FDR Had The Greatest Generation, Bush Must Deal With The Worst, His Own

Editorial rooms around the country undoubtedly erupted into storms of snorts yesterday afternoon when word spread that President George W. Bush had compared the war on terror to World War II. I’m confident that in the end, the flashes and booms heard in Seattle Wednesday night will ultimately be attributed to the coincidence of a million simultaneous indignant sniffs emanating from Emerald City coffee houses and poetry reading rooms.
But the comparison is valid. The war is worldwide. It will take a long time to win. And, as long as the country’s morale is not broken from within, we will win.
But the war on terror is also very different from World War II. And on the eve of the 60th anniversary of D-Day, it’s worth noting the differences.
First of all, we have a major political party that has aligned its political fortunes with our defeat, and has done all in its oratorical power to sow defeatism. As survey after survey has revealed, that political party almost monopolizes the mainstream media. The result is an unrelenting stream of what has gone wrong. Imagine how a press hostile to Roosevelt would have reported the battle at Guadalcanal. At Guadalcanal, we sent under-supplied Marines beyond the range of resupply. They were short of ammunition. They had to feed themselves with captured Japanese stores. The First Marines took Guadalcanal. But, the conditions under which they had to fight would have been used by Roosevelt’s opponents to disparage his capacity as a war time leader.
Today, we have retired know-it-alls relentlessly predicting our next move in the war or second-guessing our last move. As D-Day approached, we would have had retired colonels and brigadier generals on the tube every night telling all they knew about the allied order of battle and predicting just how and where the hammer would fall. And Hitler would have tuned in to Aaron Brown every night, just as Osama Bin Laden or his lieutenants undoubtedly do.
In the 1940’s the phrase “loose lips sink ships” was taken seriously. In 2004, loose lips draw big paychecks.
It’s worth remembering that today’s second guessers were recently taking orders from the people running things today. The military is one of the last bastions of meritocracy. It’s just possible that those still working reached their station by being smarter than their retired former subordinates.
Imagine, if you will, what World War II might have been like if Franklin Roosevelt and General Dwight Eisenhower had to fight World War II in the media climate that Bush must endure to fight the war on terrorism.
“Why are you fighting in North Africa?” the self-anointed strategic experts would demand. “Morocco never attacked us,” they would argue.
“Why mess with Guadalcanal? What did they ever do to us?” Aren’t we at war with Japan?
Roosevelt would have been excoriated by the New York Times for destroying the heavy water plant in Norway. “Were all those Norwegian civilian deaths necessary? What proof do you have that Germany had a weapons of mass destruction program?”
There was no CIA then, and thus no director to blame for faulty intelligence. But CNN would have demanded that somebody walk the plank unless proof of a German weapons-of-mass-destruction program existed. If Germany had such weapons, then wouldn’t Hitler have used them?
And, can you imagine any paper in 1944 doubting the moral superiority of the United States versus the Nazis? Just two days ago, this corner of this very newspaper described Iraq as under an American “boot heel.” Really! Kicking out a despot and trying to bring democracy and peace to that tortured region of the world is comparable to a “boot heel.”
A reminder is necessary here. Democracy exists where it does today because we imposed it. The twentieth century dawned on a Europe ruled mostly by monarchies. By 1940, despotic dictators ruled most of the continent. Democracy in various forms rules there today because we insisted upon it. Europeans warred with one another for thousands of year until we enforced the peace.
Nazis apply boot heels. Communists apply boot heels. Islamofascists strive to place us under their boot heels.
Roosevelt and Bush did have to face one thing in common. Both had a Kennedy who made defeatism their cause and had sympathy for our enemy.