In Iraq, Bush sought a legacy as liberator

At long last President Bush has provided some significant insight into his costly commitment of fighting forces and treasure to the war in Iraq.

"I'd like to be a president {known} as somebody who liberated 50 million people and helped achieve peace," Bush told an interviewer in remarks released by the White House on Saturday. The recorded interview is to be stored in the Library of Congress and in a museum to be devoted to the Bush presidency.

A few questions are in order. When did the freeing of millions of people in foreign lands become an imperative for an American president? Was this the original intent of Bush's invasion of Iraq? Or did this become an expedient explanation after the Iraq war, a war of choice, became hugely unpopular with the American people?

Few have questioned Bush's overthrow of teh taliban regime in Afghanistan, which had given safe haven to al qaida leaders as they plotted the 9/11 attacks.

Bush's initial explanation of the follow-up invasion of Iraq was that dictator Saddam Hussaein possessed large stores of chemical weapons, and had shown a willingness to use them. Some chemical weapons were, indeed, found in Iraq, but not enough to persuade skeptics that they posed a serious threat to the United States or its interests.

As the years passed, and the Iraq war dragged on, popular disapproval of the war rose and approval ratings for Bush fell.

There is no precedemt for America to wage war simply to free foreign populations from unpopular regimes. Previously, that has happened as a consequence of American forces toppling regimes that had invaded American territory, as Japan did at Peael Harbor, or posed an existential threat to this country, as Germany did by waging war on commercial shipping during the runup to World War II.

As recently as a half-century ago, the limits on exercise of American power were clearly understood, having been at issue in one of the great individual confrontations of our time.

After leading American forces across Korea all the way to the Chinese border, Gen. Douglas MacArthur argued that he should push on into Communist China, and that the United States should even resort to the atomic bomb to subdue the regime.

President Harry Truman said no. Then MacArthur took his campaign public, and Truman removed him from command.

In recent decades, however, American politicians have become more and more brazen about using government hammers and enticements to pursue social engineering within our borders, seeking reults that the free market system had failed to provide. The current financial turmoil resulted directly from a 30-year campaign by Congress and outside groups such as ACORN to force banks to grant mortgages to borrowers who couldn't meet free market standards of credit-worthiness. The Bush administration contributed to the debacle through the Federal Reserve's long drive to lower interest rates.

Now, it appears that the Bush administration was pursuing social engineering even more ambitiously by toppling the government of Iraq, which had not directly attacked or threatened the United States.

There is no light at the end of the tunnel. Barack Obama was elected president notwithstanding indications that he would intrude government even more ambitiously than Bush into social and economic affairs that the framers thought should be guided by market forces.

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