Washington — Last weekend there was a series of newspaper
articles in all the major papers that struck me as odd. They
attempted to describe how the President is doing during these
vestibular days before war with Iraq. He is relaxed. He is the same
in public as in private. He is comfortable with his decisions.
Well, of course he is. George W. Bush is a very straightforward
man. He is among the most genuine men to reside at 1600
Pennsylvania Avenue since Warren Gamaliel Harding. Wait, wait, that
is not meant as a slight. Coolidge and Hoover were genuine. Truman
was genuine. Ronald Reagan was a genuine guy and perhaps even Bush
I, though Bush I has held so many positions in public life it would
be difficult for him not to adopt certain artifices. Bush II is,
however, down home and genuine. People who meet him usually
recognize this. He does not take credit for things he has not done,
and some of the admirable things that he does he does not boast
about.
He has come to the conclusion that terrorists and “those who
harbor terrorists” are a threat to his fellow citizens. Like only
one other president in the three decades during which terrorism has
claimed the lives of 4,000 Americans (about a thousand before
9/11), he intends to treat terror as an act of war not a crime.
That other President was Ronald Reagan.
President Reagan sent American warplanes in April 1986 to bomb
Colonel Qaddafi’s compound after the Libyan dictator capped
numerous bellicose acts worldwide by sending agents to a West
Berlin disco frequented by American soldiers. There they set off a
bomb that killed two American soldiers and wounded some two hundred
innocent people among them fifty more American soldiers. Even in
that surgical military strike against a dictator who had been
terrorizing the world certain European sophisticates were against
us, most memorably Jacques Chirac, then only the French Prime
Minister of France.
Prime Minister Chirac denied French airspace to our strike force
causing its pilots to fly 2400 more miles to attack Qaddafi.
Chirac’s motives were the same then as they are today: commerce,
moral posturing, and procrastination. At the time in this column I
described Qaddafi’s network of terror as “a new abomination in the
annals of war.”
Expressing the disappointment that millions of Americans feel
towards now President Chirac, I wondered if the French “would have
allowed our planes to fly over a more precisely designated rout,
leapfrogging such places as Ardennes, Suresnes, Rhone, the Lorraine
Valley, St. James, St. Laurent, and Espinal. All contain military
cemeteries where American men lie face up, forever gazing into the
skies of France. Surely these men would not object if they were to
see once more the underbelly of an American bomber flying far from
home to defend the values of the West.” The lines struck a chord
then. Pilots from the USS John F. Kennedy wrote me to tell
me that they posted the column on their bulletin board. I reproduce
part of it in hopes of stirring today’s pilots as they prepare to
strike against an even more monstrous brute than Qaddafi. The
American military has served the cause of freedom as few other
military forces ever have.
I also reproduce these lines to remind us that the obduracy of
certain European powers is not new. Nor is their reliance on
American resolve. There is also another reason to recall our action
against Libya. It sent Qaddafi hunkering. The fiery brute lost his
fire. Reagan went on to stare down the Soviet Union, which gave up
on the Cold War a few years later. Peace unfortunately is not
secured by French procrastination. They might have learned that
from their decade of appeasement in the 1930s.
The resolute man in the White House is of course mounting a
vastly larger strike against Saddam today than President Reagan
mounted against Libya’s tin pot colonel. Yet he has more of the
world on his side. He has most of Europe, the Arab emirates,
Jordan, and Turkey probably will be with us. Students of war as
knowledgeable as Britain’s John Keegan estimate the fighting will
last only a week or so. First will come the most formidable aerial
attack in history. Then air-mobile assaults will be mounted with
heavily armed helicopters and elite troops from our airborne
divisions and special-ops units. Finally our ground forces will
roll against what is left of the Iraqi army. Within a few days
Baghdad will be surrounded. Saddam will be dead or under
arrest.
The great questions that now cannot be answered are: Will the
Western alliance recover? Will terrorism subside? Will Iraq accept
peace and civilized government? My guess is that the answer to all
three questions is yes, but the work that follows the war will be
as arduous as the work that led up to it.
