GEORGE W. BUSH is a war president and is prepared to be one until he leaves office. He made that clear last night. “Our war on terror is well begun, but it is only begun. This campaign may not be finished on our watch, yet it must be and it will be waged on our watch. We cannot stop short. . . .” No, we can’t, and it is to Bush’s great credit that he intends to wage war for as long as he must. (Can those mentions of North Korea, Iran, and Iraq have been incidental?) Bush also deserves credit for understanding why he–and the nation–should wage this war. Reiterating what he said in his speech to Congress in September (also, by the way, a report on the State of the Union), Bush defined the war in terms of a battle for freedom, which manifestly it is. “We have known freedom’s price,” he said in closing. “We have shown freedom’s power. And in this great conflict, my fellow Americans, we will see freedom’s victory.” Two things nonetheless struck me as odd about the speech. One was that Bush put “economic security” on a par with national security and homeland security. These are now his “three great goals for America.” But the three don’t really go together. Government has more power when it is trying to secure the nation against threats of violence at home than it does when it touches the economy. And it has even more power when it is trying to protect the nation against threats from abroad. The reason government has so much power in those contexts is that those who threaten bodily security may themselves come loaded with powerful weapons. And they must be stopped. I can envision liberal Democrats (citing Enron) using Bush’s rhetoric of economic security to ask for more power over the economy, or at least more power over it than Bush would like to see. Maybe Bush was trying to line up a trio of things to talk about. That’s what you do in a speech. But I wish he had put the economy in a subordinate position and kept his address centered on the war. The other odd thing about the speech was that Bush talked rather abstractly about homeland security. He mentioned the items al Qaeda left behind in Afghanistan that our troops found–diagrams of our power plants, surveillance maps of American cities, etc. But instead of driving home the point of the threat within, he went global: “Thousands of dangerous killers, schooled in the methods of murder . . . are now spread throughout the world like ticking time bombs–set to go off without warning.” Yes, but what we have to beware of are the ticking time bombs within these United States. I was surprised that Bush, war president that he is, didn’t try to impart a greater sense of urgency about this very present danger. Terry Eastland is publisher of The Weekly Standard.
