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Greatness Comes from Goodness: The paleo-right in America, of which George W. Bush is a reformed member, never tired of expressing its derision for “nation-building,” questioning its value to U.S. interests and deriding the lives thus saved as so many drops in an ocean of misery. In fact, our nation-building exercises have not always been planned, accepted, and executed intelligently, but those that were saved thousands of lives. There simply isn’t another force on earth that can move and deliver the resources that the U.S. military delivered after the Tsunami. In light of that effort, and the free elections in Iraq and Afghanistan, those who reflexively denounce the U.S. military as a force of oppression are struggling against a mighty tide of evidence to the contrary.

Perhaps de Tocqueville, that last pro-American Frenchman, had a point.

And Pat Buchanan doesn’t. Dave at No Illusions has some fascinating and nearly unreported poll numbers about how Tsunami relief has changed public opinion in Indonesia, a country that until recently was alarmingly sypathetic to terror. Read these numbers from Iraq, too.