Every Paper Gets It Right ... Sometimes

What is more special than that warm feeling you get when a newspaper you've come to dread presents something so right it takes your breath away? Or as Cassandra at Villainous Company puts it when writing about a Michael Ignatieff essay on Thomas Jefferson's last letter, says, "What a surprise! For every now and then, the Times can still surprise and delight me. What followed was absolutely amazing." Here it is, with his emphasis:

Despite the exceptional character of American liberty, every American president has proclaimed America's duty to defend it abroad as the universal birthright of mankind. John F. Kennedy echoed Jefferson when, in a speech in 1961, he said that the spread of freedom abroad was powered by ''the force of right and reason''; but, he went on, in a sober and pragmatic vein, ''reason does not always appeal to unreasonable men.'' The contrast between Kennedy and the current incumbent of the White House is striking. Until George W. Bush, no American president -- not even Franklin Roosevelt or Woodrow Wilson -- actually risked his presidency on the premise that Jefferson might be right. But this gambler from Texas has bet his place in history on the proposition, as he stated in a speech in March, that decades of American presidents' ''excusing and accommodating tyranny, in the pursuit of stability'' in the Middle East inflamed the hatred of the fanatics who piloted the planes into the twin towers on Sept. 11.

If democracy plants itself in Iraq and spreads throughout the Middle East, Bush will be remembered as a plain-speaking visionary. If Iraq fails, it will be his Vietnam, and nothing else will matter much about his time in office. For any president, it must be daunting to know already that his reputation depends on what Jefferson once called ''so inscrutable [an] arrangement of causes and consequences in this world.''

Cassandra sums it up just as I would:

This observation brought to mind two themes I have tried to stress over and over: first, that George Bush is doing something both visionary and unprecedented in American history. And second, that several recent studies indicate the establishment of stable, mature democracies is the single best antidote to terrorism.

Read Igntieff's full essay here.