Bush Plummets…As He Wins the Argument

Polls taken through Iraq’s thick prism reflect increasing public disenchantment with the Bush presidency. The economy hums and the stock market climbs daily to heights previously unknown, but still the president has fallen to the sub-30-percent approval terrain charted only by Jimmy Carter in modern times.

Here, though, is the real anomaly: If one listens, truly listens, to the gloomiest war critics — Democrat congressional leaders and presidential candidates — the president has already won the debate about what is to be done in Iraq.

That’s because, (1) whether or not they actually believe it, top Democrats keep saying we should be fighting al Qaeda, and (2) al Qaeda, like it or not, is in Iraq — massed, determined and deadly. It is the enduring failure of the administration that it cannot seem to make Americans see these two stark realities.

Iraq: The place where jihadists commit the latest atrocity hard on the last. Iraq: The “capital of the Caliphate,” as Osama bin Laden has called it, further describing it as the center of the “third world war … a war of destiny between infidelity and Islam.” Iraq: The site of the battle bin Laden aptly says will end either “in victory and glory or misery and humiliation.”

Americans, of course, do not want to be immiserated and humiliated by our enemies. Democrats know this — which is why they dare not end the war, as it is in their power to do, right this minute, by cutting off funding.

They won’t try that, no matter how furious this dereliction makes their rabid base. They know they don’t have the votes. And they know they don’t have the votes because Americans will not abide losing to al Qaeda. For all the Democrats’ post hoc blather about the 2006 elections being a referendum on Iraq, Americans still revile jihadists more than war. That is the reason we went to war in the first place.

If we leave now, we lose. It’s that simple. We make a prophet of bin Laden, who has been saying all along that we’d quit once things got tough. We embolden the enemy, swell its recruitment, inflate its funding, and guarantee that suppressing it, after the inevitable next wave of attacks against us, will cost many, many more American lives.

Democrats are quite correct that the 2006 elections signaled public ardor for a new direction in Iraq. What they misread — or, better, what they are frantically trying to manufacture — is a purported national consensus about what that new direction should be.

Yes, there is indisputably a vibrant antiwar movement. Thanks to its sympathetic media megaphone, it is influential beyond its numbers. But for all its sound and fury, that movement makes up only a portion of those demanding a “new direction.”

For the rest of us, the desired new direction is the word that is such anathema to both the Left and the foreign-policy establishment: Victory.

MAKING THE CASE

Here is where the administration has betrayed its own cause and disserved Americans. For four years, it has been incoherent, or flat-out AWOL, in making the public case about why military operations in Iraq are inextricably bound with victory in the greater war against jihadists and their state sponsors.

Even as President Bush sought reelection, his administration failed to take heed (as I pleaded for it to do in this pre-2004 election piece) of the Left’s contention that Iraq was a “diversion” from the “real” war on terror — a contention that was wrong but resonant because the public case had been neglected. To be sure, stockpiles of WMDs were not found as anticipated. Flawed intelligence, however, was a bipartisan failure. More to the point, it did not alter the fact that, had we not taken him out, Saddam was well positioned to be right back in business — with lots of Russian, Chinese, and European support for ending sanctions, lots Oil-for-Food money, and lots of jihadist contacts.

Those ties between the now-deposed Iraqi regime and jihadists — the vital connection between Iraq and the war on terror — were never well explained. The administration, grateful to be reelected despite being burned on WMDs, has since shunned all discussion of the justification for deposing Saddam, assuming a suicidally tin-eared “we’re looking forward, not back” posture.

But you have to look back, constantly. In a just war, you have to remind people why the cause is just, why the sacrifices are worth it. You can’t focus, myopically, on Iraqi “democracy” — something Americans simply don’t care that much about — while your not-so-loyal opposition, day after withering day, delegitmizes the casus belli.

To no one’s surprise, that delegitimization project continues even as we speak with the shameful initiative by the Democrats’ 2008 frontrunner, Sen. Hillary Clinton, to revoke the use-of-force resolution she proudly voted for in 2002. This, despite having famously posed as our two-for-the-price-of-one co-president at the very time her husband made regime change in Iraq the official policy of the United States. (Since she’s now avowedly focused like a laser on “real” terrorism, more’s the pity that it’s too late for her to seek revocation of President Clinton’s pardons of convicted FALN and Weather Underground terrorists, to say nothing of his abject failure to respond to the Khobar Towers and Cole attacks in which jihadists killed 36 members of the U.S. armed forces.)

