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Politics : American Presidential Politics and foreign affairs -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Peter Dierks who wrote (2742)	12/20/2005 9:20:24 PM
From: Peter Dierks	Respond to of 71588

The global war on terror needs a second wind. BY BRENDAN MINITER Tuesday, December 20, 2005 12:01 a.m. EST In any long-distance race there is a point where self-doubt and exhaustion can become nearly all-consuming. Marathoners call it "hitting the wall." As a nation, we have reached that pass in the global war on terror. Four years in, and Rep. Jack Murtha has shown us the wall of self-doubt. Signs that the faint of heart are giving up and heading for the sidelines now abound. One is in funding the war: The defense Authorization bill, a $450 billion spending bill that's essential to funding the U.S. military, stalled for weeks before Congress finally agreed to its final dimensions this week. In the meantime the Pentagon survived on under "continuing resolutions." Another comes in that other precious commodity in Washington: television debate time. The two biggest defense issues to garner coverage this year have been Sen. John McCain's relentless pursuit to "ban" torture anywhere in the world--notwithstanding that federal law already prohibits any American citizen from committing torture--and Mr. Murtha's proposal to withdraw troops immediately from Iraq. Defeating insurgents and other terrorists, it seems, have become secondary questions to the larger issue of whether this marathon war is worth it. Signs of fatigue are especially evident on the home front. Efforts to renew the Patriot Act got lost amid all the huffing and puffing on Capitol Hill last week after someone leaked to the New York Times that the Bush administration has a secret program to monitor conversations between suspected terrorists inside the United States and those overseas. Critics call this "domestic spying" and liken it to the tactics of authoritarian regimes. Yesterday President Bush was asked by a reporter if this "unchecked" executive power was more or less "permanent." Mr. Bush is stepping in with some cold water for the American people. In his Saturday radio address he pointed out that two of the 9/11 hijackers contacted al Qaeda operatives overseas while they were in the U.S. Had the National Security Agency been running its secret program then, the authorities might have known that the two were planning to board a plane and ram it into the Pentagon. "This is a highly classified program that is crucial" to preventing terrorist attacks, he said. "The unauthorized disclosure of this effort damages our national security and puts our citizens at risk." In an earlier era, such a live radio broadcast from the Oval Office might have ended the debate or turned it on the media for disclosing the program. But not with today's political climate. So Mr. Bush tried calming worries that the federal government is running roughshod over civil liberties by noting the program is reauthorized every 45 days or so and that he has reauthorized it more than 30 times, each time reviewing the program's performance. And the attorney general as well as the White House counsel agree that the program is constitutional and within the realm of a president's power to prosecute a war. Mr. Bush also noted that key members of Congress--including House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi--have been briefed on the program a dozen times. As the president said at his press conference yesterday, this is far from an "unchecked" use of power. Most Americans likely will never learn these details. And, in any case, we can only hope that the rest of us won't get lost in them. The big picture is that al Qaeda operatives can and do pop up in every country and are waging an asymmetric war by using our freedoms against us. We can delegate the power to go after them--no matter where they originate their phone calls--without losing the freedoms that make this country worth fighting for. The real danger here is that such debates will exhaust all of us, sapping the energy we need to fight a long and broad-based war. Heretofore Muslim extremists have been somewhat haphazard in their operations and seemingly conduct their attacks in an ad hoc fashion. A bombing campaign that includes targets in Bali, Kenya, Pakistan, Spain, Tanzania and Yemen, among other places, in the space of just a few years seems more random and desperate than focused and disciplined. Al Qaeda isn't the Soviet Union, so it's tempting to assume that the West isn't now facing a coherent, though evil, ideology with broad appeal. But that will be a safe assumption only if Mr. Bush and his successors are allowed to win this war. For the next few years, perhaps even a couple of decades, the U.S. has an opportunity to ensure that terrorists will remain on the fringe of society. That opportunity will be lost, however, if the Muslim world is left to languish under the thumb of dictators who, in part, are kept in power with Western money. If millions of Muslims are locked out of the modern world, it is only a matter of time before there is a popular revolt against modernity. Osama bin Laden is the tip of that spear, and he once hoped to lead that revolt across international borders. This war will not last forever, and it is a war we are winning by spreading our ideas while confronting terrorists where we find them. Elections in Afghanistan and Iraq are milestones along the path to the modern world for 50 million Muslims. As they leave behind their oppression, we gain a bulwark against the ideology of terror. Self-doubt now is self-defeating. Mr. Miniter is assistant editor of OpinionJournal.com. His column appears Tuesdays. opinionjournal.com