Frank’s Case Book

The world is full of political predictions that subsequently only provide clear evidence of how very difficult it is to make such predictions in a diverse culture, that is nearly evenly divided. Political predictions from partisans are almost worthless because they are not so much a dispassionate assessment as an attempt to push the electorate. There is something of a bandwagon effect. Those who are undecided may try to go with the anticipated winner. Supporters of the expected loser may become discouraged and unwilling to endure the inconveniences of voting.

On the Saturday before the 2000 election, the consensus of the national polls had the then Governor George Bush ahead of Vice-President Al Gore by about 3%, very close to the current margins in the national polls between Bush and Senator John Kerry. Given the general relationship between electoral votes and popular vote totals and this points spread, I expected a 3% Bush victory in 2000 with a corresponding 80-point margin in the electoral college. This would have represented a relatively close, but still comfortable victory.

Of course, we remember the actual results. Gore won the popular vote by about 0.5%, 48.38% versus 47.87%. Despite an election controversy that went to the US Supreme Court, Bush won the election in the Electoral College by a tiny five votes, 271 to 266.

Looking back at the contemporaneous polls just before the 2000 election reveals a mixed bag of results. See the table below. Zogby is often credited with picking the last minute movement toward Gore perhaps caused by the eleventh-hour revelation of Bush’s drunk driving arrest decades earlier. Zogby nailed Gore’s popular vote percentage on the head. As of this writing, Zogby now shows a movement for Senator John Kerry who enjoys a small 1% lead, but more importantly Zogby sees momentum for Kerry. Zogby did indeed accurately predict the Gore percentage, but significantly underpredicted Bush’s strength. Zogby expected Bush to only have 46% of the vote, nearly 2% less than his actual total. Zogby overpredicted the final popular vote for Nader. In retrospect, perhaps the CBS and Fox polls really did the best giving Gore a 1% margin and calling the election a dead heat, respectively.

	Bush	Gore	Buchanan	Nader
CNN	47%	45%	1%	4%
Zogby	46%	48%	0.5%	5%
ABC	48%	45%		3%
Battleground	50%	45%		3%
Newsweek	45%	43%
CBS	44%	45%
Fox	43%	43%	1%	3%
Wash. Post	48%	45%	1%	3%

This election is so peculiar, in so many ways, that it is almost impossible to generalize from history. However, some factors that argue against a Bush victory are:

• The stock market has at best been even over the last year. Winning incumbents are usually associated with increasing stock markets.
• Although there has always been such leftward tilt to the press, there has been nothing like the efforts of the mass media in this election to drive the people to Kerry. Nothing in memory corresponds to the remarkable credulousness of CBS News in allowing themselves to be duped into using forged documents to question President Bush’s National Guard service. Nothing in memory compares to the blinders the national media has put on about the irresponsible sweeping accusations of atrocities that John Kerry made about his fellow soldiers. Nothing in memory compares to the way the national media have not questioned Senator Kerry’s voting record in the Senate.
• No sitting president since Harry Truman has won an election if during the previous year, he was at sometime losing in the polls. Though he enjoys a small lead in the polls now, in August, Bush was behind in the national polls.
• The election is close and the conventional wisdom holds that undecideds typically break towards the challenger. This would tend to give the edge to Kerry.
• More voters have been registered this year. Polls indicate that Kerry chances improve when registered voters rather than likely voters are tallied. One suspects that a significant number of these new registrants will vote and this will help Kerry.

Other factors that weigh on Bush’s behalf are:

• Americans are loath to switch presidents during war.
• Unemployment is low by conventional standards and people vote according to their personal circumstances.
• The economy has been growing at a rapid pace during the past twelve months.
• Kerry is a Massachusetts Liberal.
• Political models predict that Bush will gain 53% of the vote. This promising prediction is mitigated by the knowledge that such models also predicted that Gore would win the 2000 election by a comfortable margin.
• Bush won the Weekly Reader poll among youngsters. Unlike other, more conventional and rationally constructed polls, the Weekly Reader poll has correctly predicted the eventual winner in every election since it began in 1956. That’s twelve in a row, with no mistakes.
• Betting polls which accurately predicted the recent Australian and California elections pick Bush by a comfortable margin. There is something about betting your own money that forces people to make more dispassionate analysis.

