BUSH DOCTRINE BELIEVERS
The Wall Street Journal Editorial Response

Good editorial response to the 9/11 hearings.

A President's Job
The 9/11 hearings: We're all Bush Doctrine believers now.
Friday, March 26, 2004 12:01 a.m.

Give President Bush's critics credit for versatility. Having spent months assailing him for doing too much after 9/11--Iraq, the Patriot Act, the "pre-emption" doctrine--they have now turned on a dime to allege that he did too little before it. This contradiction is Mr. Bush's opportunity to rise above the ankle biting and explain to the American public what a President is elected to do.

Any President's most difficult decision is how and when to defend the American people. As the 9/11 hearings reveal, there are always a thousand reasons for a President not to act. The intelligence might be uncertain, civilians might be killed, U.S. soldiers could die, and the "international community" might object. There are risks in any decision. But when Presidents fail to act at all, or act with too little conviction, we get a September 11.

This is the real lesson emerging from the 9/11 Commission hearings if you listen above the partisan din. In their eagerness to insist that Mr. Bush should have acted more pre-emptively before 9/11, the critics are rebutting their own case against the President's aggressive antiterror policy ever since. The implication of their critique is that Mr. Bush didn't repudiate the failed strategy of the Clinton years fast enough.

The bias in these columns has long been to support forceful Presidential leadership on national security. Even when skeptical about a military intervention, as we were about Haiti in 1994, we saluted once Bill Clinton sent in the troops. We supported Mr. Clinton in Bosnia and Kosovo, and we were among the few who didn't pile on Jimmy Carter after the hostage-rescue fiasco in Iran.

We likewise support Mr. Bush's antiterror leadership, despite the inevitable missteps of planning or WMD intelligence. Whatever lapses may have occurred in the eight months of his Presidency before 9/11, since that day Mr. Bush has had the courage to act, and forcefully. He has turned 20 years of antiterror policy on its head, going on offense by taking the war to the terrorists, toppling state sponsors in Afghanistan and Iraq, and now attempting to "transform" the Middle East through a democratic beachhead in Iraq. This is leadership. (full article)