And here is Daniel Henninger in today's Wall Street Journal:
This week, in a not-much-noticed follow-on report from the 9/11 Commission, one finds this statement: "Preventing terrorists from gaining access to weapons of mass destruction must be elevated above all other problems of national security because it represents the greatest threat to the American people."
By "terrorists" the commission means al Qaeda. By "weapons of mass destruction" it means nuclear devices--specifically the leakage of nuclear bomb-making material from former Soviet sites. The original 9/11 Commission's report said al Qaeda had tried to get nuclear WMD for 10 years, presumably while bleeding Afghanistan. Al Qaeda now is in Iraq. It is trying to push the U.S. out of Iraq. Some in Washington want a withdrawal from Iraq. If we do that before Iraq is secure, leaving its central provinces and neighboring nations as a jihadist transit point, will the commission's reasonable fears about WMD acquisition by terrorists ease? Duh.
Democratizing Iraq is where the hedge has been placed against Islamic extremism's proven compulsion to annihilate civilian populations--with airliners, humans as bombs and assuredly any WMD they can get--each weapon as morally repugnant as the next. Yes, Iraqi democratization may not work. But it is a bet worth making. As former U.S. Undersecretary of Defense Fred Ikle wrote on this page not long ago, "The paroxysm after 9/11 would be a hiccup compared with the reaction the morning after one or more nuclear bombs caused massive devastation."
Against this, the current opposition spectacle in Washington is not edifying. How did it come to pass that an opposition's measure of a president's foreign policy was all or nothing, success or "failure"? The answer is that the political absolutism now normal in Washington arrived at the moment--Nov. 7, 2000--that our politics subordinated even a war against terror to seizing the office of the presidency.
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