Bush the Wuss

The 9/11 report catalogues, and embodies, the bureaucratization of that effort, its transformation into a defensive action in which vast resources are deployed to guard against the possibility of pinpoint strikes -- the expense further increased by the need to maintain legal niceties and economic normality while the country is under threat. The attempt to be simultaneously at peace, and at war, is not sustainable.

AS IS OFTEN THE CASE, DAVID WARREN, Canadian, is closer to the core of what the 911 Report actually exposes; a lack of resolve and a languid approach to what is a state of war.

Call Mr. Bush a war-monger if you will; in my eyes he's beginning to look like a wuss. His great strength to date has been doing what he says he will do, thus making his demands credible. In the immediate aftermath of the Iraq invasion, a much higher level of co-operation was obtained from Libya, Sudan, Pakistan, and even Saudi Arabia and Iran. But the advantage has been frittered away, as the Bush administration has gone "all multilateral" in response to continuing criticism over Iraq. I myself underestimated the ability of the Western media to turn the victory in Iraq into an apparent defeat through selective reporting and sheer verbiage.

While the current relaxation of Washington's belligerency may be attributed to the U.S. election cycle -- in the absence of another huge terror hit on the U.S. itself, the voters are getting bored with foreign wars -- I detect a deeper pusillanimity. In retrospect, it took much too long to invade Iraq, and the

various "evil-doers" were given too much opportunity to prepare for it. Moreover, the Bush administration allowed itself to be bogged down in Iraqi reconstruction. In war as in physics, speed counts for mass: and now the whole world is watching the lumbering pace at which the Americans deliver a punch. Iran has been, effectively, conceded a window of opportunity to develop and deploy nuclear weapons; the pressure has been taken off the Saud dynasty to clean up its act on American instead of Arabian terms.

Mr. Bush promised to take the battle to the enemy, both at home and abroad. The 9/11 report catalogues, and embodies, the bureaucratization of that effort, its transformation into a defensive action in which vast resources are deployed to guard against the possibility of pinpoint strikes -- the expense further increased by the need to maintain legal niceties and economic normality while the country is under threat. The attempt to be simultaneously at peace, and at war, is not sustainable.

The U.S. was not expecting to get hit, on the morning of 9/11/01, and therefore no one was on his toes: that is the chief finding of the 9/11 Commission. Since almost every specific failure it highlights in the existing security systems has been fixed where convenient, or addressed where inconvenient, the report is practically useless. It does not wrestle with the developing threat: for the Jihadis have also been learning from their experience what America's real vulnerabilities are: a mindset that continues to rank "political correctness" above questions of life and death; and a political and media "opposition culture" that has itself embraced an anti-American ethos, compatible with the Jihad's.
-- David Warren

Posted by Vanderleun at July 25, 2004 7:58 PM