I've been reading in Reagan's War: The Epic Story of His Forty Year Struggle and Final Triumph Over Communism, by Peter Schweizer.
It's a good read.
I am struck by how much W learned from Reagan. I think that this was part of what enabled W to stand tall, the instant that 9/11 hit. He had seen what it meant for a President to lead the nation to defeat its sworn mortal enemy.
Reagan was a focused enemy of communism for 30 years before he became President. He had articulated for decades, in columns, radio broadcasts and books, just how he planned to take them down. He came in after decades of "detente, peaceful coexistance, disarmament, ...", and on the heels of the disgraceful Carter years, after years of defeat and truce in many foreign lands. By the force of his vision, the Berlin wall _did_ come down, and the Soviet Union collapsed. He flat out won a war that was being fought between the two most heavily armed nations in history, without condeming all life on this planet to radioactive extinction.
I don't think Bush came to office with the same degree of focus on terrorism. But he knew what it was when he saw it, and he had seen right up close how to deal with it. There is no compromise between blood enemies. When someone has vowed to kill you and all your like, and has persisted with great energy for years to carry out that vow, there is no peaceful coexistance, no detente, no compromise, no disarmament.
Someone is going to die - him or you. Choose wisely.
Sometimes I think that the leftists, including most of the Democratic Party leadership (oxymoron), are also our mortal enemy. They haven't been as clear in stating that they want to bury America as was Kruschev or Osama, but they do.
At times like that, I pray for the day when we have a President who treats the left as Reagan did the Soviet Union, as W treats the terrorists. A death match.
Now just how you play a death match, while respecting the ballot box and the constition, I don't know. But then, I wouldn't have known how to defeat the Soviet Union, which in 1980 had the strongest military in the world, at least not without creating alot of mutant cockroaches to inherit the Earth.
Someday, someone, will know.