The Breach

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.

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Americans are asking: How will we fight and win this war? We will direct every resource at our command -- every means of diplomacy, every tool of intelligence, every instrument of law enforcement, every financial influence, and every necessary weapon of war -- to the disruption and to the defeat of the global terror network.

This war will not be like the war against Iraq a decade ago, with a decisive liberation of territory and a swift conclusion. It will not look like the air war above Kosovo two years ago, where no ground troops were used and not a single American was lost in combat.

Our response involves far more than instant retaliation and isolated strikes. Americans should not expect one battle, but a lengthy campaign, unlike any other we have ever seen. It may include dramatic strikes, visible on TV, and covert operations, secret even in success. We will starve terrorists of funding, turn them one against another, drive them from place to place, until there is no refuge or no rest. And we will pursue nations that provide aid or safe haven to terrorism. Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists. From this day forward, any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime.

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I will not forget this wound to our country or those who inflicted it. I will not yield; I will not rest; I will not relent in waging this struggle for freedom and security for the American people.

-- President Bush, Speaking to a Joint Session of Congress and the American People, September 20, 2001.

Our second goal is to prevent regimes that sponsor terror from threatening America or our friends and allies with weapons of mass destruction. Some of these regimes have been pretty quiet since September the 11th. But we know their true nature. North Korea is a regime arming with missiles and weapons of mass destruction, while starving its citizens.

Iran aggressively pursues these weapons and exports terror, while an unelected few repress the Iranian people's hope for freedom.

Iraq continues to flaunt its hostility toward America and to support terror. The Iraqi regime has plotted to develop anthrax, and nerve gas, and nuclear weapons for over a decade. This is a regime that has already used poison gas to murder thousands of its own citizens -- leaving the bodies of mothers huddled over their dead children. This is a regime that agreed to international inspections -- then kicked out the inspectors. This is a regime that has something to hide from the civilized world.

States like these, and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world. By seeking weapons of mass destruction, these regimes pose a grave and growing danger. They could provide these arms to terrorists, giving them the means to match their hatred. They could attack our allies or attempt to blackmail the United States. In any of these cases, the price of indifference would be catastrophic.

-- President Bush, Speaking to a Joint Session of Congress, State of the Union Address, January 29, 2002

Bush lied. Not enough people died.

When President Bush made the case for the War on Terror, it was made in the context of the two main speeches quoted at length above, which constituted the beginning of what has become to be known as the Bush Doctrine. Conservatives signed on to that war effort because conservatives were persuaded that Bush's diagnosis of the problem and intended solution was correct.

From the beginning, I've had reservations about Bush's commitment to the so-called Bush Doctrine. While the initial job--dismantling the Taliban regime in Afghanistan--was approached properly, it also seemed to me that the Administration wanted to win that war on the cheap, expending other people's blood. Conservatives may shake with anger when Senator Kerry charges that Bin Laden got away because we sub-contracted out the fighting at Tora Bora, and I understand that. Kerry is not the man to carry such a charge. However, I think the real reason it resonates so badly is because it is true.

Afghanistan should have been invaded and occupied by a very large all-American army. Unlawful combatants, including Taliban spokesmen, should have been summarily shot, as is proper under both international law and the law of warfare as it has evolved. The war should have gone through Pakistan, laying to waste a government and a country that was the Taliban's main enablers. The entire area should have been laid to waste, destroyed completely and utterly; and then, having delivered the short, sharp punic lesson, we should have withdrawn en masse.

I thought so then, I think so now. Instead, what we got was PC cant about how we were "liberating" the Afghans. What was sold as an unrelenting war instead became a long-term occupation, with us playing at teaching a traditional, hide-bound Muslim society about multi-culturalism, tolerance, love, peace and harmony. We installed a government and backed it with power so weak its writ barely carried into outer Kabul, let alone the badlands. We issued press releases patting ourselves on the back about how many women attended the constitutional convention, as if such a thing would be happening were we not there with guns. Worse still, we then sub-sub-contracted the security work out to NATO, thereby exposing ourselves to every left-wing political party in Europe, who now hold our policy hostage by withholding their consent to new military deployments.

