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October 7, 2005
More, Please
President Bush gave a speech which was one of the best he's ever given. The President laid out the nature of the enemy and the elements of our strategy in the war. It's a shame that these points are not being continually made by the administration, or by the media. There's too much good stuff for excerpts to do justice, but I did want to address the strategy angle. The President noted five elements to our strategy:
- "First, we're determined to prevent the attacks of terrorist networks before they occur." The President divides this into two sub-areas: strengthening defenses here, and killing or capturing the enemy's current leadership and disrupting their organization.
- "Second, we're determined to deny weapons of mass destruction to outlaw regimes, and to their terrorist allies who would use them without hesitation."
- "Third, we're determined to deny radical groups the support and sanctuary of outlaw regimes." Here, the president puts Syria and Iran on notice by name.
- "Fourth, we're determined to deny the militants control of any nation, which they would use as a home base and a launching pad for terror."
- "The fifth element of our strategy in the war on terror is to deny the militants future recruits by replacing hatred and resentment with democracy and hope across the broader Middle East."
I guess the executive summary would be: defend locally, attack globally, deny unanswerable weapons to the enemy, deny sanctuary and bases of operations to the enemy, reduce the enemy's ability to replace their cadres. It's a useful strategy, because it simultaneously attacks the enemy at several pressure points: their current leadership and cadres, their capabilities, their sanctuaries and their ideology. In the long run, I suspect that the last will be the most important to ending the threat. Everything else is focused on containing the threat.
Like I said: good speech; give it more often and in prime time.
UPDATE: Juan Cole, not surprisingly, sees it differently. But calling names and shading the facts outrageously is not very convincing.
Mr. Bush, I don't recognize the world you paint. I find your speech a form of sheer propaganda, having almost no relationship to reality.
Likewise your post, Juan. But moreso, since I recognize the world the President paints, but not the one you paint. In particular, asserting that none of al Qaeda, Syria, Iran or anyone else in the region could possibly harm the US, and that it's all our fault anyway, followed by a tired repetition of Democrat talking points, just turns my stomach. Where the President offers a strategy for winning against the enemy we discovered on 9/11, Juan Cole offers nothing but handwaving and a denial that anyone except the US is the enemy. Pathetic.
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