Eventually, I think, Bush is one of few presidents who has actually sought to transform America’s place in the world — and out of necessity, what with the 9/11 attacks.

He is a president that is attempting to establish a democratic-oriented beachhead in a part of the world where nobody thinks it’s possible.

Now, we’ve had our arguments with him about doing that: “Should that be the priority or should it happen after victory?” Some of us thought, “Yeah, I love the idea,” because his theory is all human beings are the same.

We all have a yearning spirit to be free. We don’t like to be constrained.

I agree with that a hundred percent, but I think focusing on that first rather than achieving victory first may be a strategic blunder.

But if he pulls it off — if this happens, if Iraq becomes what his vision for it is — then historians down the road are going to write tremendous things about Bush and the way he persisted.

Here he is supposedly a lame-duck president, and he is not acting like it at all. He does not portray at any time any of this stuff. The personal attacks, the policy attacks, the opposition to his primary policy of the war on terror, he never betrays that it bothers him personally.

He just keeps plugging away at it — some people say “stubbornly,” or what have you. But at least with Bush in this regard, in this one area of his administration, he has not wavered on it at all.

I’ll tell you, given where the Democrats have been, thank God he hasn’t.

This could have been a disaster, had a lesser president with the same policies caved in the middle of it. We would have already been experiencing more terrorist attacks.

We have had none since 9/11.