Lewiston – Sept. 11, 2001, marked the beginning of a new era of American foreign policy, a neoconservative pundit told a Bates College audience.
William Kristol, a leading spokesman for the political right, gave a lecture to a standing-room-only crowd of students, faculty members and area residents Wednesday night.
His talk focused on how the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon by al-Qaida terrorists was “the end of one era and the beginning of another.”
He explained this new era by comparing it to the beginnings of the Cold War. Histories and memoirs from the late 1940s have a great deal of fluidity and uncertainty in them. Such constant surprise “is what it means to live in a new era,” Kristol said.
He deemed the administration of President Bush “a historically interesting presidency.”
Kristol, dressed conservatively in a suit and red tie, told his audience that he would not give a partisan talk or a political talk.
But while seeking to avoid partisan rhetoric, Kristol praised President Bush for having had a “pretty consistent and pretty well-thought-through response” after Sept. 11.
The president is right to “embrace democracy” and to attempt to make it happen in other countries, Kristol said. For example, he said, America “can’t prop up the dictators (of the Middle East) anymore.”
Kristol also expressed his opinion that Bush doesn’t get enough credit for staying in Iraq. It was “an impressive act of leadership” to stay despite all of the criticism and casualties, Kristol said.
He closed the talk by stating that “there are signs that the ice has broken in the Middle East.” To back this up, he pointed to the success of recent democratic elections in Afghanistan, Ukraine, Palestine and, most importantly, Iraq.
According to Kristol, Jan. 30, the day of the Iraqi elections, could well become an extremely significant day in the history of democracy around the world.
Kristol is editor and publisher of the Washington-based political magazine The Weekly Standard, which he helped found in 1995. He is the former leader of Project for the Republican Future and a frequent contributor to Fox News.
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