Still, I held my tongue. Look on the bright side: the Taliban are gone, Al-Qaeda is scattered and if the Afghans can salvage something out of the peace that follows, well, that's a good thing isn't it? It's not a perfect world, and the U.S. is acting under great constraint, so maybe this is the best we can hope for. Basically, at its root, the Bush Doctrine still appeared solid to me, though I disputed the tactics employed.

Iraq followed. Unlike the paleo-conservatives, I thought this was generally in line with the Bush Doctrine. For all the reasons Bush set forth (ignore the leftists and their "where is the WMD?" talk-they've lied so much that they themselves now believe their own lies), Iraq was a logical next step in the War on Terror.

While the planning was on-going, we made the politically fatal and totally self-made error of taking the issue to the United Nations, at the behest of the Hamiltonians/Wilsonians of our own foreign policy institutions and, largely, the British, whose support and whose military we did not and do not need. This decision was fatal because it focused the War on Terror on unimportant, minor concerns. (Did the inspectors receive full and complete access on March 19 or limited access or should they be there at all...blahblahblahblahblah). It also handed the keys of victory to our enemies. Not surprisingly, they promptly hid those keys, where they remain today in between award ceremonies to Michael Moore and shouts of "Abu Ghraib" on the hour.

What political correctness and a squeamishness about all matters religious did to Islamism, the approach to the United Nations did for European and international leftism. Now, thanks to the Bush Administration, all of our actions were to be judged by a Islamist and a Leftist. Every day we ask them if we are winning and every day they say "no;" the news headlines gleefully report our continued failure.

By turning what was an American war against an American enemy into a popularity contest, the Administration surrendered control over the victory conditions, ensuring our failure, which would then further erode popularity, etc. etc. until you just want to throw up.

What followed is so well-known as to hardly be worth mentioning. While just about everyone on the right thought that the invasion and occupation of Iraq would look a lot like our invasion and occupation of Germany in WWII (i.e. lots of troops on the ground and a military government that ruled for years), we again went on the cheap, and paid the price. The initial authority--does anyone remember Jay Garner?--was literally laughable. We then made something else up and put a FSO in charge. We then handed over power as soon as possible and, given the vote for the first time in their lives, Iraqis voted along sectarian lines, down to the last tribe and imam. No one, least of all the Iraqis themselves, thinks that this government exists in any real sense absent American soldiers on the ground. We stumbled from crisis to crisis, first invading Falllujah, then leaving, then re-invading, then leaving again. A two-bit cleric and his private militia fought U.S. troops in towns. American soldiers and Marines died, and continue to die, in drips and drabs, the killers melting into the general populace.

And here we are today, with reports in the media that a former Taliban ambassador is now studying at Yale with a U.S. student visa in his passport, Iraq is on the verge of civil war, the Hezbollah flag flies openly on top of Iraqi Police Stations in the south, British and American soldiers are routinely killed by munitions supplied by Iran's Revolutionary Guard, the press is full of more Abu Ghraib pictures and, guess what? The Islamists and the Leftists we've handed the keys over still say we've failed.

Big surprise.

Along the way, the President has not advanced the American issue in a direct, forthright way. Instead, his Administration has bumbled along, pretending we are at peace. The very real fact of a very real war is not even discernable among the American population at large. No sacrifices are asked, not even doing without "American Idol." No mobilization has been ordered. Life goes on as before, creating a severe and hurtful disorientation between those families who have lost sons and those who don't even know there is a war on.

This is not the War on Terror the President sold us on in 2001. Not even close. We are not serious and everyone knows this, especially our enemies. I look into the eyes of my sons and I know that I would rather die-I would rather die-than let them fight in a war to establish the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan or to hand power over to the crazy Shi'ites of Iraq.

The leading Iraqi political figure, the Grand Ayatollah al-Sistani, has on his website instructions for how to determine what is unclean and what is clean. Among his definitions of "unclean" are things like shit, entrails of animals and, oh yes, the dead bodies of infidel soldiers.

Our policy is to die for a man and a people who literally think the dead bodies of our soldiers are literally shit.

That is our policy.

That is what we are asking people to die for.

I can't take it anymore. This is crap of the first order, it is deeply wrong and wrong-headed.

I cannot support President Bush any longer. Can you?