The mean of the polls shows a narrowing lead for Bush. As of this writing, an extrapolation of these polls does not close the gap fast enough to give Kerry an election-day victory. Nonetheless, given the number of newly registered voters, I do not believe that models for likely voters are accurate. They are at the very least untested. Among all registered voters, the polls show a tie, so I suspect that the Kerry will win.

Prediction 1: Kerry by 1.5% in the popular vote and 60 electoral votes. Bush supporters, like myself, should take heart in that my expectation of the popular vote totals was very wrong in 2000.

Prediction 2: Osma Bin Laden and his followers will believe (or at least claim) that the recent tape threatening America, released Friday before the election, was responsible for the Kerry victory. The truth of that assertion will not matter, as much as the perception. Fairly or unfairly, the international perceptions growing out of a Kerry victory would damage the war on terror and that is a very bad thing.

One of the perils of printed punditry is the possibility that words written long ago will serve as definitive evidence of just how little one really knows.   One should always remember the caution of Neils Bohr that, “Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.”  On the other hand, some predictions are so easy to make that they provide no usefulinformation.  One can predict confidently now, that on the eve of the upcoming presidential elections, the official position of both the campaigns is that both their respective candidates will undoubtedly win the election.  There are other assertions, like the one to be made here, that are safe since they involve a “what if” assessment that can never be tested. Credibility is not at stake.

There are really only two strong passions motivating people in this election and one of them is not the economy.  Despite some important economic issues, the large deficit, good but not great employment numbers, polls show that most people are sufficiently comfortable with their personal economic situations that the election of an incumbent would not be threatened.

The two motivating passions are the War in Iraq, including its aftermath, and the deep-seated irrational hatred of Bush engendered by the bitter results of the 2000 election that some on the Left still (despite independent counts by news organization) have not accepted. Indeed, there is a line of argument that the latter issue is really the only motivating passion and Iraq just provides a convenient political rallying point.  Let us not presume the latter, because that would require people to be so animated by partisan animus that they would be willing to exploit a war to sate their anger.

The thesis here is the Joseph Lieberman would have been a much more formidable candidate against George Bush than John Kerry, despite the current narrowness of the head-on-head Bush-Kerry polls.  Let it be conceded, that given Lieberman’s  pro Iraq War stand, and his unwillingness to abandon his principled position when Governor Howard Dean excited Democratic partisans with an anti-war stance (unlike the unceremonious flight from pre-war positions of John Kerry and John Edwards), he would never garner the Democratic presidential nomination..

Lieberman would have qualified for the “anyone but Bush crowd.”  Without having to explicitly mention the 2000 elections, as Gore’s vice-presidential running mate, Lieberman could have unobtrusively benefited from the support of those who continue to wallow in the pit of election 2000 victim hood.  For those who hate Bush, Lieberman would have been a more than adequate candidate.

On the more important issue of Iraq, Lieberman could convincingly run to the right of George Bush and assuage the doubts of those whose primary concern is security.  When Bush decided on a plan of attack for Iraq, they could have gone in heavy or light, slow or rapid.  The advantages of going in light are:

• Light forces are more precise, reducing the likelihood of civilian casualties and the creation of large numbers of refugees (500,000 was the erroneous prediction of the United Nations).
• Light forces are faster, reducing the likelihood that Saddam Huessein’s forces could have engaged in a systematic destruction of critical Iraqi infrastructure.
• A large force would have required permission to deploy from Turkey. This would have involved Turkish troops in northern Iraq, exacerbating the tensions with the Iraqi Kurds, our strongest natural allies in Iraq.

Going in heavy would have had the key advantage of more systematically destroying Saddam’s forces.  It might have also meant an earlier destruction of insurgencies in places like Fallujah, that have been a constant problem since the end of the war.  Despite a higher level of destruction and civilian casualties on the front end, going in heavy might have decreased problems in the post-war era.  The strategic decision was a difficult one and reasonable people can disagree.  In hindsight, the advantages of going in light are forgotten, as we pay the costs for this course.  The costs in terms of casualties, refugees, and destroyed infrastructure of going in heavy are not tallied.

Lieberman could now make the claim, (especially in hindsight) that he would have gone in heavier and reduced post-war problems.  Lieberman could have reasonably argued that he would not have been so accommodating to insurgent forces in Fallujah, Sadr City or Najaf. Lieberman would make it easy for those whom the fight against terrorism is a priority to vote against Bush, without that apprehension that Democrats tend to be weak on defense matters.  Lieberman would not be so easily categorized as a free taxing Liberal and libertine on social issues, unconcerned about traditional social values.

