Victor Davis Hanson has a fine essay on the ongoing war in Iraq and the war on terror. He examines why the enemy thinks they can win, and why they may not. It's a matter of will, that of the American people and that of our President.
President Bush, whatever one thinks of him, is, well, let's face it, a strange sort of president. For all the hysteria about Karl Rove's supposed political calculations and machinations, I sense that the president doesn't care much what others think of him; indeed, for the price of winning this war he might even be willing to be a one-term president. In other words, this is a man who probably would not have withdrawn from Beirut, turned ships around off the harbor at Haiti at the sound of gunfire, or yanked Americans from Somalia as two-bit thugs dragged their corpses in the street.For some reason or another he does not seem to crave future rave reviews from the New York Times, a late-night private dinner in Georgetown, or an obsequious phone call from a European apparatchik. Indeed, he seems to have expected the invective from the Europeans, the slander from our own media, and even the irrational, if not visceral, hatred of American elites as the inevitable wages that come with at last saying "enough is enough" and thereby dissolving in a moment the comfortable fraud that so many of us had invested so heavily in the last 20 years. How long his resistance will last in the face of slander and slurs of historic proportions is unclear; but for now he has again responded in a manner that his enemies would never have anticipated.
Dr. Hanson makes about twenty good points in this article. Read the whole thing via National Review Online.
Posted by Alan at October 3, 2003 11:53 PM