Michael Novak on President Bush

The two hits on President Bus, writes RMC Chappie Michael Novak, is that he has lost the war and that his administration is incompetent.

Certainly, he has made mistakes on the war.  But

the president has now changed strategy, as well as the generals charged with pursuing it. He now has commanders who believe in victory and who, in fact, designed the way to get to it.

You can argue that the president’s strategy to keep as low a profile and let the Iraqis do it was a mistake, since it encouraged local warlords to step into the power vacuum.  But now the president has responded and changed.

The other argument is incompetence.  But let’s be realistic here.

A long-established lesson is that even in the best of times, government is mightily incompetent—and the bigger government gets, the more incompetent it becomes.

The buck stops here, and the president is responsible for every government mistake and miscue.  But let us not forget

the decisive steps President Bush took [after 9/11] allowed our economy not only to recoup the dreadful financial losses of September 11 but also to climb unparalleled heights.

We should not forget the recent epiphany of Theodore Dalrymple, in which he realized that the welfare state is built on the concept of failure, from top to bottom, and that its invariable response is to reinforce failure.

Of course if you believe, with President Bush and Michael Novak that “single most dominant issue we face remains the threat from jihadism,” then the question of whether we lose the battle of Iraq is a minor one. 

The ugly words broadcast by the jihadists may seem mad, but they are matched by steady actions upon a world-wide front. Their stated aim is to convert us forcibly to Islam or to exterminate us until the caliphate stretches around the world: one religion, one polity.

 If we believe that we are called to resist the militant surge of Islam then we have to do something about it. 

In response to the jihadist threat President Bush set out to bring democracy to the Middle East. You can say that he is having quite a struggle. But you can’t say he didn’t have a plan, and you can’t say that he just sat around twiddling his thumbs.