President Bush Gets it Right

“Whatever mistakes have been made in Iraq, the worst mistake would be to think that if we pulled out, the terrorists would leave us alone.”

Last night, on the fifth anniversary of the terrorist attacks against New York and Washington, D.C., President Bush addressed the nation. He used the occasion to emphatically defend the invasion of Iraq, even though, as he stated clearly, “Saddam Hussein was not responsible for the 9/11 attacks.”

The President is correct that withdrawal from Iraq, either phased or immediate, would not end the threat of terrorist attacks against American soil, though that is because Iraq is, or was, utterly tangential to the anti-terror struggle. He is right to pledge that America will see this project through. We may have done the Iraqi people the favor of removing a cruel dictator, but they have paid for this favor with tens of thousands of civilian lives and their entire national infrastructure. To leave now would be to leave promises unfulfilled and a full-scale civil war in our wake. Having attacked them on baseless allegations, we have a moral obligation to repair the damage and secure the country.

Unfortunately, this was the only sentence in the entire address that the President got right. Everything else points to the sad, terrifying truth that we have a deluded madman leading the country.

“The war against this enemy is more than a military conflict,” said the President, and he called it “a war unlike any we have fought before.” It was John Kerry in 2004 who argued that military power alone was the wrong strategy for the War on Terror, and then Vice President Cheney mocked him for wanting a more “sensitive” approach. Yet the President has waged an utterly conventional war, long on firepower and short on strategy, with sensitivity nowhere to be found. “It is the decisive ideological struggle of the 21st century,” Bush elaborated, though apparently he thinks it can be won with bombs and missiles.

Bush described the ideological struggle as “driven by a perverted vision of Islam – a totalitarian ideology that hates freedom, rejects tolerance and despises dissent.” Sounds a lot like the Republican base, to me: their greatest enemy is the American Civil Liberties Union, they decry “tolerance” as oppressive liberal politically correct double-speak for gay marriage, and disagreeing with the President is tantamount to treason.

Bush said that the Iraq war is related to 9/11 because “the regime of Saddam Hussein was a clear threat.” Oh? He’d made no threats against the United States, had no weapons capability and no relationship to Al Qaeda. Hussein wasn’t attacked because he was a threat; he was attacked because he was the easiest target, a household name in America, an unstable despot with deluded ambitions, in charge of a government that would collapse in hours with a ragtag army of ill-trained, ill-equipped, underpaid troops who would dissolve into the dunes as soon as their paychecks stopped. He was attacked precisely because he was the least threatening of all.

The President assailed pre-9/11 foreign policy: “Years of pursuing stability to promote peace had left us with neither. So we changed policies.” Here is the heart of his insanity: if patience and diplomacy don’t get results fast enough, abandon them in favor of mass slaughter and chaos. To win hearts and minds in an ideological conflict, wage conventional warfare with invasion, occupation and cluster bombs. Torture, but call it something else.

“[The war] will not be over until either we or the extremists emerge victorious,” Bush declared. But until the American government chooses to recognize the actual causes for which the terrorists are fighting, instead of lamely asserting “dangerous enemies have declared their intention to destroy our way of life,” and until we recognize that even the best-intentioned American foreign policy has had unforeseen consequences for the middle east, until we begin to respect the wills and cultures of people outside the United States, until we begin to redress the wrongs that have been wrought, we won’t even have taken the first step along Bush’s much-touted path of moderation. It’s one group of extremists against another, and it will never end.