Strategic Soulmates

Fire of Liberty
Peter Schweizer has a wonderful Op/Ed in yesterday's USA Today that points out how our War on Terrorism is very similar to our fight during WWII. In fact, Schweizer notes that FDR faced a considerable amount of questions and jeering from various members of Congress and his political opponents who noted we were taking our eye off the ball by placing a greater emphasis of defeating the Nazi "war-machine," rather than simply targeting the Japanese. In fact there were also individuals who implied that FDR's decision to take on Germany was influenced by a cabal of Anglophiles in England. It's really shocking about how much these arguments against FDR during WWII parallel with those that President Bush sees everyday in the press.

Though FDR and President Bush are polar opposites in their economic (except free trade), political, and social policies, they both share one common kinship which is their ability to see the larger strategic picture before them. Both understand that the whole point of fighting these wars is to bring about the defeat of a ideology of death by going after nations who provide succor to these terrorists or wave the bloody banner of death themselves. Schweizer seems to sum up the whole argument about this kinship between FDR and President Bush very nicely in the following paragraphs:

There have been numerous tactical mistakes made in the war on terrorism, just as there were under Roosevelt 60 years ago. Nonetheless, we cannot let tragic, tactical setbacks, like the recent deaths of 20 Marines from one unit, lead us to abandon the grand strategy. Allied errors at the Battle of the Bulge didn't mean the sweep across Europe was wrong.

Bush is in many ways FDR's strategic soul mate. His war on terror is a total global war against a movement comprised of terrorist groups and their state sponsors. By ousting both Saddam and the Taliban, he has removed two important components of the worldwide terrorist movement. And his grand strategy is slowly achieving results.

The forces of reform in the Middle East have been strengthened; the terrorist movement has been psychologically shaken. By destroying Saddam's military machine overnight, he has completely changed the psychology of the war on terrorism. Bush's strategy is one that FDR would understand well.

So let the yahoos in Congress, protesting mothers and the press bang their gongs on and on about President Bush's failures or about him chasing windmills by going after Saddam but in the longer run the decisions by President Bush will go down as some of the most important decisions in our time.