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Recall that when Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, its primary effect was psychological rather than practical. Lincoln "freed" slaves in parts of the country that were not then under federal control. All George W. Bush is trying to do is apply the same standard to the rest of the world.

When you think that way about current events, you're forced to suspect that perhaps the internationalist Left is more insensitive than the allegedly redneck Right. We who think highly of freedom want to share it with the people of the Middle East. Our neighbors, for all their talk of solidarity with the oppressed, would rather not go to all that trouble.

GEOGRAPHY WORKS AGAINST THE American Left, however. "We live in the country where the biggest dreams are born," said the president, high-fiving fellow members of his "faith-based community" with uncharacteristic subtlety while a host of people past and present nodded assent to his claim (you think the Forty-Niners, the Suffragettes, the Freedom Riders, and the immigrants who built Lockheed Martin's famous "Skunk Works" would disagree?) Freedom makes the American Dream possible. And like the Good Book says, much is expected from those to whom much has been given.

The fear on the Left is that if freedom is the universal aspiration that the president keeps saying it is, then there may not be a populist base from which to challenge what this administration is doing to promote its spread. As Nibras Kazimi wrote in the New York Sun about the Iraqi elections, "Eight suicide bombers targeted polling stations in Iraq on Sunday, yet eight million Iraqi chose to vote anyway."

George W. Bush and his administration are doing freedom's math. Sometimes they add wrong. But as Americans -- and, more to the point, as responsible humans -- they can't, and shouldn't, stop. There are precedents for this in natural law and in the Bible, both with respect to how God wants talent used and why the Good Samaritan paid cash up front.

Will Audrey and people like her accept that? I'll have to call around to find out.

topics:
Foreign Policy, Business, Islam, Law, Iraq, United Nations, NATO