If You Can't Retreat, Can't Sit Still--then Attack

This is the advice of Power Line to President Bush and I like it. It is bold, it is necessary and it is the right thing to do.

For too long, this Administration, which started off so right and gone so horribly astray, has tried to fight the war on terror and the war in Iraq by being politically sensitive. In doing so, neither war goes well and America is grumbling. Clearly leaving Iraq, no matter how much the Democrats want to do it, simply means delaying the inevitable return to the region, at a time and under circumstances not nearly as favorable as they are now.

But sticking with the current policy is not working either. "Stay the Course" does not inspire confidence and frakly, the course is off-target.

The only option is to take a bold and decisive step and attack. Attack the root cause, the militias and the sectarian violence. Unleash the fury and power of the American military upon these beasts that kill women, children and police. When a gun is fired in a town or city block, evacuate the whole area, strip search everyone for weapons, do a 100% positive ID check and search the area so thoroughly, you find every dog, rat, a flea in the area, confiscate any weapon, ammunition or bomb making device, arrest those who need arresting and start prison camps in the middle of the desert. In short, give insurgents no place to go, no place to hide and no material to fight.

Of course, lefties will tell you that you can't solve this kind of problem without talking. Fine, talk about this: how do you get two children who are fighting to talk? First you have to get them to stop fighting. In Iraq the only actor capable of doing that right now is the United States. We have to play the hard figure and separate the kids and take away not only their means of fighting but their will to fight. The only way to end their will to fight is to make the people who want to fight that their lives will be ten times as miserable as they are now.

The President should be bold, he should be active. Twenty-five years from now, the world will look at President Bush and consider him to be the most prescient leader of his time. There will be democracy in the Middle East and he will have planted that seed. Now in order to cultivate that seed, the President has to give it a chance to grow, give it a good soil to grow and that soil can not be tilled when it is a war zone.