Presidential Leadership

I've been thinking about Presidential leadership.  Over and over in tonight's foreign policy debate we saw our President misstate facts, demonstrate a lack of serious knowledge of the military role in foreign policy, and denigrate a man who questioned him. 

This administration has seized defeat from the jaws of victory in Iraq.  We couldn't negotiate a Status of Forces Agreement with a country heavily dependent upon us. That is a failure. We abandoned those who stood beside us against terrorism and evil and we will do it again in Afghanistan. 

But the sad truth is, the Republicans have shown no more acumen in maintaining American power throughout the world, throwing away hard won victories because they simply lack the killer instinct any championship sports team will show in a big game.

President Obama seems to bend over backward to radical Islam. He apologizes for America, as if we are the only nation that has made mistakes.  He seems to pick the Muslim terrorists side reflexively, in Libya, Egypt, Palestine, and Iran.  He doesn't offer the level of support to Israel that we might expect the world's greatest democracy to give the only pro-Western democracy in that region. He failed to support pro-democracy demonstrators in Iran. He refers to a terrible killing spree carried out by a self-proclaimed "soldier of Allah" at Fort Hood as "workplace violence."

But this insistence on finding the good (even when it is imaginary) in the Muslim world was a hallmark of Bush 43, too. He referred to Islam as a "religion of peace" despite the bloody evidence in New York, Washington, London, Madrid, and countless places in the Middle East. There are a lot of brutal thugs in that club.  Our presidents need to say this openly: Islamic extremist terrorists mean to destroy us, to end our way of life, and everything we hold dear. The only way to deal with many of these men is by harsh application of force. 

Bill Clinton did everything he could to avoid confronting these brutal forces, even when Americans were murdered in Tanzania, Kenya, Somalia, and as bookends on his watch, at the World Trade Center and on the USS Cole. He tossed a few missiles and bombs at Iraq, Somalia, Sudan, Afghanistan, and Serbia, but ineffectually and in ways calculated to do as little damage to the enemy as possible. He ran from Somalia when it got messy, and demanded the Air Force plan its air war over Serbia at altitudes high enough that no American was endangered, even at the cost of less accurate bombing. He allied us with the Bin Laden-backed Kosovo Liberation Army.

George H.W. Bush put together a coalition to win Desert Storm brilliantly.  But when the enemy was on the run, in those moments where you break their will to fight, he backed down.  On the Highway of Death, we stopped killing the enemy because it looked bad on television. We have simply lost the will to break an enemy in the crushing way that worked for us in 1945.  The result was the longest slow-motion war in our history, 12 years of no-fly zones, intermittent bombing of Iraq, and permitting some degree of state-sponsored terrorism.  If we had killed a few thousand Iraqi soldiers along that desert road in 1991, how many Iraqis, Kurds, Americans, and others would be live today?

Ronald Reagan gets a black mark next to his name for putting American Marines into Lebanon, then doing nothing after Iranian backed Hezbollah bombed their barracks in Beirut in 1983. Why did we not punish Iran then?

Jimmy Carter: 444 days. A figure all of us who lived through the Iranian hostage crisis will remember. What a disaster.

The therapeutic age seems to have purged leadership from our leaders. So often Bill Clinton looked like a talk show host hugging the tearful, bolstering the sad, and listening with trembling lip to the sorrows of life. Once our nation was led by men of steely resolve, heroes who had counted the cost of freedom. George Washington, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt - these were men who would fight rather than yield on principle, and the foremost principle that an American president upholds is the safety of the American nation and its people. We sacrificed half a million lives to fix the wrong that was slavery.  We saved Europe twice in a generation. We have tried to preserve freedom - or at least a chance for it - for people from Korea to Kosovo, across the breadth of Asia from Indochina to Israel. How many times has America fought brutal enemies, tried to build representative governments, provided every kind of aid and commercial trade, and then treated them as partners, allies, and friends. No other nation has done this.

Now we are engaged in a great global war, testing whether this nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure. Will we step up to this responsibility? I hope so. But it begins with a commander-in-chief who faces the world's terrible truths about force, perception, reality, and victory.