AMERICANS WANT AL QAEDA DEFEATED

Notwithstanding all the missteps, the war effort remains salvageable. To understand why, one need look no further than the Left’s own talking points.

Democrat Senator Christopher Dodd, a 2008 (no) hopeful, has always been a reliable barometer of pat left-liberal dogma. In a Sunday interview, he insisted that withdrawing our forces from Iraq was necessary so we could escalate our military commitment to Afghanistan — which he portrayed as al Qaeda’s “epicenter.” When Fox’s Chris Wallace repeatedly observed that the selfsame al Qaeda is behind much of the mayhem in Iraq, Dodd stuck mulishly to the script, countering that, no, even if there is some al Qaeda presence, Iraq is a civil war that we can’t win.

Now, I don’t buy for a moment that Sen. Dodd, Sen. Clinton, Majority Leader Harry Reid, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and the rest of the Soros/Hollywood/Netroot/New York Times thrall really want to fight al Qaeda in Afghanistan. If President Bush were fool enough to take their advice and abandon Iraq to surge in Afghanistan, I’m confident they’d be telling us by next week that al Qaeda’s “epicenter” is in Iraq, and that the rube in the Oval Office should “redeploy” instead of miring us in Afghanistan’s intractable civil war.

But the point is not the fact of hypocrisy; it is why the Left feels the need to be hypocritical. Why don’t its champions just reaffirm their preferred “Come home, America” summons? Why do they posture about leaving Iraq to confront al Qaeda in Afghanistan (while, naturally, taking no actual steps to ratchet up military operations in Afghanistan)?

Because the last time they tried unadorned “Come home, America” in the midst of a frustrating war, they suffered the worst electoral deluge in American history. Because they know that however low Bush’s numbers may now be, their own will be bottomless if their policy of withdrawal from Iraq is revealed as the resounding terrorist triumph it would be. Because they fully understand that, no matter how much they’d like to turn the clock back to September 10th, the majority of Americans well remember September 11th. Because they know it is unacceptable to leave the battlefield while al Qaeda is still on it. The Democrats have to keep saying “civil war”; if they acknowledge al Qaeda’s catalytic role in Iraq, in the killing of our troops there, they know most Americans will see “redeployment” as a euphemism for surrender.

This presents a last opportunity for the Bush administration. However ruefully and emptily, Democrats admit that we have to fight al Qaeda where al Qaeda is strong. It is thus the administration’s burden to demonstrate, compellingly, that al Qaeda is making a menacing stand in Iraq. Yes, what’s happening there features sectarian infighting; but it is not, as the Left contends, a civil war. It is infighting stoked by al Qaeda and the Iranian enablers with whom al Qaeda has colluded since the early 1990s. Both are making their stand, and both are intent on emerging dominant once we’re gone.

This is not the work of one presidential speech. It is the diligent, disciplined work of daily demonstration: Where is al Qaeda in Iraq? What are they doing? How many of those we’ve killed and captured have been imported jihadis rather than indigenous Iraqi insurgents? What is the scale of al Qaeda activity in Iraq versus its operations in other hot-spots? How many Americans in Iraq have been killed by al Qaeda terrorists? Why is it credible to believe that a U.S. withdrawal would turn parts of Iraq into safe-havens of the type al Qaeda enjoyed in Sudan and Afghanistan during the 1990s — when it repeatedly struck American interests?

On the need to fight al Qaeda, the argument is already won. But the jury is out, and increasingly skeptical, on how well Iraq serves that need. Victory is not about Iraqi democracy or stability. It is about killing and capturing jihadists who threaten American national security. If the administration, with its bully pulpit, is incapable of convincing Americans that those jihadists are in Iraq, then Iraq is lost.

We are all weary of Iraq. Still, if competently informed, the American people won’t tolerate losing in Iraq — not to al Qaeda.

— Andrew C. McCarthy directs the Center for Law & Counterterrorism at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.