The Undiscovered Victory

Just as George W. Bush's economic policies are bearing rich and ample fruit almost totally under the public radar, so his successes in the Fourth World War (aka the "Global War on Terror") - which are the foundation of the further military campaigns that have to be undertaken if it is to be brought to a swift and successful conclusion - continue to be buried under a perpetual avalanche of barking defeatism from the DisLoyal Opposition and their Extreme Media propagandists with narry a peep from the White House.

And the GOP natives are getting restless - and vocal.

David Frum, for instance:

By now it should be clear that President Bush's words on the subject of Iraq have ceased connecting with the American public. His speech yesterday to the Veterans of Foreign Wars is the latest - and one of the most serious to date - manifestations of the problem. The polls tell us that the American public is losing heart. A substantial majority (56%) now say that the war is going either "very badly" or "moderately badly." More than 50% now regard the war as a mistake. One-third want an immediate and total withdrawal. Maybe most fatefully: a plurality now say that they believe that the President deliberately misled the country into war.

Supporters of the war can argue that the public is mistaken, overly influenced by biased news reporting. Yes, yes. But mistaken public opinion is just as powerful as sound public opinion.

Again, supporters of the war can do our bit to try to change minds. But the biggest megaphone in the country belongs to President Bush - and much depends on whether he uses it well or badly.

He is using it very badly indeed.

We can segue seemlessly into Jeb Babbin's American Spectator column, also from yesterday:

Wartime presidents must lead their people. In this, Mr. Bush has fallen flat. It's not enough to say we must complete the mission. It's not nearly enough to repeat the truism that our soldiers are performing bravely, with skill and humaneness not seen before in history. As important as those facts are, they pale in comparison to what we aren't told: What is the mission? Who are our enemies, and where are they? How are we going to attack and defeat them? What, specifically, are they trying to do and how are we going to stop them? We know none of those things from the President. To say what he says again and again - without saying much else - leaves wartime opinion-making to Vladimir Putin, Russell Feingold, Chuck Hagel and Cindy Sheehan.

Wartime presidents have to tell our people what is going on, and why. They have to ask people to make sacrifices and explain, in compelling terms, why those sacrifices are essential to the future of the nation. And though he is not failing in the war planning task Mr. Bush is on the road to making as much of a hash of it as LBJ did in Vietnam.

Mr. Frum cites a specific, and very recent, example:

Again and again during the Bush presidency - and yesterday most recently - the President will agree to give what is advertised in advance as a major speech. An important venue will be chosen. A crowd of thousands will be gathered. The networks will all be invited. And after these elaborate preparations, the President says ... nothing that he has not said a hundred times before.

If a president continues to do that, he is himself teaching the public and the media to ignore him - especially when the words seem (as his speech yesterday to the VFW seemed) utterly to ignore the past three months of real-world events.

The President could have made news yesterday by itemizing the reasons to regard Iraq more positively than most journalists do. He could have ticked off some of the achievements daily posted on the centcom.mil site. (Here's the latest.) He could have teased details even out of the [Extreme] media. (Mickey Kaus the other day noted that the reliably dour Robin Wright of the Washington Post casually mentioned in the course of her latest down-beater that Iraq has gone on a car-buying boom that has put a million new cars on the road since liberation. Kaus: "A 'car-buying boom' - another shocking failure! Don't they know about global warming?")

Or, alternatively, the President could have skipped the good news and delivered a blood, sweat, toils, and tears speech: Yes things are hard, harder in fact than expected, but the stakes remain enormous - and here is why we must win, and why I am determined to fight this thing through to victory. That would be powerful too.

As it is, though, he says nothing, and is perceived to say nothing, and soon nobody will be listening at all, if anybody still is.

The problem may even be worse than that. By what Bill Kristol is now saying, the Bush Administration's Iraq stance may be on the verge of becoming "cut & run Lite":

One sentence, however, stood out like a sore thumb in both the President's and the Vice President's remarks: "As Iraqis stand up, we'll stand down," the President said. "And over time, as Iraqi forces stand up, American forces will stand down," repeated the Vice President.

Now, it is probably the case that a couple of years from now we will be able responsibly to reduce the number of American forces in Iraq. But the "stand up/stand down" formulation goes beyond that. It suggests - and Defense Secretary Rumsfeld has repeatedly elaborated on this thought - that as Iraqi soldiers get trained, they will replace Americans, apparently regardless of our progress toward victory in the war.

But this formulation - and this policy, if it becomes policy - is, to quote the President, "a terrible signal" to send to the enemy. The enemy should confront the unpleasant prospect of soon facing the current level of American forces supplemented by an ever-growing number of Iraqi fighters. Our enemies should not have the impression that, by continuing the terror, they can secure the reward of facing (inevitably) less-able Iraqi forces in place of American troops.

This formulation, and this policy, is also a terrible signal to send to our friends. It suggests we want to get out more than we want to win. Such a suggestion will itself make winning more difficult - for who will risk committing to a side that seems uncertain about its own commitment, and that seems to be seeking an exit from the struggle?

