Posted on 05/03/2003 3:40:41 PM PDT by CFW
The political analysts were heavy at it, telling us that President Bush's jet landing on an aircraft carrier - and his bounding about in a flight suit after it came down - were undertaken to provide TV footage for the 2004 campaign. And no sooner were they done with making the event seem artificial and phony than we had another group of analysts (sometimes the same ones) parading their chief assessment of how things are going to go for the United States from here on: gloomily.
This second group concedes the war is over and say they knew it would be as easy as it was (no, they didn't; they warned of body bags and quagmire), but now comes the tough part, they tell us, the rebuilding of Iraq as a decent state. There is more than a hint in their words of impossibility, and of disaster looming.
Both groups have an eye for the obvious. The presidency is indeed a political office. Presidents who are not good at politics are not effective and do not stay around long. Was there political calculation in Thursday night's landing and speech on the carrier? Of course. There are other things to be noted here, though, and one is the vitality, the energy, the confidence of a president who briefly flew that jet and didn't mind if his press secretary joked about it as if his boss could probably not fly it straight.
Another is that this president connected with those sailors. His critics make much out of his being raised in privileged circumstances without wanting to grant that he has a one-of-the-guys style that cannot be faked. This president is down-to-earth, a small-d democrat, and many people - not all, not those who really do look down their noses at ordinary men and women - respond to it.
As for difficulties ahead, they are there. The president acknowledged as much in the speech. What the critics do not want to grant is that there would be greater difficulties ahead if the United States had not engaged in this war in Iraq and quickly, decisively won it. There would still be a Saddam Hussein around, murdering and torturing his people, giving aid and comfort to terrorists, building weapons of mass destruction.
So difficulties, yes, but the prediction here is that the United States will achieve its goals in Iraq, though with more than a few bad, even awful moments, and the evaluation here is that President Bush gave a fine speech that deserves attention.
"In the images of falling statues, we have witnessed the arrival of a new era," he said. "For a hundred years of war, culminating in the nuclear age, military technology was designed and deployed to inflict casualties on an ever-growing scale. In defeating Nazi Germany and imperial Japan, Allied forces destroyed entire cities, while enemy leaders who started the conflict were safe until the final days. Military power was used to end a regime by breaking a nation."
The situation is different today, he said. It's possible to "achieve military objectives without directing violence against civilians." The tragedy of war remains, he said, but now "the guilty have far more to fear than the innocent."
The accomplishment in this war, the president said, is to have liberated Iraqis and to have further reduced the ability of terrorists to do to Americans what they did on that day that awakened the nation to their threat, Sept. 11, 2001.
"In these 19 months that changed the world, our actions have been focused, and deliberate, and proportionate to the offense," he said. "We have not forgotten the victims of Sept. 11th - the last phone calls, the cold murder of children, the searches in the rubble. With those attacks, the terrorists and their supporters declared war on the United States. And war is what they got."
Do not call that gloating. It is not. The president was telling a dangerous part of the world what it does not seem to have previously realized, that it is not free to come across the oceans and kill our people and threaten a diminution of our future. He was talking both to terrorists and the nations that harbor them, making it clear that we can and will respond effectively, though without the devastation of past wars, and that just as in Iraq, we and our allies will prevail.
My advice to Iran, to Syria, to North Korea and to the various groups of hate-America terrorists is that they had better not ignore the words of this president who came swooping down on a carrier the other night, because if they do, they will pay dearly.
(Jay Ambrose is director of editorial policy at Scripps Howard Newspapers)
I don't think so. The people are going to want to see those pictures. T-shirts, Coffee cups, calendars etc. Heck, I'm already thinking about Christmas gifts.
I think that Bush thought, "Hey, I'd like to do that because it would be cool", nothing more calculating than that. I imagine that many people tried to talk him out of it.
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