to delay the incoming thereof. Don't ask me why.
Senator Byrd, a former Klu Klux Klan man, is taking a stand over states' rights, or his rights over State, or some such. Whatever the reason, the sight of an old Klansman blocking a little coloured girl from Birmingham, Alabammy, from getting into her office contributed to the general retro vibe that hangs around the Democratic Party these days. Even "Eve Of Destruction" is a 40-year-old hippie dirge.
The Democrats' big phrase is "exit strategy". Time and again, their senators demanded that Secretary Rice tell 'em what the "exit strategy" for Iraq was. The correct answer is: there isn't one, and there shouldn't be one, and it's a stupid expression.
The more polite response came in the president's inaugural address: "The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands."
This week's election in Iraq will go not perfectly but well enough, and in time the number of US troops needed there will be reduced, and in some more time they'll be reduced more dramatically, and one day there'll be none at all, just a small diplomatic presence that functions a bit like the old British ministers did in the Gulf emirates for centuries - they know everyone and everything, and they keep the Iraqi-American relationship running smooth enough that Baghdad doesn't start looking for other foreign patrons. In other words: no exit. It's a silly - and implicitly defeatist - phrase.
If you want an example of "exit strategy" thinking, look no further than the southern "border".
As I mentioned en passant last year, a century ago American policy in Mexico was all exit and no strategy. That week's President-for-Life gets out of hand? Go in, whack him, exit, and let the locals figure out who gets to be the new bad guy. Repeat as necessary. As a result, Mexico remained an economic basket-case and a swamp of corruption, and three-quarters of its population are now living in California and Arizona. And, believe me, they've got no exit strategy at all.
By contrast, the British didn't go into India with an "exit strategy" - or, come to that, Ireland. And, though they may have eventually exited, they left a greater mark than the Yanqui did in Mexico. Which looks like the smarter approach now? "Most Indians Say 'Thumbs Up' To Second Bush Term," reported the Christian Science Monitor this week, "and no, that doesn't mean something rude in Indian culture."
The problem with "exit strategy" fetishisation is that these days, everywhere's Mexico. If you've got a few hundred bucks and a bank card you can come to America and blow it up. Everyone lives next door now. 9/11 demonstrated that the paradox of America - the isolationist superpower - was no longer tenable.
That was what George W. Bush accomplished so superbly in his speech: the idealistic position - spreading liberty - is now also the realist one - if you don't spread it, in the end your own liberty will be jeopardised. "It is the policy of the United States," said the president, "to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world."
Wow. By the end of his second term? Well, not necessarily. But what matters is that the president has repudiated the failed "realism" that showers billions on a "friendly" dictator like Egypt's Mubarak and is then surprised when one of his subjects flies a passenger jet into the World Trade Centre.
You'd think the Democratic Party and the Europeans would welcome this: they spent the days after September 11th yakking endlessly about the need to address "root causes". This is the root cause, the only one that matters.
Saudi Arabia isn't poor; shovelling more money at the House of Saud isn't going to make any difference to the heart of the problem: it's the most illiberal, and thereby dysfunctional, region in the world - and it exports its dysfunctions. You can't eliminate all dictatorships overnight. But by declaring it the long-term goal, you serve notice on Mubarak, Assad, Mugabe and ultimately the Chinese - and you let them know that as long as they delay the inevitable they're not quite respectable.
That's an important symbolic break in American foreign policy.
There's a big lesson here for Democrats and Europeans that goes way beyond the merits of destabilising Iran or Syria. On September 11th, the world came unspun. There's no shame in acknowledging, as Condi Rice did last week, that previous policy - Republican and Democrat - toward the Middle East is wrong. But there's something silly and immature about opponents who, from John Kerry to Robert C. Byrd, can't get beyond spin, grandstanding and debater's points. If the president's speech yoked idealism and realism, that doesn't leave much for dissenting Dems except their own peculiar mélange of cynicism and delusion. Not a winning combination.