The counter argument to the thesis that Lieberman would have been a better nominee is that Lieberman and Bush’s Iraq positions are sufficiently similar that people would not be inclined to switch presidents.  As Truman once said, if given a choice between a Democrat running like a Republican, and a Republican, the people would choose the Republican every time.

However, we are at a rather unique war time position. There remains a general unease about how the reconstruction of Iraq is perceived as going.  Lieberman could have provided a credible alternative to Bush without Kerry’s baggage of duplicity.  Unfortunately for the Democrats, they are plainly too angry to nominate a social moderate with a cogent position on Iraq, perhaps, in some respects, to the right of Bush.  If Lieberman were the Democratic nominee, he would be leading Bush now by double digits and might very well have had sufficient coat tails to regain a significant majority in the Senate.  The politics of hate may or may not cost Democrats the presidential election, but it will probably cost them the opportunity to stop and reverse the Republican electoral trends of recent years.

Being a moderately successful debater at both the high school and college level, makes presidential debates an ambivalent experience for me. On one hand, the competitive juices are aroused vicariously. How should arguments be marshaled? What constitutes persuasive evidence? How can the weakness in our own arguments be explained or at least hidden? How should time for various arguments be apportioned for effective presentation? On the other hand, we must recognize that presidential debates are not debates in the classic sense. The debating propositions are usually ambiguous and ill-defined. There is little chance for rebuttal and no opportunity for cross examination.

It is, therefore, difficult for me to arrive at a dispassionate assessment of presidential debates. The nature and technical flow of the arguments are confused with the simple ethos and likeability of the candidates. Candidates are not only selling their arguments, but themselves. Voters often make an assessment as to the glibness, passion, and affability of the candidates. It is this mix of selling of the argument and marketing of the candidate, I find difficult to separate. Frankly few would want most technically excellent debaters to be president.

By nearly all accounts, Democratic candidate John Kerry bested George Bush in the recent debate. Not only was Kerry smoother, Bush frowned in such a way as to reduce his likeability. In all likelihood, the polls should show slippage for Bush. Since, people have seen Bush for four years they have a fairly fixed opinion of him so the consequences for him are smaller. A similar performance by Kerry would have been more devastating.

However, the victory may yet prove Pyrrhic for Kerry. Kerry was an academic debater and suffers from an affliction common to ex-debaters: the excessive concern for winning the present argument and the arrogance to believe that they can, if necessary, talk in enough circles around others to obfuscate their positions.

Winning an argument is the essence of academic debate. The truth or falsity of the debate proposition is irrelevant. Indeed, the best debaters typically win regardless of which side of a proposition they are asked to argue on. Everything is contained within the content of a debate. No one is expected or wants to make consistent arguments over the long term. What a debater says in the morning is irrelevant to the argument he makes in the afternoon. Debate is about developing rhetorical skill. Rhetorical skill is uncorrelated to the ability to correctly choose those themes and goals for which those rhetorical skills are deployed.

However, consistency and belief are ultimately measured in a campaign. Kerry’s reputation for flip-floppy is partly the result of the academic debater’s instinctive tendency to please the audience immediately in front of him; to win the present argument irrespective of long term consistency.

Early in the primary campaign, Kerry was hawkish on the war because he felt that would play well in the general election. He quickly switched to a more dovish position, when it appeared that Governor Howard Dean was igniting support among Democrats. That is why it is so easy to find contradictory statements from Kerry.

Not long ago Kerry said that Iraq was the “wrong war, in the wrong place, at the wrong time.” Now he says he will persuade allies to join us in pursuing the war. It is even hard for a clever debater to convince allies to join in what Kerry has already so forcefully and categorically characterized as a mistake.

As a measure of his rhetorical skill, in a single response, Kerry was able to say that both no country would have a veto power in preventing actions to defend the United States and at the same time saying some “global test” would have to be passed. These examples represent contradictions that are difficult to sustain.

As forceful and fluent as Kerry’s words were in the debate, they will come into direct conflict with contrary with equally eloquent words he has already spoken. Campaigns are not a debate, where the arguments in the previous rounds are ignored. Kerry has laid the foundation to sustain the Republican argument that Kerry has no fixed position.

It is so disheartening to witness the sad desperateness of unrequited love. That is what makes Democratic candidate John Kerry’s obsessive and obsequious need for European approval so unrealistic and forlornly delusional.

