Failing the Test of September 11

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Mark Helprin
wants to know why George W. Bush is "a president more of word than of deed."

For the record, Helprin is no liberal Bush-basher. Helprin is a contributing editor of The Wall Street Journal and a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute. He is also a former speech writer for Bob Dole.

Recently he wrote a piece in the op-ed page of the Wall Street Journal admonishing POTUS for his conduct of the terror war in the year since 9/11. He compares Bush with FDR in the twelve months after Pearl Harbor. Listen:

A year after Pearl Harbor, FDR exemplified the probity of an America that knew its enemies had yet to be dislodged from their citadels.

In the previous 365 days [after Pearl Harbor] we had quadrupled defense spending and military production, doubled military manpower, turned the Battle of the Atlantic, invaded North Africa in history's then largest amphibious assault, begun the Burma Road, engaged Hirohito's air force, bombed Tokyo, checked the expansion of the Japanese Empire, and triumphed at Midway and in the Coral Sea.

And President Bush? According to Helprin, Bush has dithered away the last 12 months. Helprin paints a picture of a President who is all hat and no cattle:

He did not ask America to sacrifice or fight, but to shop.

In the days following Sept. 11, he was sitting on a great war horse ready to run, and he dismounted. And every time he was pushed back up by a people rightly incensed and eager to mobilize, he slid off the saddle and started talking.

Never have so many war plans been discussed so openly and so long for so little.

Like his father, who listened to clerks rather than to the rules of war, and broke off the attack, the son has wasted momentum, virtually assuring that the next battle will be fought on the enemy's terms.

What kind of war can you fight if you cannot even bring yourself to declare it?

He draws attention to the difference between Bush’s tough talk about the military and his actual record:

Though the president campaigned to restore the military, he has not.

His first defense budget represented virtually no change; the second--after Sept. 11--a minuscule increase; and the third, though much trumpeted, a wholly insufficient one.

Less the purely operational costs of the "war," the president's third budget is 3.1% of GDP. The Clinton administration directed a larger share of America's resources to defense even as it severely degraded the military of which President Bush is supposedly the savior.

Timing is everything. Helprin’s piece appeared the same day that the Saudis seemed to signal that they would aquiesce to our request for access to Saudi military bases. That said, his words are validated by that outcome:

You cannot lead a nation in war if you dare not recognize the enemy.

[President Bush has failed] to recognize Saudi Arabia as the ideological, diplomatic, financial, organizational, and strategic center of the new terrorism:




• ideological in its exportation of intolerant Wahhabism;
• diplomatic in coordinating opposition to American military action in the Gulf;
• financial in its subsidy of al Qaeda and other terrorists;
• organizational in providing personnel, infrastructure, and access to the U.S.;
• and strategic in that it is the depository of great wealth, the center of mass, and the blocker of crucial routes of invasion.

He questions Bush’s judgement as Commander in Chief:

You cannot lead a nation in war unless you are willing to strike the enemy at his heart. The president has reportedly overridden professional military advice stipulating a minimum of 250,000 troops and three months' buildup for an invasion of Iraq, in favor of 50,000 or so with a few weeks of staging.

Read the entire piece.

With friends like this, the Republicans don’t need Democrats.