The Art of Politics

Beyond The Water's Edge

President Bush must make the case that the war on terror doesn't stop at the border...

Speeches during the first two days of the Republican convention have done yeoman's work for the President on many fronts, but most importantly they carried water that the White House has at times been careless with - that the war on terror is the trump issue in the election, and more importantly, that the war in Iraq is part and parcel of any long term strategic success against terrorism. In the next two nights, the vision of this effort must be broadened to once again recognize that the fight against terrorism must not stop at the water's edge.

The Republicans will be horribly remiss if they fail to mention what has occurred of late in Russia. The downing of two airliners was frightening enough. But the hostage taking of children - hundreds of them - at a middle school is an outright assault on human decency. Anyone who would hold a gun to the head of a child represents an evil that is both unspeakable and undeterrable. No amount of reason, rationalisms, coercion, sense, nor rhetoric can dissuade such an act that is borne of a mindset so utterly devoid of basic, cohesive human values.

The White House has argued that Iraq is part of the war on terror. The usual rebuttal concludes that as Saddam presented no imminent or proximate threat, and that since he was not responsible for 9/11, that Iraq represented a totally discrete issue. This is outright folly, and Rudy Giuliani said it clearly, stating that "in any plan to destroy global terrorism, Saddam Hussein needed to be removed." And this clarity must be extended - do we suppose that Islamist extremists that threaten the lives of hundreds of children in Russia do not represent an imminent, proximate threat to the United States, and therefore are not our sworn enemies in the war against terrorism? Are French journalists, held in Iraq because of their governments social policies, not held by those that would threaten any one of us? Are we neutral in the butchery of Nepalese cooks and launderers, who are massacred and dismissed as merely those who "serve the Jews and the Christians ... believing in Buddha as their God"?

Fighting Islamist terrorism, in Iraq, in Israel, in Russia, in Spain - these are not discrete problems. They are not independent, nor unrelated. They are part and parcel of a struggle against a fanatic Islamist movement that despises the West, despises Christendom and the existence of Jews, and seeks to exact through threat and the death of innocents what they cannot through popular choice. They are supported by bad actors and regimes that utilize them to their own ends - in Iraq, in Iran, in Syria. No permanent peace can come to the middle east with actors such as Saddam or Arafat in positions of power. Saddam most of all, with his history of regional belligerence, and his known history of seeking, possessing, and using unconventional weapons that can be wielded against civilian targets to devastating effect.

It is time to reaffirm the commitment to a truly global war on terror.

Posted by MEC2 at September 1, 2004 07:41 PM