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Friday, September 8, 2006
No time for Americans to be impatient
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
In the days leading up to Monday’s milestone anniversary of the attacks that took America into the war on terrorism, President Bush spoke to the nation with sparkling clarity on the nature of the threat and the enemy we are fighting.
In another era, it might have been enough. Now, though, the nation has grown so polarized that it’s not certain any evidence will be sufficient to convince the determined left that dominates the national Democratic Party. For every American, for every voter especially, it boils down to a single question: Who do you trust to keep America safe?
On Wednesday, Bush introduced the country to 14 terrorists, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and “the men our intelligence officials believe orchestrated the deaths of nearly 3,000 Americans on Sept. 11th, 2001,” along with “those believed to be responsible for the attack on the USS Cole and an operative believed to be involved in the bombings of American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.”
He presented them as an anniversary payment to “the families of those murdered that day [who] have waited patiently for justice.” And he presented them, too, to the Congress that will decide the rules for the military commissions charged with imposing justice.
Asking Congress to do anything that offers opportunity for political posturing two months before an election is ordinarily a guarantee that nothing of substance will come from it. But in this instance, Bush framed the issue brilliantly.
Congress knows, and the American people are reminded, that in authorizing military commissions for terrorists, as the U.S. Supreme Court directed, the construct of the tribunals may well determine whether the outcome is justice or eternal legal wrangling. With the 14, Congress and the nation can see that the issues are not mere legal abstractions involving proceedings for those who are caught up in a sweep of the battlefield.
Two Bush speeches of the past week are worth reading. One is his White House remarks of last Wednesday. The other was his address here on Thursday to the Georgia Public Policy Foundation. Both are available at www.whitehouse.gov/news.
In each, he attempted to address questions raised by the war’s opponents, including the mission in Iraq. “The fighting has been difficult and it has been bloody, and some say that Iraq is a diversion from the war on terror. The terrorists disagree … Al-Qaida leaders have declared that Baghdad will be the capital of the new caliphate that they wish to establish across the broader Middle East … The terrorists know that the outcome of the war on terror will depend on the outcome in Iraq — and so to protect our own citizens, the free world must succeed in Iraq.”
The war on terror, he said, “is more than a military conflict. It is the decisive ideological struggle of the 21st century. And we’re only in the opening stages.”
That is the truth. The question, though, has always been whether Americans have the patience for wars that, five years after Sept. 11, are still in the opening stages. The temptation is to think not.
That would, of course, be a disaster for the nation. However premature abandonment of Iraq is presented — as redeployment, early withdrawal or repositioning — the defeat will be starkly evident to the entire world. This nation, then, begins a long journey into appeasement as national security policy.
One of the great national blunders of the past 30 years was to abandon the draft. It had its problems, of course, with fairness and with military usefulness. But it forced young men to come to terms with their own values and to become a part of something more important than the individual. Many of them hated the military. But in an important and necessary way, it connected them to the country.
Now this war is treated as a Super Bowl. Every commentator is an armchair general advising the secretary of defense and the president on the appropriate strategy for the war, all the while insisting that the “mission” be defined so that we know whether we are halfway there, a third or some other checklist number. And we position ourselves, too, as arbitrators, almost impartial, determining which threat is legitimate and which isn’t.
The danger here is that America will quit too early because an impatient populace demands instant results. There’s no checklist for Iraq. When the young democracy can survive on its own, it’s time to leave. Not before.
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