WONDER LAND
Joining the Fight
One president can't wage war on terror alone.
BY DANIEL HENNINGER
Friday, November 21, 2003 12:01 a.m.
President Bush delivered an historically important speech in London this week. It was dense with big ideas deserving reflection, more than can be explored in the space of a column. Suffice to say that Mr. Bush's ideas were met with a swift, one-idea retort in Istanbul the next day.
Two truck bombs, described as the worst terrorist bombing in Turkey's recent history, blew up a British bank and the British consulate. Some 27 people are dead and at least 450 wounded, some horrible to describe. Of course 3,000 died in America on September 11, 212 were blown to death in Bali last year, 17 were slaughtered in Riyadh this month, and terrorist bombs are murdering civilians in Israel and U.S. soldiers and Iraqi citizens around Baghdad, routinely.
You can, and should, read the full text of the Bush speech (the most accessible version is on the White House's own Web site). Here is the five-minute Louvre version:
America's worldview began "with reading too much John Locke and Adam Smith." Thus, "we believe in open societies ordered by moral conviction." We seek an "alliance of values" whose cornerstone is respect for individual dignity. "Great responsibilities fall to the great democracies." When they fail that responsibility, as in the past century, dictators rise, living off resentments and surviving with violence. Their weapons of choice today are nuclear, chemical and biological.
"The hope that danger is passed is comforting...and it is false." The "tidiness" of the multilateral "process" is not enough. Free nations, as a last resort, must be willing to contain "aggression and evil by force." Leaders have a "duty" to defend their people from "a chaotic world ruled by force."
As to John Locke, men and women in democratic societies, Mr. Bush said, "turn their hearts and labor to building better lives." As to Adam Smith: "By extending the reach of trade, we foster prosperity and the habits of liberty." And as to Iraq: "There were good-faith disagreements . . . over the course and timing of military action in Iraq. Whatever has come before, we now have only two options: to keep our word, or to break our word."
With this speech we have reached a juncture, I think, where people have to agree with the president about the nature of the threat, or disagree. The threat is the proliferation of the technical knowledge beneath weapons of mass destruction, and the existence of people willing to use these technologies against large civilian populations or whole nations. That, in sum, is terrorism.
For those of us who agree about the nature of the threat, I think the time has come to recognize, in a formal way, that we have entered a period of history analogous to the Cold War--and that we now need Cold War institutions to win the war on terror.
We don't require another mass murder next week in London, and the week after in New York, Madrid or Sydney to understand that this threat will recur for years until it is defeated. Yes, a long, hard slog. And those of us who know this should also recognize that we've been standing around with our hands in our pockets, watching, and leaving one president and his associates to carry the whole load--the fight, the arguments, the counterarguments and the flak.
To read Mr. Bush's London speech is to understand clearly that a grand struggle is unfolding, and it will need structures outside government to win it. One such structure would be to create a successor to the Committee for a Free World.
September 11 and its aftermath happened so quickly--the pre-emption doctrine, the run-up to war, an abrupt victory and now the unavoidable march forward--that the best supporters could muster was mostly yelling back at the marchers in the street. What this war needs now is an institutionalized, off-stage chorus of support, counsel, explication--and warning. The need to articulate and sustain the intellectual basis for the war on terror is as needed now as it was when marchers filled the capitals of Europe to protest against Ronald Reagan, Maggie Thatcher and pro-active opposition to communism across the 1980s.
Many non-governmental groups played a role in opposing communism, but I single out the Committee for a Free World, led then by Midge Decter, because its members included both American and European intellectuals. The Americans included Irving Kristol, Seymour Martin Lipset and Edward Shils. Supporters in Europe included writers from France, West Germany, Italy and Britain, such as Leo Labedz, Tom Stoppard, Alain Bescanon and Golo Mann, as well as the Pole, Leszek Kolakowski. This war today needs to find intellectual allies beyond the U.S., and beyond Europe. And they need a place to meet, debate and act.
There were other groups, such as the Committee on the Present Danger, and the list of men and women who contributed their minds and energy to containing and defeating the Soviet threat, or supporting Solidarity and its counterparts, is long and luminous. It is startling to look at the membership of the anti-Soviet Committee for a Democratic Majority, begun in 1972 by Sen. Henry Jackson--names such as Nunn, Moynihan and Boren. No such group of elected Democrats is possible today.
In some ways, the task now is harder. The physical threat then was identifiable as ICBMs and Soviet tanks, and by the 1980s communism's nature was well understood. The details of weapons proliferation and the origins and shape of Islamic extremism are less broadly understood.
As then, this is a war in which ideas fight alongside men in arms. But look at the debate now; we've let the opposition get away with making the terms of argument personal, fought over in just four words: "George Bush" and "Donald Rumsfeld." And we've left these men to carry the burden of both fighting the war on the ground and the war of words.
Mr. Bush fought magnificently in London this week. This war, however, is about more than George Bush, and will need more than his words to win. America's first war had the Committees of Correspondence. The last big one had the Committee for a Free World. This war is going to need one, too.
Mr. Henninger is deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page. His column appears Fridays in the Journal and on OpinionJournal.com.
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