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Bush Administration Starts New Year in Trenches Armstrong Williams Beleaguered by revelations of secret surveillance, the slow response to the Hurricane Katrina disaster and growing disenchantment over the rising death toll in Iraq, the administration is looking forward to what's ahead for the New Year more than most. Some of the criticism the administration has engendered over the last year is fair. Much is not. Hurricane Katrina was a tragedy of biblical proportions. The knee-jerk tendency to blame the president for an act of God is absurd.
More importantly, we should not lose sight of the fact that this administration is willing to take bold steps to protect national security. Sometimes you have to sacrifice civil liberties to protect the country. If we get attacked again, I think much of the current criticism will go away.
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For the time being, the administration starts this year in the trenches, confronting the threats to our national security. I say good. The fight against terrorism remains a very real threat to our national security. The administration has forthrightly proclaimed that terrorism is rooted in a radical interpretation of Muslim ideology. No other president has been so open about the evil ideology of the radical jihadists. This honesty is important, because it moves the national dialogue away from vague notions of terrorists' threats and places it squarely where it belongs: Radical Muslim Jihadists. President Bush has rightly analogized this movement to other totalitarian threats we faced in the 20th century, like fascism, communism and Nazism.
Only recently have we learned that the United States has disrupted 10 al-Qaida terrorism plots since September 11, 2001, including the attempted detonation of a "dirty bomb" inside the United States. Surely many more successes go unpublicized because of their classified nature.
Yes, our president has rightly engendered criticism. Yes, he went about the war in Iraq in a flawed manner. And yes, his strong stances tend to make him a magnet for criticism – so much so that when a dam in New Orleans breaks or a bomb explodes in Iraq, we look to blame our president.
Lost in the hubbub is the good. We've begun to stabilize portions of western Iraq. Because of U.S. military action in Iraq, 3.3 million people were able to vote in Iraq's first free vote in over half a century. The image of millions of people risking their lives to vote for the first time is the image of good triumphing over the evil of oppression. There is good that is being accomplished. Let's hope this fact is not lost in this New Year.
www.armstrongwilliams.com
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