A Look Back: 2005 Bush inagural speech out of step with history

Eight years ago, George W. Bush stepped forward to deliver his second inaugural address, a speech that, in retrospect, seems completely out of step with history.
The speech was a naïve neo-con treatise that seemed wholly irrelevant nearly from the day Bush delivered it. In 2005, the Iraq war was going badly and soon the signs that we could not reasonably withdraw our forces from a nation as fragile as Afghanistan were evident.
And the most obvious sign of the times was that Americans began paying less attention to the daily developments in these two conflicts. That war weariness made the prospect of launching a third war nearly preposterous.

Yet, Bush sounded the call, telling the nation that America stood at the ready to establish freedom in every corner of the world. This, he proclaimed, is "the calling of our time."
The same compassionate conservative who in the 2000 campaign said he would not allow the U.S. to become the policeman of the world said five years later that America was ready to put a cop on the beat on every continent, if necessary, to advance the cause of freedom.

At the time of his second inaugural, of course, the Bush message that "we've got to fight them over there so we don't have to fight them over here" still resonated with many
Americans.
"For as long as whole regions of the world simmer in resentment and tyranny prone to ideologies that feed hatred and excuse murder, violence will gather and multiply in destructive power, and cross the most defended borders, and raise a mortal threat," he said at his 2005 inauguration.
In the years since, the idea that Saddam Hussein was ever a mortal threat willing to attack American soil has long since faded. The suggestion that, after the removal of al-Qaida from the barren lands of Afghanistan, the U.S. should stay on for many years to rebuild that nation and beat back the Taliban now seems like a fatally flawed plan that spun out of control.

"We are led, by events and common sense, to one conclusion: The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world," Bush said.

"So it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.

"This is not primarily the task of arms, though we will defend ourselves and our friends by force of arms when necessary."

That was 2005. In 2013, after the ups and downs in Afghanistan, after the continued "post-war" violence in Iraq, after the frustration of trying to halt the Iranian nuclear program, after the complex cross-currents of the Arab Spring, it seems fairly obvious, in hindsight, that no one, not even the United States, can serve as the white knight that rides into town, saves freedom and leaves without consequences.