Criticism of President Bush

J. Peter Mulhern's column in yesterday's American Thinker (HT: WorldNetDaily) is a criticism of President Bush's approach to the war. It's excellent. Read the whole thing, because these excerpts don't do it justice.

A conservative, Mulhern gets to the heart of some of the frustration I've felt with President Bush's rhetoric--and lack of fire--about how he sees this war that was declared and re-declared by the Islamofascists. His bottom line is that President Bush is a conventional thinker, and our war requires someone who isn't stuck in convention.

President Bush isn’t likely to change enough to execute a dramatic turnaround. But Republicans will soon begin in earnest the process of selecting their next leader. They should make a concerted effort to understand and learn from his mistakes. Above all, the Bush experience should teach Republicans and conservatives to shun the conventional.

The conventional understanding of how history unfolds is still fundamentally Marxist. Conventional wisdom views every human conflict as pitting oppressors against the oppressed. The oppressed struggle to throw off the oppressor’s yoke; the oppressors fight to keep that yoke firmly in place. Cultural factors such as religion are invisible.... International law and the institutions that administer it are vital because they provide principled restraints on the oppressors.

The day Islamic terrorism finally came home we needed a leader to tell us that we were at war and to lay out a clear strategy for victory. The President’s job was to identify our enemies and inspire us to defeat them and eliminate their threat to our homeland.

President Bush never managed to do that job because conventional wisdom made him incapable of understanding what happened on September 11. He has never grasped the ugly truth that we are fighting a religious war with roots in the Dark Ages. That war is entirely outside his conventional frame of reference. He doesn’t have the vocabulary for defining and defending it.

So the President talks about Islam being a "religion of peace," about bringing democracy to the formerly oppressed people of Iraq, about our war not being a war against a particular religion. He understands the importance of fighting but can't quite seem to grasp exactly what it is that needs to be fought.

The scum that turned passenger jets into cruise missiles and screamed about Allah as they crashed into their targets weren’t poor or oppressed. They weren’t protesting against neo-colonial exploitation of Middle Eastern oil wealth or globalization or anything else the conventional mind might understand.

They were self-consciously opening a new offensive in the 1370 year old war between Islam and the unbelievers, those in the dar al harb (house of war). They didn’t do this out of desperation. They did it because they believed, with considerable justification, that the West is no longer Christian enough or tough enough to resist Islamic competition.

A president who understood what happened on September 11 would have been addressing the nation on September 12 to say that we can no longer tolerate the Islamic status quo, particularly in Arabia and Persia. We can’t tolerate Saudi wealth promoting the poisonous Wahabbi sect. We can’t tolerate Arab and Persian support for Islamic terrorism. Above all we can’t tolerate any Muslim enemies with access to the resources of an oil producing state.

This is not a conventional war. It's a fight for our very survival, but the President is again showing his lack of that understanding by taking concerns about Iran's nuclear program to the EU and the UN and any other set of ineffective, corrupt initials he can find. Let's hope we have the time it's taking for the Administration to deal conventionally with conventional bureaucrats about a screaming, antisocial fanatic who happens to be running a country.

It's two more years until our next Presidential election, and Mulhern has this advice for those who take the Islamofascist-jihadist threat seriously:

The next Republican presidential nominee will probably have to craft our response to the next major Muslim strike on our homeland. For better or worse, Republicans are stuck with the burdens of power because the Democrats are stuck on stupid trying to win American elections as the anti-American party. This leaves Republican primary voters with a grave responsibility.

We should all pray that they choose wisely and well.