Residual Forces

Barry Casselman has a great piece in the Washington Times.

AN AMERICAN EAGLE IN AUTUMN

It is the final political season for President George W. Bush.
After November, he will begin the process leading to the day in
January, 2009 when he will become irreversibly a former president
of the United States.

But his season as president is not yet over. He has two and
one-half years to preside over the American government,
regardless of the results this November.

President Bush faces momentous difficulties. Many Americans
still do not realize the extent to which the United States is locked
into a protracted and dangerous war with islamo-fascism.

After we were attacked on September 11, 2001, U.S. public
opinion overwhelmingly favored the pursuit of our attackers in
their base in Afghanistan. President Bush and his advisors realized,
however, that this would not solve the new long-term threat now
posed by an enemy determined not only to remove our presence
from the Middle East and destroy the state of Israel, but also to
humiliate and overwhelm Western culture with an aggressive and
feudal totalitarian culture of their own.

A war was initiated in Iraq to remove a bestial dictator and to
change this totalitarian nature of the Middle East. Virtually
everyone concedes Saddam Hussein’s cruelty, but many in the
U.S. and most in Europe resisted the boldness and risk the
president took to alter the chemistry of persistent feudalism in
the Middle Eastern Islamic world.

Unfortunately, President Bush at the outset muddled his true
purpose with dire warnings of so-called “weapons of mass
destruction” which were not found after the war. What we did
find was absolute evidence of a regime so venal and cruel that it
is difficult to understand how it was able to persist for so many
decades. Opponents rightly contend that even destroying this
unspeakable regime was not alone worth the risk we took, the
lives we have lost, and the huge expense we have made. But the
president and his advisors had a much larger strategic purpose.
They saw the necessity, given the ominous aggression of the
terrorists, to change the nature of the Middle Eastern political
landscape which had been altered primarily by a vast and
seemingly unending infusion of cash from the sale of its
petroleum resources to the rest of the world. This infusion
permitted Middle Easter regimes to arm themselves with
sophisticated weaponry and to pursue the acquisition of
nuclear weapons. It is instructive to point out to  Western
apologists for these regimes that they did not use their new
economic resources to provide civiliam infrastructure,
universal education and health care to their populations,
including the long-suffering Palestinian refugees in their midst.

His opponents continue to demonize President Bush. But I
continue to think his strategic vision is the best one, and the
risk he took was a valid one. The struggle is not over in the
Middle East, contrary to the perennial naysayers, but it is a
time when outcomes are uncertain and our purpose is not
transparent. The president and his advisors, principally
Defence Secretary Rumsfeld, tried to follow-up their
successful military campaign with minimal military force.
I think this was mainly due to their lack of personal military
experience. Colin Powell’s doctrine of “overwhelming force”
in hindsight (and in the foresight of military history) was
much more likely to succeed.

But given the chance to reverse our policy through the
presidential election on 2004, American voters chose,
intuitively, to continue the president’s course. As I have
written many times in recent months, wars are not easily and
neatly fought. From Manassas to the Battle of the Bulge to
Viet Nam, there are battles lost and grievous mistakes made.
It has been this way as long as we have records of history.

Only 16 years after we unilaterally withdrew from Viet Nam,
world communism collapsed. It did not collapse from war on
a battlefield, but it did collapse from the determination of
Western democratic capitalism to contain it until it fell apart
from its own economic contradictions. In the case of the
Middle East, the continued infusion of billions of dollars into
the economies of hostile regimes from the sale of petroleum,
and the aggression of the terrorists offers no such simple
prospect. I have suggested that George W. Bush came to the
right vision and the right strategy after September 11. In this
he has served, and continues to serve, the greatest interests of
the United States and its values of democracy and economic
freedom. This gift, however, has not been matched with equal
gifts of communication to the American people. In an
environment of uncertainly, terrible images of war and
destruction, and a lack of understanding of our foreign
policy purposes, it is not surprising that most Americans are
unhappy, anxious and unwilling to be optimistic about our
military confrontations which seem to have no end.

During the campaign of 2006, Mr. Bush has been touring the
country in support of his party’s candidates for Congress. As
a sitting, albeit unpopular, president, he raises large sums for
their campaigns. But his remarks on these occasions, often
given to private and sympathetic audiences,.has been a
restatement of his resolve to carry on the global struggle
against the contemporary threat of terrorism. He and his
advisors are showing new flexibility in their determination to
defeat this enemy even as some leaders of the opposition
party are clamoring for immediate withdrawal from Iraq. The
American voters are deepy troubled and weary of war, but I
don’t think they have any intention to appease the enemy
and surrender the field. (Some Democrats, including Senator
Joe Biden, are searching for new ways to hold the field, reject
appeasement, yet realize American goals and ideals. But for
now, they are being shouted down.)

This is why November may not be so dark for the president
and his party after all. Mr. Bush has been telling personal
stories to his audiences during the campaign of 2006, trying
to enable them belatedly to understand what he is doing.
Reverting to his native Texglish, and eschewing the more
formal contemporary English of so many of his colleagues,
Mr. Bush talks of his recent experiences as president. One
of the most touching is when he talks about the books he
has been reading about his predecessors, particularly the
best of them, Washington, Lincoln and Franklin
Roosevelt. All of them were war president, too. His
identity with Lincoln is the most revealing. Lincoln
struggled with an unpopular war, was demonized in the
press, and he made many mistakes in his choice of generals
and battles. Lincoln’s original stated purpose to preserve
the Union evolved into the abolition of slavery, and when
he was on the verge of winning, he put it all into what
author Ron White and others call, his greatest speech, the
second inaugural. Mr. Bush has read Mr. White’s
remarkable book (”Lincoln’s Greatest Speech”) as I
recently have, and he communicates his own anguish,
realizing he has no less responsibility and purpose as our
greatest president, but knowing he lacks Lincoln’s
extraaordinary gift of speech. Unlike Lincoln, who wrote
his own speeches, Mr. Bush has delivered his best ones
with the aid of a superb speechwriter.  Even so, he has
so far failed to explain fully to the American people his
grand strategy and purpose.

But he is an eagle in the autumn of his presidency,
stubbornly holding to his vision and overwhelming
responsibility, determined to finish his watch holding
to his deepest values and ideals. Eventually, those who
oppose him, and even those who may despise him now,
are likely to recognize and honor his lonely and historic
journey.