The Fundamental 5th Anniversary Truth: “Most People Want Us to Win”
Note: This and a “post of others’ posts” will be today’s only entries.
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The President met with Paul Gigot of The Wall Street Journal last week (link requires subscription). Here are key excerpts:
Love or loathe President George W. Bush, you can’t say he lacks the courage of his convictions. Down in the polls, with the American people in a sour mood over Iraq, Mr. Bush isn’t changing his policy or hunkering down in the Oval Office. Instead he’s doubling down, investing whatever scarce political capital he has to frame the November contest as a choice over the economy and taxes and especially over his prosecution of the war on terror.
….. The president is certainly in feisty, even passionate, form as I meet him for 40-some minutes Thursday afternoon, coming off the third of his speeches this week on the lessons of 9/11 and a fund-raiser in Savannah, Ga., for GOP House candidate Max Burns. The critics are saying the Bush Doctrine of spreading democracy in the Middle East is dead, but the Beltway coroners must not have talked with Mr. Bush. I pose the frequent complaint that his policy has succeeded only in unleashing the radical Furies in Palestine, Lebanon and Iraq.
“I would remind the critics of the freedom agenda that the policy prior to September 11th was stability for the sake of stability: Let us not worry about the form of government. Let us simply worry about whether or not the world appears stable, whether or not we achieve short-term geopolitical gain,” he says. “And it looked like that policy was working, and, frankly, it made some sense when it came to dealing with the Middle East vis-Ã -vis the Communists.
“The problem with that philosophy, or that foreign policy, was that beneath the surface boiled resentment and hatred, and that resentment and hatred helped fuel this radical Islam, and the radical Islam is what ended up causing the attacks that killed 3,000 of our citizens. So I vowed, and made the decision that not only would we stay on the offense and . . . get these people before they could attack us again. But in the long run the only way to make sure your grandchildren are protected, Paul, is to win the battle of ideas, is to defeat the ideology of hatred and resentment.”
….. The pace of Middle East reform will vary by country, he adds. In Kuwait, they now let women vote. “And so if you look at the Middle East from 10 years to today, there’s been some significant change. Jordan changed, Morocco, the Gulf Coast countries, Qatar,” and of course the nascent democracies of Iraq and Afghanistan.
Regarding Iraq, Mr. Bush is a bit reflective, if also insistent about the costs of failure. “I’m not surprised that this war has created consternation amongst the American people,” he concedes. “The enemy has got the capacity to take — got the willingness to take innocent life and the capacity to do so, knowing full well that those deaths and that carnage will end up on our TV screens. So the American people are now having to adjust to a new kind of bloody war.
“Now, my view of the country is this: Most people want us to win. There are a good number who say, get out now. But most Americans are united in the concept — of the idea of winning.”
….. Mr. Bush is most emphatic when he links Iraq to the larger struggle for Mideast reform. “In the long run, the United States is going to have to make a decision as to whether or not it will support moderates against extremists, reformers against tyrants. And Iraq is the first real test of the nation’s commitment to this ideological struggle. . . . I believe it strongly. One way for the American people to understand the stakes is to envision what happens if America withdraws.” He has been hitting that last point hard in his recent speeches, and it is the linchpin of the argument Mr. Bush will make through November against the Democrats who insist on pulling out immediately.
….. Mr. Bush remains as blunt as ever about the nature of the Iranian regime when I ask if one lesson of North Korea is that Iran must be stopped before it acquires a bomb. “North Korea doesn’t teach us that lesson. The current government [in Iran] teaches that lesson,” Mr. Bush says. “Their declared policies of destruction and their support for terror makes it clear they should not have a nuclear weapon.”
The impression Mr. Bush leaves is of a man deeply engaged on the Iran problem and, like several presidents before him, trying to understand what kind of diplomatic or economic pressure short of military means will change the regime’s behavior. One way or another, Iran will be the major dilemma of the rest of his presidency, and Mr. Bush knows it.
….. “I said in my Inaugural Address, we should end tyranny in the 21st century,” he says. “And I meant that.”
