Americans are better served by the president's comment that the war on terror can't be won than by false assurances that it can.
Published September 4, 2004
President Bush slipped up this week and said something honest about the war on terror: "I don't think you can win it," he said in a television interview. The president's statement was a rare acknowledgement of reality. The war on terror can't be "won" in the sense that traditional wars were, any more than the "war on crime" or the "war on drugs" can be.
The war on terror is broader and more difficult than a fight against a government that can be defeated or removed from power - although punishing governments, such as Afghanistan's Taliban, that harbor terrorists is a necessary element of the war. As long as a single fanatic with a weapon can cause massive casualties, a free society can never be completely safe from terrorism.
That seems to be the point the president was trying to make. Naturally, though, he immediately came under attack for having lapsed into a moment of candor. Democratic rival John Kerry took a break from windsurfing to pronounce that the war on terror "absolutely" could be won. Other Democrats accused the president of defeatism, or worse. Republicans pressured him to take back his words.
And so the president and his spokesmen quickly backtracked. They, too, are back to giving the American people false assurances that the war on terror can be won as definitively as World War II was.
Most people know better, so it would be helpful if our politicians would stop pandering to us and start talking more honestly about the best short-term and long-term strategies for minimizing terrorism and marginalizing the terrorists.
Any realistic strategy will take many forms: reorganizing and strengthening our intelligence operations to cope with modern threats; building alliances that allow us to track and disrupt terrorist activities around the globe; supporting political reforms in the Islamic world that can help to dry up the breeding grounds for terrorism; upholding our own democratic principles at home and in our relations with other governments and people; and, when necessary, taking military action against terrorist groups that pose a direct threat to our security.
None of those steps can "win" this war in a traditional sense, but they can give us the upper hand, both strategically and morally. The presidential campaigns should be talking honestly with voters about the demands that the war on terror will place on our society, as well as the limits of what this ongoing war can accomplish. But after a brief moment of candor from the president, both sides are back to posturing in ways that do nothing to make us safer and can only foster false expectations.
