George W. Bush has chosen to call himself a war president, but as he embarks upon a second term, he confronts a challenge no American war president has ever before encountered.
Only three of his predecessors -- Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt and Richard Nixon -- began another term in the midst of shooting wars. Lincoln in 1865 and Roosevelt in 1945 focused on the peace, knowing that their wars had been won; Nixon in 1973 was consummating an agreement to extract the United States from a war begun by his predecessors and already lost. When the 43rd president of the United States addresses the nation at his second inauguration, he knows that history will ultimately judge his presidency on how he wages what his administration has labeled "The Global War on Terror" and how he disengages the United States from Iraq.
Man of war: The president waves as he departs for the USS Abraham Lincoln to meet sailors returning from Iraq in May 2003. On ship, he declared an end to "major combat operations."
(Mike Blake -- Reuters)
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Having led his country into this unmapped territory, Bush must demonstrate the flexibility and imagination to build support for a conflict that will surely outlast his presidency. In this, he could draw on the wisdom of a 19th-century war president: "As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew," Lincoln told Congress in December 1862. "We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country."
It is too soon to know how history will judge success in the current struggle. But failure will be readily recognizable, even to members of Bush's party who will gather at his inauguration on Thursday. If in the next four years the United States suffers another catastrophic attack, or if Iraq becomes an enemy state or flies apart, or if terrorism metastasizes to threaten our interests beyond the Middle East, then surely President Bush will be a flop by his own definition.
Bush has in the past used presidential speeches to rally the country, but he has failed to follow through on the promise of his rhetoric. After 9/11, like Roosevelt after Pearl Harbor and John F. Kennedy upon assuming office, Bush lifted our spirits and brought much of the world to our side. He quickly defined what had happened -- War! -- and so readied us for sacrifice while warning friend and foe alike of our resolve. In a bold campaign, he overthrew the Taliban in Afghanistan and put al Qaeda on the run. Those first months were the high point of leadership for a president fond of talking about himself as a leader.
But Bush identified the wrong enemy -- "terrorism" instead of "radical Islamic terrorists" -- and quickly slipped into the apocalyptic rhetoric of good and evil, complicating strategy and making success impossible to measure. He followed with actions uncharacteristic of wartime presidents and harmful to war-making. First, he implored the American people to return to normal, never asking for sacrifice (or even for youth to join the military). Then he refused to increase the size of our ground forces, even after embarking on campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq. Unlike Lincoln and Roosevelt, he turned the conduct of war over to underlings, eschewing active presidential involvement. He refused to abandon his domestic agenda (as Lyndon Johnson did in 1965) or to subordinate it to war's necessities (as Roosevelt did in World War II).
Bush never followed up his burst of bipartisan rhetoric with true bipartisan action, and, unlike his predecessors, he avoided the commitment of time and energy necessary to bring our allies together, antagonizing them instead with take-it-or-leave-it choices. Most divisive of all, he attacked Iraq without a unifying casus belli.
Unlike Lincoln, who freely admitted to error and once boasted that "my policy is to have no policy," Bush has made consistency into a fetish and refuses to admit any mistake, thus forfeiting credibility and respect.
When the president speaks about Iraq, it seems as if American strategy relies on democratizing the rest of the world, starting with a country that appears to be moving from insurgency to civil war. This is an ancient American dream and ultimately in the American national interest, but establishing U.S-style liberty, political democracy and market capitalism is such a long-term goal as to be utopian. It will in any event fail to provide much security in the near and mid-term future.
As his second term begins, Bush has few precedents on which to draw. His war resembles the Cold War more than any previous shooting war, making perhaps his closest analogue Harry Truman in 1949: winner of a narrow election victory; lacking in respect at home and abroad; facing a conflict and an enemy that is both unclear and elusive. Then as now, U.S. relationships with many countries were in transition, and the winds of change -- social and technological as well as political and economic -- were sweeping the world in the wake of a cataclysm that had remade the map. Just as in the Cold War, this fight is for people's loyalties and interests, ideologies and beliefs.
Like Truman, who used his inaugural address to define the enemy, reassert American values and outline a strategy for the future, Bush must in his address on Thursday clarify the nature and purpose of the global war on terror, so that he can bring about the domestic unity and improve the foreign relationships that will allow the United States to prevail.
More importantly, like Truman and then Eisenhower (who quickly ended the Korean War, a divisive local conflict that was harming the struggle against the larger enemy), Bush must understand that his legacy will be "foundational." He has created or strengthened many policies, programs, institutions and initiatives to prosecute this long conflict against murderous radical Islam, but the work has just begun.
What is to be done? To succeed, Bush must rebuild American intelligence. He must separate radical Islam from its host populations. He must dramatically increase the diplomacy and dollars devoted to preventing the spread of nuclear and biological weapons. He must formulate new policies about the detention of prisoners that command respect at home and abroad. And he must emphasize, as he promised in Canada last year, rebuilding the foreign relationships that will permit us to chase down terrorists anywhere in the world. Most of all, he must devote more attention to homeland security, for while we attack the terrorists overseas, they can still damage us grievously at home. And he must do all this while ensuring that the principles of American liberty and freedom are not undermined in the process.
There are signs that Bush is moving to meet these challenges. Two new Cabinet choices promise less divisiveness and more effective management. Alberto Gonzales, a loyalist who exudes caution and cooperation, replaces the clumsy ideologue John Ashcroft at Justice. Michael Chertoff, who expresses sensitivity to the conflict between liberty and security, replaces the colorless (except for his warning system) Tom Ridge, whose Homeland Security department's disorganization calls to mind the chaos of World War I and "the mess in Washington" notorious during World War II. In Iraq, the unwavering march toward elections and "Iraqification" indicates that an exit strategy is in place.
Shortly before the election, the president let slip that he didn't think the war against terrorism was winnable in any traditional sense, suggesting that he now sees complexities that were absent from his defiant words of Sept. 14, 2001, at Washington National Cathedral: "This conflict was begun on the timing and terms of others," he said. "It will end in a way and at an hour of our choosing." Bush seems to sense the need for more unity and less bravado home and abroad.
It would be too much to expect, given the habits of a lifetime and the rhetorical commitments already made, that Bush could be induced to abandon his domestic agenda. But he should know that battles over privatizing a portion of Social Security, making permanent his tax cuts, and the rest of a partisan agenda will undermine his war leadership and reduce the support and cooperation necessary for national security.
Yet if Bush applies the same degree of focus to his "Global War on Terror" that he devoted to his reelection, if he concentrates on building consensus and strengthening our national security institutions, then the United States can prosecute this struggle effectively for a generation and beyond. Then the president will indeed be thinking anew. Only by doing so will he leave office four years from now in the company of America's successful war presidents.
Richard Kohn heads the Curriculum in Peace, War, and Defense at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. A former chief of history for the U.S. Air Force, he is at work on a study of presidential war leadership.
