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Rudy Guiliani said it best at the RNC: America is now waking up to a war begun with the bombing in Munich, Germany, in 1972.  Whether you accept that particular date is irrelevant to his point that the forces of oppression have been attacking free nations for decades.  To the liberals who ask ‘why’, we can answer very easily: because the spread of liberty is a threat to authoritarian rule.  And the United States, alone among nations, was the creator and the harbinger of that liberty.

A simple reminder from Civics class: the great thing about the US system of government is not only that it is a democracy.  Democracy has been around for thousands of years, and always susceptible to the tyranny of the majority.  What our founders did right was to make it a constitutional democracy, the extra twist that turned our autonomy into true liberty.  Our sovereign territories made a covenant with each other to the constitution, and bound ourselves to one law and one fate under the law - a thing never before done in history. 

Disputes between sovereign states became issues for lawyers in a courtroom, not soldiers in a battlefield.  And there is no dispute that because of our unity under the law, our strength was multiplied.  We spoke to the world with one voice, defeated every foe, and became the greatest nation on earth.

At the end of World War II, with a vow to keep our soldiers from having fought in vain, the US took the lead and initiated a global plan to keep such a war from happening again.  Modeled after our own system, the idea was to create and grow a ‘critical mass’ of free nations, unified by covenant with each other to a single law, against which the forces of oppression could not hope to stand.  We asked the free nations of the globe to join us in our compact, and they responded. 

The United States founded the United Nations, and patterned its charter after the US constitution.

This is the weapon we launched against our enemies, and it has become more powerful.  The UN has since quadrupled in size.  Nations from across the globe came to stand with us in our struggle to bring liberty to a broken world.  And our enemies grew worried.  If the date is 1972, then so be it: they began to attack free nations, using any means at their disposal, while they still had support.  Many of our own allies endured waves of withering attacks over the course of the last decades, yet held fast in our covenant to each other, and remained true to the rule of law. 

We continued to grow and become stronger, as our foes became more isolated and desperate.  Even Russia struggled to join the refuge of international law, proving ultimately the success of our power.

But if, as Mr. Guiliani suggested, we had been asleep to this fight, we must agree also that we had forgotten our own goal, and the weapon we launched so many years ago.  The UN has not been a very exciting topic in our times of sensationalism.  And recently, some US conservatives have begun to imagine a threat in the growing strength of the UN.  These suspicions gained traction in the 1980’s, when the UN - never intended as a rubber stamp for US foreign policy - disagreed with president Reagan’s decision to create and deploy terrorists as a weapon against the Soviet Union.  The subsequent partisan anger spread into the mainstream with the help of sneering talk shows and conspiracy theories.  A marked change showed in our language: many began to refer to the UN as ‘them’, not ‘us’.

And then 9/11 changed everything, as is often said.  And perhaps one could agree that the UN is no longer a useful creation of the US in a post-9/11 world.  Perhaps one could even believe that an alliance of free nations is no longer necessary in a world dominated by US military power, were it not for the fact that the ‘vision’ put forward by Mr. Bush at his recent convention and extolled by so many was exactly the same as the vision which created the UN in the first place.

Mr. Bush’s vision is precisely that we create and lead an alliance of free nations against which the forces of oppression will not stand.  This is his great plan.  But now, where will he get this alliance?  Who will join it, now that they‘ve been shut out?  Most of the free nations now stand explicitly against the US. 

And where’s the starting point of this alliance?  Does it consist only of those who joined us in Iraq, excluding those who joined in Afghanistan?  Or Gulf War I?  Or Kosovo?  Will Iraq join us when they are free, and will we kick them aside later if they dare to disagree with a future president’s actions?  If Britain disagrees with our next war, will we exclude them as we just excluded France?

And who’s to say that in another 50 years, when this ‘new’ alliance gains the kind of power Mr. Bush now describes as necessary to our security, that a future president won’t have a new power struggle with this alliance, decide to destroy it and start over yet again?

Mr. Bush said that we will stand by our friends.  But how can we take this, when he so visibly attempts to destroy the alliance of our ‘old’ friends, the ones who stood shoulder to shoulder with America and its presidents over all those long, hard years?

Bush lawyers openly call our treaties nothing more than words on paper to be discarded at will.  This is the basis of an alliance?  This is the power of a covenant and a compact with the US?  Who would be stupid enough to make such a pact, when it is clear that there is no stability to it, when one president alone can so easily destroy it?

It is common to hear that the UN just ties our hands, that it has become simply a cumbersome bureaucratic body.  It is true that democracy requires more than ‘might makes right‘.  But as US history has proven to the world, a covenant to the rule of law is the very tie that binds, not binds that tie our hands.  It is the source of our strength, not a hindrance to it.

Mr. Bush said about Iraq that he ‘tried diplomacy’ with the UN.  Recall that in fact, before he went to speak to them on the issue, he had already said that our allies’ voice were irrelevant to him.

He said that he ‘would not trust a madman’ when he made his decision to invade, which must have been insulting to Hans Blix and his team of investigators who told Powell before the invasion that it was ‘highly doubtful’ that Iraq had any WMD. 

In fact, any who paid attention knows the whole UN debacle was just a power struggle on behalf of those inside the US who fear a strong alliance of free nations bound to the rule of law.  This is no secret, and was openly praised before the Iraq invasion and throughout the Republican convention.  Their motto: we don’t need a permission slip to defend our country.  But in the meantime, they also neglected to demonstrate to anyone that Iraq was a particular threat to the US.

This is why the free nations think Mr. Bush no longer desires to lead them, but to rule them.  His arrogance was not found in his walk, but in his contempt for the compacts to the rule of law made by former US presidents, and 50 years of hardships borne by our allies because of them.

This is why our troops are dying in Iraq, when they didn’t in our last three military adventures.  This is why our allies stood with us in Gulf War I, Kosovo, Afghanistan, but not Iraq.  The world plainly believes that Mr. Bush wants to weaken the greatest democratic alliance ever made, because he thinks it is a threat to US self-determination.  Forget about terrorists - the free nations will not endorse an expansion of the war on terror on these terms, whether or not Bush wins the coming election, and now they wait for the US public to decide.

If we endorse this plan, we may have wider latitude in choosing preventive wars, but we break our bonds with the world community and pay for our flexibility in American lives, for we will fight the next war alone, and the next one, and the next one. 

If not, our added strength and shared burden comes for the price of following the modicum requirements of our own compacts - a world, say, in which facts are checked before final decisions are forced upon our neighbors. 

This is our choice, whether we like it or not, and also why it is so important.

Mr. Bush said he will change course and start a new alliance from scratch, a new flexibility bought with the blood of US soldiers and isolation in the world.

Mr. Kerry has said he will stay the course and return to our old alliance and to the covenant of law which gave us strength in the first place.

Our decision will have enormous ramifications.  Choose wisely.