When did the Europeans exhibit the greatest affection for the United States in the last few years? It did so immediately after 3000 people were killed at the World Trade Center buildings in New York, the Pentagon, and on a lonely field in Pennsylvania on September 11, 2001. Mixed in with genuine sympathy and compassion on the part of many Europeans was a little too much smugness on the part of European elites. There was a little too much sang freud that perhaps America had received its just retribution and overdue comeuppance for its arrogant and self-important foreign policy, particularly its support of Israel. Contradictorily, there was also the suggestion in a French bestseller that the tragedy of September 11 was planned and executed by the US itself as a way to put Americans on war footing.

While certainly there are many Europeans who love and admire Americans on a person-to-person level, European political opinion will not be satisfied with the United States unless it unilaterally opens trade barriers to help the overburdened European social welfare state. European elites will not be satisfied unless Americans bear the burden of Western military spending and loss of life, used only at discretion and the forbearance of Europeans, like in Bosnia. European governments will be pleased so long as the unruly and uncultured Americans listen to their betters.

In a recent speech on Iraq, Kerry insisted that he would persuade Europeans to share the burden in Iraq. While some like the British and the Italians certainly have already contributed very substantially in resources and blood, Kerry is in a jilted lover’s fantasy if he sincerely believes that the French and Germans will ever donate enough troops or money to materially effect the situation in Iraq. It is possible that Kerry does not believe this, but is making the promise for political effect, so Kerry’s position reduces to excessive credulity or lack of credibility.

By degrading the legitimate preference for French and German support to self-abasement, Kerry is setting up the United States for the morning-after disillusionment. Americans best not permit the siren’s song of European love and approval to seduce Americans to overlook their congenital allegiance to the spread of liberty and democracy and the necessity to defend those interests.

A conversation deep in the bowels of Republican election headquarters August 2004…

Deep Font:  Mr. Rove, I received your request to come here.

Karl Rove:  Yes.  I’m glad you could make it here so quickly.  We have an assignment that should be a perfect match for your skills. We know that this fall the Democrats will discover how the President exploited his family connections to avoid military service in Vietnam and skipped out on what little duty in the National Guard was required of him.  What we need to do is to discredit such reports before they gain any traction.

Deep Font:  How can we do that?  We know that the major media have all their investigative reporters interviewing Bush’s old acquaintances and they will be scouring whatever records we have not managed to destroy.

Karl Rove:  Simple. We will give the media and their Democratic allies what they want.

Deep Font:  Did I hear you right?

Karl Rove:  Yes you did.  We will give them want they want, but not quite the way they want or expect it.  I want you to forge documents from the 1972 era that will feed unspoken speculation about Bush wanting to avoid a physical examination to keep his drug habit from becoming public.  I want the documents to suggest that Bush’s superiors were being pressured from above to give Bush sparkling evaluations.  I want these documents to be leaked to the media.

Deep Font:  I still don’t understand.  Wouldn’t such information damage the president’s re-election chances?

Karl Rove:  It could slightly, but only if the reports are allowed to linger and sink into the public consciousness.  This is where your particular expertise comes into play.  I want the documents to appear at first blush to be authentic, but under any serious scrutiny they should be transparent forgeries.  When the fact they are forgeries becomes apparent, the media will be discredited and anything they find subsequently will lack credibility.

Deep Font:  Yes I could do that.  I could use proportionally-spaced fonts and use modern line spacing.  Gosh, I could even use a smaller font for superscripts, things that would be hard to accomplish using the common typewriters of the era.  However, no reasonably skeptical reporter would fall for this.  Who would be so transparently partisan, so willing to believe that they have found evidence of a Bush scandal, that they would abandon natural journalistic skepticism?

Karl Rove:  I am surprised you have to ask.  The answer is CBS News and Dan Rather, of course.  The people at CBS are either too young or too anti-Bush to be properly skeptical.  Such memos would play right into there preconceived notions.  Some of the producers were not even born in 1972.  They probably would not recognize the documents as forgeries if we told them they were private e-mails or cell-phone records from 1972.

Deep Font:  If the media are that credulous, isn’t it possible that the forgery will not be realized until after the election?

Karl Rove:  Yes, that could be a problem.  I’ll just have our digital black shirts use blogs on the Internet to publicize those features of the documents that make them obvious forgeries.  With Fox News and the Weekly Standard, knowledge of the forgeries will trickle into the main stream media.  Once they smell blood in the water, the mainstream media are like sharks and will go after their own.  They will quickly validate to the non-Conservative community that the documents are forgeries.  Indeed, if I am not mistaken, CBS will stand behind the story long after it is painfully obvious that the documents are not authentic.  No, I am being to optimistic.  Not even Dan Rather has been that blinded by zeal.

