Fight Back, Mr. President
We begin at the end of Bill Kristol's call for President Bush to fight back against charges that he lied us into war.
Bush once again needs to fight for support for his policies and to draw a contrast between his policies and those of his opponents. If you do not defend yourself against your critics, your political standing is going to erode. Bush owes it to himself, to his supporters, to the soldiers fighting in Iraq, and to the country to fight back.
Yes, he does owe a vigorous defense of war policy to all of the above. His refusal to defend himself against the accusations that he lied us into war is harming more than just his own reputation and standing in the polls: The nation's prestige is on the line, soldiers have been and still are dying for this policy and the Iraqi people need to know that come what may enough of the country still knows that we did the right thing and that we'll stay the course until the insurgency is crushed.
This administration's lack of self-defense has resolved itself into a portrait of detached weakness. Its indifference to the lies arrayed against it, by the likes of Joseph Wilson and Sens. Kennedy and Levin and the fringe element represented by Cindy Sheehan, has instead of casting the lies as beyond belief hardened those lies into conventional wisdom. More than half the country thinks now that Bush lied us into war, even though a simple Google search on the phrase "Clinton Iraq 1998" can easily prove the he did not and could not have lied us into war.
Mr. Bush may not be up for re-election again, but if he really believes in his Iraq policies he must see to it that the next elections ratify them as the nation's will, since the war against al Qaeda will probably go on long after he leaves office. But instead he lets the lie continue virtually unchallenged, setting up the dangerous prospect of empowering the anti-war left to capture enough momentum in next year's mid-terms that Congress defunding the war is a real possibility, as is an anti-war capture of the White House in 2008.
Add to that the successful spin of the Katrina aftermath as entirely a federal failure, and the Bush team has left its allies exposed on the issue of basic governing competence. Again, defense of FEMA's performance as a federal back-up is easily mounted merely by pointing out the numerous local failures that contributed to the overall collapse of civil order in New Orleans. But that defense hasn't been made, and conventional wisdom has hardened around the erroneous notion that a few emails from Mike Brown prove somehow that NO Mayor Ray Nagin's failure to evacuate his city, his failure to maintain law and order, his failure to communicate adequately with FEMA, and LA Gov. Kathleen Blanco's multiple and overlapping failures to even make a decision at all are all irrelevant. The world has simplified the entire problem to one man, whom Bush called "Brownie."
Mr. Bush needs to defend himself, but if recent history is any guide he won't until his back is against the wall, and even then his self-defense will only be enough to push back, not enough to discredit his accusers once and for all as he could easily do. He still has around 40% approval rating, and doesn't seem to see any urgency in defending his policies. I see no reason to think he's going to change course and mount any kind of effective defense any time soon. And by the time he does, it will probably be too late to do any good. Those of us who support this administration's war policy might as well face facts: When it comes to vocally supporting the war, President Bush has left us on our own. He is as derelict in his duty to defend his policy here as he is in defending the Mexican border.
This is no time to go along to get along. The anti-war left gets a little bolder every day, building on what it's already gotten away with and adding to the doubt it has sown in the war policy since the invasion. It's long past time for the Bush administration to defend itself and discredit its critics on the war.