Ted Kennedy’s speech last month to the Center for American Progress, criticizing President Bush for the prosecution of the war on terror, is another indication that America’s “progressive leadership” doesn’t recognize progress or leadership when it sees it.

The senator claims that the Bush administration is leading the country “to a perilous place.” Many across this nation would sharply disagree. America has already been to that “perilous place.” On the morning of September 11, 2001, the world saw with morbid clarity the ultimate cost of pervasive cuts in our defense and intelligence infrastructure. The threat to America, and indeed the civilized world, has not vanished. Yet, due to this administration’s vigorous pursuit of terrorists around the globe, America is not blissfully–yet fatally–asleep in the “perilous place” that it was on September 10, 2001.

Senator Kennedy also claims that the president and congressional Republicans have followed an agenda that ignores “urgent national and human needs.” One must ask, what is more urgent than our national security? In the two-plus years since the attacks, Congress and the president have, among other things, approved the Patriot Act and the Homeland Security Act, established Homeland Security grants for states, and increased defense spending. When it comes to the most fundamental needs of a nation, Congress and the president have not flinched from duty, nor have they cowered behind empty rhetoric. We have not stood by the water’s edge waiting for rescue from the evil that lurks underneath. We are the rescue.

In his speech, the senator laments the perceived “disrespect for the United Nations.” He’s referring to the same U.N. that selects countries such as Syria and Libya for the Human Rights Commission while ejecting the U.S. from membership. This is the same U.N. that has a farcical track record when it comes to peace-keeping missions throughout the world. The U.N. runs at the first sign of trouble: Recall Rwanda, and now Iraq. America, on the other hand, stays the course. Even if it is true that the U.S. has “disrespected” the U.N., it didn’t deserve our respect in the first place.

Our disrespect isn’t limited to the United Nations, either, according to the senator. We have also, he says, disrespected “other peoples in other lands.” The fact remains, however, that our military actions in the last two years have resulted in the liberation of two countries from oppressive and murderous regimes. As for his comments that America has become “a less respected land,” has Senator Kennedy noticed how Libya’s Qaddafi or Syria’s al-Assad have been squirming since their brother in barbarism fell from the comfort of his palaces to the ignominy of a spider hole?

President Bush has been maligned by Senator Kennedy and others for being too preoccupied with Saddam Hussein even before the 9/11 attacks. What liberals like Kennedy consider an unhealthy fixation, most Americans would consider leadership. Saddam had been in violation of numerous U.N. Security Council resolutions for over a decade. He consistently opened fire on U.S. and coalition aircraft patrolling the no-fly zones. Saddam even kicked the U.N. weapons inspectors out of Iraq. The most that President Clinton offered were cruise-missile attacks and the occasional late-night air raid. That’s not to say these efforts weren’t justified, but it is like treating a bullet wound with a band-aid. At least President Bush was willing to undertake a serious examination of the threat Saddam posed to the U.S. and his neighbors, and what actions could be taken in response.

There’s more justification, even if in hindsight, for the close scrutiny that Saddam received under the pre-9/11 Bush policy. Just months before the president was sworn in, the U.S.S. Cole was bombed in Yemen. In the 17 years prior to that, the United States had been attacked several times with little in the way of retaliation. The Marine barracks bombing in 1983, the assassination of a CIA employee outside the agency’s headquarters in 1993, the first World Trade Center attack a month later, the Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia in 1996, and the U.S. embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 were all horrendous acts of belligerence that did not, when considered as a whole, culminate in the serious counteroffensive that the terrorists and their sponsors deserved. Saddam Hussein’s continued grip on power would only have been another festering sore to be dealt with before it became infected. Now, in the post-9/11 world, with Saddam vanquished, parasitic terrorists have one less nation-state from which they can receive the sustenance they need: finances, training, and shelter.

This is true despite the fact that Senator Kennedy and others like him think, in this day and age, that a threat must be “imminent” before it can be eliminated. Unfortunately, our enemies don’t telegraph their intentions the way a bank robber would by waving a gun in a teller’s face. Our “imminent” warning may be a nanosecond too late, should a mushroom cloud ever appear over one of our cities.

Much of the senator’s speech is the same tired rhetoric that the president’s detractors have used before, but it’s dressed a bit differently. Kennedy complains that by expanding the policy on Afghanistan to other terrorist regimes, the U.S. has “lost our previous clear focus on the most imminent threat to our national security–Osama bin Laden” and al Qaeda. The senator should be reminded that in his first address to a Joint Session of Congress a week after the attacks, President Bush made it very clear that the war on terror was more than just an offensive against bin Laden and al Qaeda. He said, “Our war on terror begins with al Qaeda, but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped, and defeated.” He also noted that this war would be “unlike any other we have ever seen…secret even in success.”

The senator’s claim that Afghanistan was pushed aside in favor of a focus on Iraq as early as the 2002 State of the Union Address is facetious at best, and a gross misrepresentation at worst. In ten of the first fourteen paragraphs of the State of the Union, the president referred to the situation in Afghanistan and its liberation. Senator Kennedy’s focus on the semantics of the speech–“What did he say about bin Laden…? Nothing. What did he say about the Taliban? Nothing”–demonstrates exactly the type of leadership we can expect should his ilk ever regain control of our national security infrastructure: Symbolism, instead of substance.

The central focus of the senator’s remarks was presidential leadership. Yet it was also the central flaw of the speech: Senator Kennedy and the leaders of American liberalism fault Bush for allowing al Qaeda to regroup in Iraq. That, however, is the point of the war: Take the conflict to them. Let’s fight it out in their backyard, not ours. They also fret that the war in Iraq will be “a recruiting program for terrorists.” Although that could be true to a certain extent, cowardice and non-action would have been the worse alternative. Terrorists attacked us with relative frequency and relative impunity for almost 18 years. They perceived us as weak and incapable of a sustained fight. We should prove these evildoers wrong. Meanwhile, Senator Kennedy, et. al., would have us wait until the threat is either “imminent” or, worse, carried out before we can respond. Which option would make you feel safer?

Senator Kennedy’s criticism of George W. Bush’s leadership rings hollow. President Bush has led this country through one of its most trying times in recent history. He inherited a recession and months later consoled a wounded nation. Like all times of grief, the mourning passed, and then President Bush led America from the sadness and the anger of the smoldering destruction to a quiet resolve to bring terrorists and their sponsors to an end. In the meantime, he has also led this country on the road to a healthier economy. Our work is not done in either respect, but the path that we are on offers more than the hand-tying multilateral approach to national defense, and more than the self-defeating bureaucratic approach to economic revitalization.

It is difficult to determine what the motive is for so many of the Democrats who oppose President Bush’s prosecution of the war thus far. On the one hand, they may honestly believe that multilateralism (read: U.N. approval) is the best way to win the war. On the other hand, they may not truly oppose the war, but instead they are simply opposed to President Bush. Either way, theirs is a style of leadership that the American people simply cannot afford to endure.

–U.S. Representative Ron Lewis is a Republican from Kentucky, and serves on the House Subcommittee on National Security, Emerging Threats and International Relations.