Has George Bush lost his will to fight the war on terrorism? After 9/11 the world shook in Afghanistan and Iraq as the United States rose up to smite its enemies, but a lot has happened in the last three years, and much of it is not good. We are threatened in Iraq by Iranian and Syrian machinations which are carried out with impunity. Moqtada al-Sadr leads Iraq closer to civil war, and we hestitate to neutralize him. Israel has Hezbollah, a terrorist organization which has killed hundreds of Americans, on the ropes, and we vote in the U.N. for an otherwise meaningless resolution that allows them to survive. It has become clear that the administration's war against Islamic terrorism has taken a turn away from an aggressively offensive strategy and seems to have morphed into a strategy of merely keeping the Islamo-fascists at arm's length.
The Iraq experience has certainly sapped the will of many Americans. It is not just the drain on our resources and soldiers' lives and well-being that have taken a toll on our resolve, but also the relentless negativism of the media which has refused to acknowledge that anything worthwhile was being accomplished there.
Now, increasingly, we're hearing military voices which were once optimistic, expressing implied skepticism. We're seeing former supporters of the president's policies start to edge closer to the side of the ship. We're seeing Republican politicians up for re-election who lack the fortitude to campaign as supporters of the president and who instead pusillanimously scurry away from him.
Part of the blame for this must lie with the White House which has been notably incapable of articulating its vision and strategy to the general public in a very convincing way. President Bush is probably the least articulate man to occupy the White House in my lifetime, and he apparently thinks that he does himself little good by trying to take his case to the public on a regular basis. I think this is a mistake. People need to be continually reminded of what the nature of the struggle is, what our goals are, what our strategy and tactics are, and how we are doing in the contest. Instead the president, to his detriment, lets a hostile media frame the debate and pretty much have the floor.
Part of the blame must also lie also with a Department of Defense which has never made a compelling counter-case to those who claimed that we needed more troops from the beginning of the post-invasion period. They seem to think that the criticisms are too uninformed to be worth their notice, but they're not. Millions of Americans would like to know why we didn't send in more troops when it became obvious that Iraq was spiralling into an insurgency. Their curiosity goes unsatisfied.
Finally, part of the blame must lie with a political opposition which has been the insurgents' best tool in their war against the coalition forces. Nothing has degraded the ability of the administration to respond appropriately to events on the ground than the relentless sniping, criticism, and carping of the president's political foes. No matter what the president does it gets distorted and maligned by an adversary media and political party that acts as if they really believe the rhetoric of those who proclaim that George Bush is a greater threat to world peace and safety than are the Islamo-fascist jihadis.
Even so, there are glimmers of hope. The president sounded as determined as ever to continue to fight the war against terrorists in his press conference last Monday. Moreover, it may be that our vote for Res. 1701 was a consequence of our assessment that Ehud Olmert was not interesting in prosecuting the war against Hezbollah and was himself hoping that the U.N. would step in to stop it. If that's so, there would have been no point in the U.S. voting against the resolution to end hostilities.
The next several months will tell us a lot about the president's determination. Will we neutralize or eliminate al-Sadr? Will we hold the Iranians to their claim that they're willing to enter into serious negotiations over their nuclear weapons program? Will we offer full support to Israel when the conflict in Lebanon flares up again? If not, then we can conclude that the aggressive phase of the war against Islamic terror is over and we will have pretty much decided to play rope-a-dope for the last two years of the Bush presidency.
