Something similar to that landmark policy — a Bush Doctrine — is now emerging to face the threat of Islamic radicalism. Despite the current shrill claims that the United States is hated, hopelessly naïve, bogged down worldwide, and back in another Vietnam, since September 11 we have witnessed a historic emergence of a comprehensive foreign policy to confront Islamic fundamentalism and its parasitic relationship with Middle East autocracy — without which it cannot survive.
Liberals ridicule the Bush doctrine because they claim to be idealistic, and resent that force, rather than reason alone, is sometimes needed. Islamicists hate it, because if Afghanistan and Iraq work, they are largely through. Moderate dictatorships in the region slur it because they can no longer triangulate with us to garner aid and a pass on their own repression. Arab faux-intellectuals and their fellow travelers in the West caricature it, because reform will make untenable their hothouse cynical anti-Americanism — as they soon become as irrelevant as Panamanian or Serbian leftists damning the United States for removing Noriega and Milosevic to give democracy a chance.
The United States is waking up from a serious malady. Once upon a time state-supported terrorism was seen as a criminal problem, not war, requiring yellow police tape, not GPS bombs. Afghanistan was turned into an anti-American terrorist base. Saddam Hussein required never-ending patrols to "box" him in. Osama bin Laden was too "hot" to be apprehended when offered up by potential captors. Pakistan and North Korea went nuclear — the greatest failure of many of the Clinton administration. Iran and Libya bought arsenals with impunity. Yasser Arafat systematically destroyed twenty years of economic progress on the West Bank and violated every accord he signed. Anti-Americanism grew in Europe without rejoinder or consequences. Saudi Arabia expected protection while our own female soldiers on patrol there hid their faces and arms — and promised not to drive. Terrorist funds flowed freely throughout the globe, as anti-Semitism and Islamicist-inspired hatred of Israel became the new pillar of trendy left-wing thought. All that has at least been recognized, checked, and is well on the way to being stopped.
Just as a presidency of earlier ossified liberals like Michael Dukakis or Walter Mondale probably would have led to support of a utopian nuclear freeze and subsequent Russian intimidation of Europe, unilateral cuts in military preparedness, and acquiescence to the Soviet Union, so too the election of John Kerry may well undo much of what has been achieved these last three years as we return to the old, normal way of doing business.
More likely, if President Bush loses, the war against terror will return, as promised, to the status of a police matter — subpoenas and court trials the more appropriate response to the mass murder of 3,000 at the "crime scene" of the crater in New York. Europe will be assured that our troops will stay while we apologize for the usual litany of purported unilateral sins. North Korea will get more blackmail cash, while pampered South Korean leftists resume their "sunshine" mirage. Iraq will be turned over to the U.N. as we abruptly leave, and could dissolve into something like the Balkans between 1991 and 1998. Iran and Syria will let out a big sigh of relief — as American diplomats once more sit out on the tarmac in vain hopes of an "audience" with despots. The Saudis will smile that smile. Arafat will be assured that he is now once again a legitimate interlocutor. And strangest of all, the American Left will feel that the United States has just barely begun to return to its "moral" bearings — even as its laxity and relativism encourage some pretty immoral things to come.