TAKING BUSH SERIOUSLY

It must have a been scatological moment for dictators around the world, as they soiled themselves watching George Bush’s inaugural address on global television. They must have known this was coming, for GW has been telegraphing his punches for a long time.

That’s why they put all their hopes on GW’s defeat last November. They knew John Kerry would never come after them. Now they know George Bush will.

The appropriate reaction to Bush’s Inaugural Address yesterday is: awe-struck. This was a Babe Ruth moment, pointing to where he wanted to hit the ball and swinging for the bleachers. I couldn’t help laughing when I read Peggy Noonan’s petty, small-minded essay in the Wall Street Journal this morning, grouchily complaining about Bush’s “mission inebriation.” She didn’t like the speech because it was so much better than any she wrote for Ronald Reagan.

I saw three of Peggy’s former colleagues – White House speechwriters for President Reagan – at one of the Inaugural Balls last night, and they all agreed that Bush’s Second Inaugural will be seen as one of the historically greatest of any American President.

So Peggy can cluck, and British newspapers can smirk, but anyone with an ounce of common sense had better start perceiving the reality behind the Left’s myth about GW. You can be sure folks like Hugo Chavez and Aleksandr Lukashenko have no such illusions.

For they know, as do their fellow dictators such as Robert Mugabe, Kim Il-Sung, Than Shwe, Ayatollah Khameini, and Fidel Castro, that there is now a bulls-eye painted on them by someone scary-smart and scary-serious who happens to be the most powerful man in the world.

So it is about time everyone start taking George W. Bush really seriously. No more pretending he is dumb or drawing cartoons depicting him as a diminutive fool with big ears. All that is, like, so passé, so… quaint.

Condi Rice specified GW’s hit list earlier this week in her testimony to a clueless Barbara Boxer. She named seven “Outposts of Tyranny” – North Korea, Iran, Cuba, Belarus, Zimbabwe, Burma, and by clear implication, Venezuela. Yet the list goes far beyond these Seven Sinners.

GW, for example, has given a green light for Porter Goss at the CIA to help friends like Colombia’s Alvaro Uribe go after the FARC narco-communist guerrillas in unorthodox ways. Last month on December 13, Colombian agents working with sympathetic anti-Chavez Venezuelan military officers, kidnapped FARC leader Rodrigo Granda in broad daylight in downtown Caracas.

Chavez has been helping FARC for years, and never dreamed the sanctuary he provided its leaders in his own capital city would be clandestinely invaded. Now he knows how determined Colombia is to stand up to him – and that a number of his officers are now on Porter’s payroll.

Or take Seymour Hersh’s now-infamous New Yorker article, The Coming Wars , claiming that the Pentagon was sending in Special Forces teams into eastern Iran from Afghanistan for covert operations. This story is such a wonderful plant that even Tony Blankley of the Washington Times was taken in, demanding that Hersh be prosecuted for disclosing classified military operations.

Eastern Iran is a desert, the Dasht-e Kavir (Desert of Salt) and the Dasht-e Lut (Desert of Stone). Iran’s nuclear facilities, like at Arak and Natanz, are in central Iran south of Tehran. SepcOps teams would be sent in via Iraq, not Afghanistan. The story was planted by Porter with Hersh – a left-wing sleaze whose claims could be easily denied – in order to rattle Iran’s cage.

Did it ever. Iranian government newspapers were stupid enough to explode in denunciations of Hersh’s article, and the speech Iranian leader Ayatollah Khameini gave in response to it was nothing short of off-the-wall hysterical. Exactly what Porter and GW wanted. And yes, a boatload of covert ops are being launched in Iran, but not like Hersh describes.

Syria and Belarus are now sophisticated PsyOps targets. Under Secretary of State Richard Armitage worked Bashar al-Asad over in a recent visit to Damascus with a laundry list of demands, followed by a raft of leaked press stories hinting that GW has ordered US military strikes on Iraqi terrorist sanctuaries in Syria, starting early February. Most importantly, Porter Goss isn’t taken in as was George Tenet with Syria’s game of “cooperation” between US and Syrian intelligence agencies.

In Belarus, Alexandr Lukashenko knows Ukraine’s Orange Revolution is being exported across his southern border. Putin is not going to come to his rescue. He has nowhere to run and nowhere to hide.

I could go on regarding different countries – but we’ve got to see the forest Bush is looking at, not just individual trees. Bush envisions a worldwide democratic revolution. It’s easier to take down say, Than Shwe’s dictatorship in Burma, or any of his counterparts, with a global full court press against the entire phenomenon of unelected governments.

You can expect the next Bush Bombshell to be the creation of an organizational vehicle to accomplish the global revolution GW wants. It will start with Administration comparisons of the United Nations to the League of Nations, the UN’s defunct precursor. This will be followed by a proposal for an additional or alternative organization of nations – membership to be exclusive to democracies.

A name has not been settled on for this proposed global alliance of democracies – but you can immediately see the first giant hurdle: China must be excluded.

Condi can condemn Belarus as an outpost of tyranny, and GW can advocate liberty for the world’s petty dictatorships, but in the end, it all comes down to China’s oppression of over 20% of humanity.

I think that, more than any president America has ever had, George W. Bush is a man who means what he says and says what he means. I think that ultimately his inaugural address yesterday was directed at China. What he says and what he does regarding China will be the test of his resolve for “global liberty.” I do not expect to be disappointed. George Bush is a very serious man – and China’s leaders, like those of other tyrannical outposts, know they must take him very, very seriously.