DO WE NEED A NEW WARFIGHTER PRESIDENT?

The "Daily Pundit", a seriously angry, and disappointed Bush supporter, says we need a new Warfighter President. Maybe he's right. That certainly is what I'll vote for. But, who is he?

I've edited this angry note to shorten it, but the theme is unchanged. Today, after the U.S. Government brokered a battlefield defeat which allows a terrorist Hezbollah to escape, to rearm and resupply, to fight another day again protected by the same "U.N." force that allowed the rocket bombardment which produced the war, well, it's hard to argue with Mr. Quick's harsh view.

In order to know where we stand today in evaluating George W. Bush, it is necessary to know where we - and he - stood five (yes, five) years ago. Three weeks after 9/11, the President addressed a joint session of congress and said:

Our enemy is a radical network of terrorists, and every government that supports them. (Applause.)

...Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists. (Applause.) From this day forward, any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime.

Four months after 9/11, President Bush delivered the State of the Union Address, in which he said the following:

... "Our enemy is...terrorists...and every government that supports them." "Any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime." "States like these [Iraq, Iran, North Korea] constitute an axis of evil." "The United States of America will not permit the world's most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world's most destructive weapons."


....Viewed in that context, the invasion of Iraq and the toppling of the Hussein regime made perfect sense, especially in a military geostrategic sense. A liberated Iraq, serving as a base and jumping-off point for further military action against Iran and, perhaps, Syria, was an obvious first target for a campaign designed to destroy the regimes comprising the most immediate threats, and for placing enormous pressure on the Saudis to cease their Wahabbist support of Sunni terror organizations globally.

It is now five years later. The Taliban - which turned out to be merely puppets of al Qaeda, which had assumed regime status in Afghanistan, has been overthrown. al Qaeda is now stateless again. It has been badly damaged, but certainly not yet destroyed, as events yesterday in London make crystal clear. The Hussein regime in Iraq has been overthrown, but not destroyed, and much of the country, including the critical oil-bearing regions, is in the hands of Shia militias that answer as much to the Mullahs of Iran as they do to any purported "democratic" government in Baghdad - where, yesterday, hundreds of thousands demonstrated in support of Iranian sponsored terror group Hizb'Allah in their attacks on Israel.

The Mullahs of Iran remain in power and, far from being cowed by the Bush actions in Iraq, are poised to push the United States out of that country entirely. They are also poised to become the second Islamic republic to attain nuclear weapons. Their terrorist surrogates slaughter Americans in Iraq, and Jews in Israel.

The Syrian regime remains intact, and provides unlimited support to anti-American and Islamist terror groups, as it has for decades.

North Korea, a primary member of the "axis of evil," today "threaten[s] us with the world's most destructive weapons." - as does, or will soon, Iran.

Bush's proud words of five years ago stand revealed as hollow and meaningless. What happened?

What happened was one of the biggest failures of leadership in Presidential history. Bush supporters will claim that Bush was done in by a liberal media and the ferocious hatred of liberals and leftwingers, but that is one of the things true leadership is all about: Managing and overcoming opposition in order to achieve the necessary goals - in this case, the destruction of world Islamist terrorism and the regimes that support it.

Bush turned out to be singularly ill-equipped for this task, both by skill and by temperament. .... Compassion has its place, but not in warfighting. The Bush we know would not have pulled the trigger on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He abdicated the hard decisions in favor of political maneuvering and meaningless gestures.

Looking back, it becomes obvious that Bush ... never intended with any conviction to actually do what he said he would do. His own brave promises reveal their hollowness with the passage of time. The world is a far more dangerous place for the United States, thanks to Bush's failures. Today, we stand threatened "by the world's most dangerous regimes with the world's most destructive weapons." And the Wahabbis of Saudi Arabia continue to fund a global terror support machine the likes of which we have not seen since the Soviet regime financed and trained every two-bit communist terror organization it could find.

That is unlikely to change under the Bush administration and, indeed, I expect it to grow worse, as I don't believe Bush has any intention of keeping an effective US military force in the region capable of giving pause to Iran, or to Saudi Arabia.

Instead, we are treated to distractions that give the impression that somebody (in this case, Israel) is doing something about some Islamist terrorists (in this case, open Iranian surrogates), and the US is "doing its part" by "protecting" Israel against the likes of France. And Bush's vaunted "political credit" (which probably never existed in the first place) has dribbled down the drain of his own incompetence.

As for me? I've moved on. The first administration of the first century of the American Third Millennium will, in my estimation, be remembered as one of the biggest failures of that century. Bush's great failure was, not invading Iraq, but not weathering the adversity that followed through acts of real leadership, and then pressing on with the necessary military destruction of the other regimes he, himself, named as most dangerous five years ago.

I'm hoping we can get through the next two years without any major disasters, and then I'm looking to elect a real war leader to the White House - somebody with a warrior's temperament and a leader's skills. George Bush has neither. He is a dangerous failure, and America will be well rid of him.

I think the last statement is inappropriate, and wrong. Mr. Bush was here when we needed him, and when nobody else in the political arena stepped up to force the issue, to do the job, or to lead us to a better outcome. He is owed our thanks, and I agree with Ed Koch, that history will remember him well, in the spirit of Harry Truman, who was also a flawed person. And....there's still time to act to take out the Iranian nukes, to bludgeon Assad sufficiently to free the Lebanese.

Nonetheless, Mr. Bush's failure to defend himself against years of bitter attacks and lies, his unwillingness to abandon "nice" for "destroy the bastards," his inability to make his case by stating and restating the need to fight, his unwillingness to call his enemies (not his opponents, his enemies) out and name them what they are, cowards and traitors, has harmed him and harmed us all.

I agree, we'll need Atilla the Hun, not a missionary for "good", in the times ahead, but GWB isn't running, and it's up to us to find him. Where and who?