Ok,  let’s remember this: Ethics and Public Policy Center.   It’s yet another “thinktank” with designs on constructing their own golden calf. A “neocon” center with all of the expansionist and grandiose notions of “expansion of American power and values”.

Accelerating the transition to responsible and responsive government in the Arab Islamic world was the grand strategic idea that impelled the United States to bring the “foreigner’s gift” to Iraq. The implementation of that idea has been, in many respects, a failure thus far; but the idea itself was a noble one. And the prescription it embodied was correct. As Bernard Lewis has argued, “the war against terror and the quest for freedom are inextricably linked, and neither can succeed without the other.” We may be sure that the war against terror will suffer commensurately if the Iraqi phase of the quest for freedom and a new politics in the Arab Islamic world is frustrated. No one—in the Congress, in the churches, in the academy, or on the street—can wish for that and still claim the mantle of moral seriousness.

GEORGE WEIGEL is a senior fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center. His new book, Deserving Victory: An Open Letter to the American People, will be published in November.

Source: FIRST THINGS: A Journal of Religion, Culture, and Public Life