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This isn't war but 'politics as usual' (Mark Steyn, May 23, 2002, National Post)

If the war is just politics now, then let's consider the Bush position. As I wrote some months ago, "on the non-war fronts the Bush Presidency has died." (Sorry to keep saying "as I wrote" every other paragraph, by the way, but don't worry, there's some rare never-more-before-published columnar material coming up in a couple hundred words or so.) The Republican Party base is feeling sorely put upon: The White House caved to The New York Times on campaign finance reform, to the unions on steel tariffs, to Ted Kennedy on education. Bush feels Presidents have to prioritize and his priority was chosen for him on September 11th. Fair enough. But, even within his sole priority, he's had to prioritize: In the "war on terror," Bush's heavyweights have concentrated on the overseas stuff and left the pipsqueaks in charge of the home front.

This week, Norman Mineta, the Transport Secretary whose resignation I called for in September (whoops, there I go again), confirmed that he'd nixed the idea of allowing pilots to carry guns. Underperformin' Norman is so September 10th, in thrall to all the old shibboleths -- gun control good; profiling bad. You can't blame the public for concluding that a war effort which targets 86-year old nuns with tweezers is all effort and no war.

So the domestic agenda's dead, the home front's a joke, and anything overseas is fast receding beyond the far horizon. You can rouse the nation to support a war presidency when the B52s are walloping Saddam, but you can't go to the people and campaign for re-election on the grounds that you're contributing to a new urban-renewal program in Jalalabad. If Bush hasn't been planning war with Iraq these last few weeks, he might as well have been golfing. Recent polls show, to no one's surprise, that the American people once again tick "education" as the most pressing issue facing the nation.

The distinguished conservative commentator John Derbyshire has now declared that war with Iraq ain't gonna happen. Meanwhile, the same crowd making a big song'n'dance about the President "ignoring" "warnings" about September 11th are saying that there's no justification for doing anything about Saddam, as he hasn't yet done anything to us. But, unless Bush II is as languid and purposeless as his dad, war with Iraq has to be coming, and coming soon. Ignore Colin Powell's recent assurances that the Administration has "no plans" to attack. That's the way he was talking in early October last year: Every time Bush made a speech deploring the "evildoers," Powell went on TV and said the Administration was interested in reaching out and working with moderate evildoers. Then the bombing started and that was the end of the outreach.

It has to be the same now. Bush, in his "axis of evil" speech, claimed that "time is running out." What's he going to say on September 11th this year? Time's still running out, but we feel it's important not to rush into things? It's not plausible. So sometime between the G7 summit at Kananaskis in June and the first anniversary of 9/11 war will start--out of the blue, with a huge bang of colossal overwhelming force, and preferably on a Sunday so that Dan Rather and Peter Jennings have to rush back from the Hamptons. Personally, I'd like it to start during Kananaskis, just to put Chrétien, Chirac and Schroeder on the spot. But that's not the Bush style. So summer or early fall it is. There are compelling international security reasons for removing Saddam, but, as CBS News has taught us, there are also persuasive domestic political ones. If war isn't underway by the beginning of autumn, George W. Bush might as well nickname himself President Juan Term.

In the narrow and self-referential world of libertarian-conservative blogging, Mark Steyn is revered. But let's face reality, in the real world no one has ever heard of him. And John Derbyshire? C'mon. So when Mr. Steyn writes a column about a president who's at 76% in the polls and has to refer to his own opinions or Mr. Derbyshire's to show that he's doomed to one term, it should be taken with a large grain of salt.

We expect this kind of petulant impatience from the Left, but those of us on the Right are supposed to be the grown-ups; Republicans are the Daddy Party after all. The idea that the failure to begin the war with Iraq by a certain date represents a catastrophe of paradigm-shifting proportions is sheer nonsense.

Posted by Orrin Judd at May 24, 2002 12:31 PM