Staying the Course
The war.

By NR Editors
From the March 25, 2002, issue of National Review

he Afghan phase of the war on terror has been so successful that some people seem to be forgetting what President Bush told us at the beginning: The war is going to be long and hard. If our enemies were massed on a field, we could fight them in the open and be done. But they are terrorists, everywhere and nowhere. We have to flush them out and then pounce. Sometimes we will pounce and miss; sometimes we will pounce mistakenly. When we are finished — which is to say, when they are finished — there will be no signing ceremony. We will have to be patient, alert, and resolute.

These qualities are not as pervasive among our political elites as one might wish. Now that we are sending troops to Yemen, the Philippines, and ex-Soviet Georgia, Democratic senators — Daschle, Byrd, Hollings — are complaining that we are losing "focus" and ," that the war is expanding and becoming "open-ended." Daschle carps that Osama bin Laden has not yet been captured or killed. The administration has moved some federal workers to an undisclosed location so that the government may continue to operate in the event of nuclear attack, and recent news reports suggest the possibility that al Qaeda may have the ability to set off at least a "dirty bomb" with radioactive material. Yet the New York Times's Maureen Dowd greeted the news of the existence of a shadow government with a riff about Bush's "twin obsessions with secrecy and self-perpetuation." She writes, "Now Mr. Cheney is Lord of the Rings, ruling over his very own Moria, an underground kingdom of bureaucratic hobbits and orcs." Perhaps the Pulitzer board should start a new prize for clever writing about nuclear attacks on America.

While capturing or killing bin Laden is certainly desirable, President Bush has correctly insisted throughout this conflict that it is not our goal. Our goal is that those who would do us harm be killed, disabled, or deterred. Achieving that goal is an "open-ended" commitment because this is not a war of our choosing, and our enemies hide.

It might be helpful were Bush to explain, again, the war we are in. The war requires political support; that takes persuasion, and persuasion takes repetition. But it is also possible that the Democrats, moved by political mischievousness or liberal convictions, will stop supporting the war anyway — bugging out after a strong start, their pattern in the Cold War.

It is certainly appropriate to raise questions about administration policy; we'll do it ourselves, if it begins to appear that the administration has not summoned the political will to move against Iraq. But if the Democrats stake out a position substantively different from that of the administration, they had better be able to defend it. If they criticize Bush, they should expect to be criticized in turn — and Republicans will have every right to ask voters to choose sides. Republicans need not and should not imply that the Democrats are disloyal or unpatriotic. Pointing out that their policies are unwise and dangerous will suffice.