Bush Only Needs to Do One Thing
BARNES, FRED
Bush Only Needs to Do One Thing Win the war. BY FRED BARNES PRESIDENT BUSH is doing his duty to keep spirits up. "The terrorists wanted our economy to stop," he said at a printing company in Glen...
...Ari Fleischer, the White House press secretary, vehemently ( disputed a USA Today headline that quoted Rumsfeld as saying bin Laden may never be captured or killed...
...And Tom Ridge, the new homeland security chief, couldn't respond adequately to reporters' questions...
...Meanwhile, Rear Admiral John Stufflebeem, the deputy director of operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the Taliban is a tougher foe than anticipated...
...And British Admiral Michael Boyce said commando raids into Afghanistan to find bin Laden may take far longer than planned...
...It's widely understood as an unpredictable phenomenon he couldn't control...
...It hasn't...
...They want bin Laden, his network, and the Taliban—indeed, everyone responsible for the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks— waxed now...
...They wanted to diminish the spirit of America...
...But Ridge quickly got up to speed, and now his almost daily briefings are crisp, informed, and unusually candid...
...People may be impatient...
...But if the war effort slips and slides for a year or two or more, then all bets are off...
...If they weren't, the press would fault the Bush administration on style points, but that wouldn't do much harm...
...The simple fact is: Bush won't be blamed for the anthrax scare...
...People aren't fleeing Washington or New York...
...Pakistan doesn't want the Northern Alliance to end up controlling much ground, as it might with a quick American triumph...
...If only the war itself—the shooting war—were going as well...
...And in 1864, Lincoln's reelection Fred Barnes is executive editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...There's anxiety, of course, but no hysteria...
...Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, terribly upbeat...
...Bush's father, George H.W...
...Bush and Secretary of State Colin Powell get credit for amassing an international coalition against terrorism...
...The problem is that overwhelming force, championed by Colin Powell in the Gulf War, is not being applied in Afghanistan...
...Or anything like overwhelming force...
...Joe Biden, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said a prolonged air war might anger Muslims, and his tepid dissent prompted criticism from House speaker Dennis Hastert...
...Wartime presidencies don't collapse because of shortcomings or unrest at home...
...If the military campaign goes poorly or there's a stalemate, which is just as bad from a public opinion standpoint, presidents suffer...
...At his daily briefing, he cited Rumsfeld's actual comments—and the point was lost...
...The U.S...
...He suffered after the war when he still didn't have an answer for the recession...
...Yes, there are reasons for it...
...And so on...
...In short, the president is determined not to lose the war at home...
...Any reasonable reading of what the defense secretary had said backed up the USA Today headline...
...His astronomical poll ratings, post-September 11, haven't dipped a bit...
...Success is yet to be determined, but we think we're having some success," he said...
...That seems unlikely at the moment...
...The Pentagon has become a fountain of discouraging wj words...
...Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld is praised as a strong briefer (though he discloses few facts...
...prospects also looked bleak—until the Civil War turned decisively in the union's favor...
...But Biden didn't question the American strategy in the war on the right grounds...
...But the domestic front isn't Bush's biggest problem...
...He told kids at a Washington elementary school the one goal in fighting terrorism is "to make sure you can live in freedom in a great land...
...military likes a war with few American casualties and no quagmire...
...He's a commanding presence in Washington...
...When the country is at war, presidents are held accountable for only one thing: winning the war...
...The public's expectations may be too high following the 100-hour victory in the Gulf War...
...Johnson's was undone by Vietnam...
...And there's not much of a ground forces component either...
...Echoing the brass, the mood of Washington turned negative last week for the first time...
...And why not...
...Nonetheless, if the war drags on, the public will be unforgiving...
...Call it underwhelming force...
...At a White House photo op, he assured reporters that the effort to spread anthrax "won't succeed...
...The war in Afghanistan is...
...He gained almost everything he wanted in the anti-terrorist bill, and there's a better-than-even chance he'll get an aviation security bill and an economic stimulus package that are mostly to his liking...
...Truman's reelection in 1952 was short-circuited by the Korean War...
...When Karl Rove, the White House political adviser, surveys the political landscape, he's bound to smile about Bush's chances in 2004...
...All this is ephemera, however, when compared with the war itself...
...Bush, got a pass from the public on the declining economy during the Gulf War...
...True, his underlings stumbled initially in confronting anthrax...
...Tommy Thompson, the secretary of health and human services, foolishly minimized the anthrax threat...
...Where does this leave Bush...
...Instead, the strategy from the Balkans has been adopted: bomb, bomb, bomb, but never massively and never in carpet-bombing fashion...
...It didn't...
...This country is too strong to allow terrorists to affect the lives of our citizens...
...Allies in the coalition who don't feel threatened by bin Laden or the Taliban fear excessive American force will rile the masses...
...If war in Afghanistan is won in a few months and, as is likely, the economy turns up, the president's future will be all but secure...
...But still there's been no serious second-guessing—at the White House or elsewhere in the administration and practically none on Capitol Hill...
...Nor was the assessment of the war last week by Gen...
...And last Friday at an East Room signing ceremony for his anti-terrorism bill, he said law enforcement will now have more tools "to identify, to dismantle, to disrupt, and to punish terrorists before they strike...
...Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, was impressive in persuading the TV networks to keep terrorist propaganda from Osama bin Laden off the air...
...The press has given the White House high marks for its marketing of the war...
...The terrorists wanted our economy to stop," he said at a printing company in Glen Burnie, Maryland...
...Muslims will grouse no matter what the United States does...
...Media criticism notwithstanding, Bush is doing fine domestically...
Vol. 7 • November 2001 • No. 8
