Thank God George Bush is the Commander-in-Chief

December 13, 2002
By GREGORY J. RUMMO

IT HAD TO have been only a few days after 9/11 when I saw the makeshift message fashioned from masking tape proudly displayed across the back of a contractor’s van. “Nuke the bastards” it seemed to scream from the paint-splattered doors.

Hmmm—simple and to the point, I thought.

Come to think of it, it was right around the same time that a caller to Sean Hannity’s afternoon talk-radio program suggested Bush’s war strategy should simply be to appear on national television with a map of the Arab world with the top 50 cities circled and explain that for every additional terrorist attack on US soil, our military would respond by dropping a nuke on one of them.

Mr. Hannity was quick to point out to the caller that his suggestion was extreme.

But in light of the report that the US would consider a response to an attack by terrorists using weapons of mass destruction with “all our options,” maybe the guy with the masking tape and the talk-radio caller weren’t as extreme as we all thought.

The announcement of President Bush’s new strategy, aimed principally at Iraq, occurred on the same day that former President Jimmy Carter accepted the Nobel Peace Prize.

The timing could not have been more exquisite.

In his acceptance speech before the Nobel Peace Prize committee, Mr. Carter, who warned Iraq that it must eliminate weapons of mass destruction said, “War may sometimes be a necessary evil. But no matter how necessary, it is always evil, never a good.”

Only days earlier, in his weekly radio message, President Bush said, “Americans seek peace in the world. War is the last option for confronting threats. Yet the temporary peace of denial and looking away from danger would only be a prelude to a broader war and greater horror.”

“War is a last option” vs. “War may sometimes be a necessary evil.” Sounds like these guys are on the same page.

They’re not—far from it—but it is nonetheless instructive to ponder the reasons why liberals are all goo-goo over the wide-toothed grinning Jimmy Carter while making President Bush out to be Satan incarnate.

It’s several things.

Liberals talk big about war. It’s easy for them to say, “War is a necessary evil,” when they’ve never been called on to wage one.

But there’s another reason why Carter gets a free pass by peaceniks—it’s called selective memory.

While conveniently remembering Mr. Carter’s brokering of the Camp David peace accord in the Middle East between Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin in 1978, his one-time attempt to use the military resulted in national disgrace and tragedy.

When diplomatic efforts to free 52 hostages taken captive and held in Iran for 444 days failed, an attempted rescue operation, run by a Special Operations Group in the Great Salt Desert near Tabas, Iran, on April 25, 1980 was aborted, but not before resulting in the deaths of eight servicemen.

The Jimmy Carter Library and Museum on the Internet has this spin on the events:

“President Carter committed himself to the safe return of the hostages while protecting America's interests and prestige. He pursued a policy of restraint that put a higher value on the lives of the hostages than on American retaliatory power or protecting his own political future. The toll of patient diplomacy was great, but President Carter's actions brought freedom for the hostages with America's honor preserved."

What brought freedom for the hostages was Ronald Reagan’s inauguration and the knowledge—maybe even the fear—that here was a man who would not simply send a few helicopters to rescue Americans held prisoner in a foreign country.

Whenever liberals attempt to use the military the job is bound to be botched.

They are weak-kneed and lack the necessary resolve to see an operation through to completion.

Witness our last president’s futile attempts.

In Somalia, men were killed and their bodies dragged through the streets because they were denied the firepower necessary to run a successful military operation.

In like manner, Bill Clinton’s anemic attempt to get bin Laden by hurling a few cruise missiles at an ibuprofen factory in the Sudan accomplished the removal of the story of Monica Lewinsky’s grand jury testimony from the front pages of the nation’s newspapers, not to mention a stirred-up al Qaida leader vowing, and ultimately succeeding, in exacting revenge on Americans here and abroad.

Solomon wrote in Ecclesiastes that there is a time for everything; “A time of war and a time of peace.” Fortunately, the “time of war” in which we now find ourselves has coincided with a president who understands his role as Commander-in-Chief, and who, with firm resolve, is willing to engage the enemy even though believing that war is ugly yet, “sometimes…a necessary evil.” n

Gregory J. Rummo is a syndicated columnist. Read all of his columns on his homepage, www.GregRummo.com. E-Mail Rummo at  GregoryJRummo@aol.com