Returing to Mr. Babbin, this revives memories of what eventually turned the Vietnam worm toward retreat and defeat, and completely ignores the proverbial elephant in the bird cage, the need to do something about the remaining terror masters in Tehran and Damascus:

As the Washington Post reported last Wednesday, "The day after burying their son, parents of a fallen Marine urged President Bush to either send more reinforcements to Iraq or withdraw U.S. troops altogether. 'We feel you either have to fight this war right or get out,' said Rosemary Palmer, mother of Lance Corporal Edward Schroeder II." What Ms. Palmer says now is precisely what our professional military has said about every war since World War II. They are saying it now but only quietly, in confidence, and almost exclusively to each other. They know that this war needs to be fought - hard, fast, and effectively - to be won at the least cost in American lives. They will do that, and win, if they are allowed to do the job as it must be done.

If.

In a meeting a couple of weeks ago, a senior DoD official said that in Iraq, "we're not winning yet, but we're holding our own." How can that be, two years into the fight, unless we are hobbling our forces politically? The objective in Iraq is not a Nixonian "peace with honor" but victory. And victory cannot be achieved in Iraq alone. Back in June, I asked another senior DoD official a question that obviously discomfited him. It was simple enough. I began with the fact that we have mensurated (i.e., three dimensional, accurate within a yard or two) targeting coordinates for the terrorist sanctuaries in Syria. (The fact that Syria is a sanctuary for terrorists who kill Americans in Iraq has not been disputable for more than a year.) I asked why, then, weren't we attacking the sanctuaries? He gave an answer that - from the look on his face - made him even more uncomfortable than the question. He said, "There are nations with which we don't want to go to war now." And therein lies the rub. President Bush must not write the plans for the GWOT on a palimpsest of Vietnam. [emphases added]

Oh, yes, there are countries with which we want to go to war. Or, more accurately, need to while there's still time to keep said war conventional, and before they can do us great and massive harm. Iran is on the verge of going nuclear if it hasn't already, and Syria is the Laos/Cambodia of the Iraqi theater, a sanctuary for our assymmetrical enemies that we are leaving untouched. And consider that all Mr. Babbin touched upon with this "senior Defense Department official" is attacking terrorist sanctuaries across the Syrian border, not sending three armored columns racing across the desert to capture Damascus. Yet the Bushies are even squeamish about that?

As long as two years ago I advanced a theory that for all the lefty bile barfed on President Bush for being a "unilateralist cowboy oil-addicted genocidal warmonger," his intention all along was to go no farther than Iraq, believing that establishing a democracy there would subvert the rest of the region in the same direction. I opined that if that was the case, he was being irresponsibly optimistic, and that the ultimate outcome would be far less favorable than he was expecting.

The first part of that theory appears vindicated, unfortunately. The jury is still out on the second part, but even the progress that has been made toward Iraqi, and regional, democratization can be lost if Dubya doesn't stop leaving the ideological/propaganda side of this conflict, both at home and abroad, unfought.

Just read the sampling of emails from frustrated Republican rank & filers that Mr. Frum appends to his essay. They say, in a nutshell, what Frum, Kristol, Babbin, Micheal Ledeen, and yours truly are amplifying: you can't fight half a war and expect to win all of it. And you can't take for granted public support for the war effort when half (or, I guess, 48% of) the country is waging full-scale "war" against it.

Like it or not, the President has got to adopt Bill Clinton's permanent campaign model. He simply cannot abstain from the field of political combat and expect a bold foreign policy or domestic agenda to even survive, much less advance.

His enemies, both foreign and domestic, have never stopped campaigning against him since his re-election. He must stop granting them the "quarter" that they have never given to him.

Our nation's survival as we have known it may depend upon it.

UPDATE: Tony Blankely joins the chorus....

UPDATE II: As quoted by Rush Limbaugh today, Brother Hinderaker's "This is what Bush should be saying" masterpiece from last night:

We are conducting an experiment never before seen, as far as I know, in the history of the human race. We are trying to fight a war under the auspices of an establishment that is determined--to put the most charitable face on it - to emphasize American casualties over all other information about the war....

The media's breathless tabulation of casualties in Iraq - now, over 1,800 deaths - is generally devoid of context. Here's some context: between 1983 and 1996, 18,006 American military personnel died accidentally in the service of their country. That death rate of 1,286 per year exceeds the rate of combat deaths in Iraq by a ratio of nearly two to one.

That's right: all through the years when hardly anyone was paying attention, soldiers, sailors and Marines were dying in accidents, training and otherwise, at nearly twice the rate of combat deaths in Iraq from the start of the war in 2003 to the present. Somehow, though, when there was no political hay to be made, I don't recall any great outcry, or gleeful reporting, or erecting of crosses in the President's home town. In fact, I'll offer a free six-pack to the first person who can find evidence that any liberal expressed concern - any concern - about the 18,006 American ervice members who died accidentally in service of their country from 1983 to 1996....

What is the President's responsibility? To expend our most precious resources only when necessary, in service of the national interest. We would all prefer that our soldiers never be required to fight. Everyone - most of all, every politician - much prefers peace to war. But when our enemies fly airplanes into our skyscrapers; attack the nerve center of our armed forces; bomb our embassies; scheme to blow up our commercial airliners; try to assassinate our former President; do their best to shoot down our military aircraft; murder our citizens; assassinate our diplomats overseas; and attack our naval vessels - well, then, the time has come to fight. And when the time comes to fight, our military personnel are ready. They don't ask to be preserved from all danger. They know their job is dangerous; they knew that when they signed up. They are prepared to face the risk, on our behalf. All they ask is to be allowed to win. [emphases added]

Forget blogging - make Rocketman Dubya's chief speechwriter right away.

Besides, that'd open up a slot on Powerline for a certain guest contributor....