http://www.spectator.org/dsp_article.asp?art_id=6133 Loose Canons
Dubya’s SGO
By Jed Babbin
Published 2/9/2004 12:08:40 AM
After the Sunday disaster on Meet the Press, it's fair to ask: Does Mr. Bush still have the confidence in himself to continue as president? If I were sitting beside Mr. Bush in the Oval Office, this is what he'd hear:
Mr. President, your performance on Meet the Press on Sunday was simply awful. You conceded that the intelligence justifying the Iraq campaign was wrong. You lacked confidence in answering Tim Russert's questions. You were tentative, you gulped, looked away, like someone who doesn't want to answer. Saying that Saddam was "capable" of developing weapons doesn't explain why it was worth spending hundreds of American lives to remove him from power. When Russert pointed out the obvious -- that there are a lot of other countries that can make WMD, and are also linked to terrorists -- you only said that diplomacy hadn't run its course in those cases. You seemed unable to answer the questions about Iraq, the intelligence mess and almost everything else about military and foreign policy matters. As of 11:30 a.m. EDT on 8 February, there is political blood in the water, and it's all yours.
You need to come out swinging on Iraq and intelligence. Your best spokesman is not Powell or Tenet. They're weak sisters, and only condemn your policy with faint praise. Big Dog got it right in his remarks to the EUnuchs last week. The problem with the world ain't George Bush's America, it's the bad guys. You have -- apparently -- reached the conclusion that the intel community isn't capable of giving you the support you need to make your policy of preemption work. Order a top-to-bottom review of it and make the changes necessary to force -- not ask -- all the intelligence agencies to operate jointly like the military now does. This cannot be done by the new commission you announced last week. You need a review that is done only by intel and military professionals, and you can't wait for the results until March 2005 when you may be out of a job. Get it done by September and make the results part of your legislative and campaign agenda.
Tim Russert went easy on you. He asked tough but respectful questions. You should be very grateful that you weren't facing the pressure of a debate with your opponent. You looked a lot like your father: a damned good man worn out by his job. You, and he, are two of our very best. But you need to make people proud of you again, to energize them to reelect you. John Kerry has all the confidence of someone who hasn't had to face the tough decisions you have. The next time his name comes up, quote Churchill: "Any clever person can make plans for winning a war if he has no responsibility for carrying them out."
You almost said the right thing: that taking out Saddam was right because we need to take on -- and take out -- all of the regimes that support terrorism. You hedged, but what you said about Libya surrendering its nukes should be your central point. What the bad guys must continue to understand is that what we did to Saddam we will do to them unless they take Qaddafi's route. Only you -- with the confidence we know you can muster -- can deliver that message credibly. John Kerry is running ads that picture him as the strong military hero he once was but is no longer. He is a multinationalist, eager -- like Clinton was -- to have the UN and the EUnuchs make our defense decisions for us. You are the real leader. Or you were, from September 2001 through May 2003. We need that George Bush to lead us for the next four years, not the one we saw on Sunday.
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