Deep Font:  I can easily arrange for the documents. All I need is a word processor and to photo copy the originals a dozen times.  Well I hope it works.  You know, sometimes these ideas blow up in your face.  Remember, when we funneled money to the Howard Dean campaign and he thought they were Internet contributions.  What a chump.  Well, he didn’t win the nomination.

Karl Rove: Yes, you’re right.  I expected Dean to self-destruct after, not before, he secured the nomination.  We went ballistic way too soon. However, when he did explode, he tainted the Democratic field with a Left-wing, anti war stench.  We ultimately did almost as well getting John Kerry to run against. The Bushs are pretty good at beating Massachusetts Liberals in national elections.  We would have had a harder time against Joe Lieberman. Dean whipped the Democrats into such a frenzy, that they never would have nominated a genuinely thoughtful candidate.

Even if I do say so myself, I did outdo myself with back-door funding of Michael Moore’s movie Fahrenheit 9/11.  Democratic partisans ate it up like gummy bears in kindergarten class.  Mom and Pop Middle America are now convinced that the Democrats have lost their collective minds.  It could not have worked better.

Deep Font:  What do you want me to do with Osama?

Karl Rove:  Keep him on ice in case Bush looses the debates with Kerry.  We may need him yet.

“Democracy is coming, and there will be no excuse thereafter [for terrorism in Iraq].” — Abu Musab al Zarqawi.

Perhaps the most powerful and persuasive polemicists are those who have not only crossed but leapt across the ideological divide. Norman Podhoretz is just such a person. He was part of a cohort of New York intellectuals, born in the first half of the last century, who gave rise to the likes of Norman Mailer and Susan Sontag. These were radicals who embraced Socialism, were sympathetic to Soviet Communism, and perceived little moral distance between the United States and Fascists in Europe. Somewhere in the 1960s, Podhoretz, on the basis of US efforts at post-war European reconstruction, Soviet repression, and the material success of the US economy began to appreciate the force for liberty and success the United States represented. As a consequence, he became one of the founders of the “Neoconservative” movement.

These Conservatives appreciate the role government sometimes play in ameliorating extreme fluctuations of a robust capitalist economy. You will not find these “new” Conservatives still upset at Franklin D.Roosevelt’s Social Security. Yet Neoconservatives are blessed with the congenital Conservative intuition that personal freedom is linked to the personal resources people control, and they retain the certain knowledge that the United States has a positive obligation to nurture freedom and democracy across the world.

Now that we have entered into the second generation of Neoconservatives, perhaps the movement should be thought of as a separate branch rather than new sprig off the main trunk of Conservatism. Neoconservatives believe that American intervention in the world is not only salutary, but necessary, while “paleoconservatives” believe that the United States is too good to involve itself intrigues of the old world. Pat Buchanan is perhaps the most vocal of current paleoconservatives.

Podhoretz has long been a writer of political philosophy and at age thirty became the editor of Commentary, one of the most influential political journals. This month, in Commentary, Podhoretz lays out a cogent and persuasive case for the Bush Doctrine: the fundamental notion that American economic and physical security are best protected when the Zeitgeist favors politically free and economically open societies. At its heart, the Bush Doctrine holds that the ideology of Islamic fundamentalism and terrorism is rooted in the lack of these values in countries ruled either by thugs or Islamic theocracies or both.

The key to this understanding is to recognize, that World War IV has now been thrust upon us. The first two world wars involved pitched battles between massive armed forces. World War III, what is commonly called the Cold War, was different. Soon after the close of World War II, it became apparent that Stalin considered the demilitarization of the US as a sign that US involvement in world affairs was a momentary phenomenon brought on by the unique events of World War II. We would soon retire behind our oceans and retreat to traditional isolationism. Hence, Stalin saw little impediment to Soviet expansion into Eastern Europe and elsewhere. It was the other underestimated president, President Truman, that in response enunciated the Truman Doctrine. This doctrine held that the US should by various means: political, economic, and, if necessary, military contain the spread of Soviet domination. This policy worked best when the US nurtured fledgling democracies rather than making temporary alliances with non-Communist, yet authoritarian regimes.

With fits and starts from Korea, to Vietnam, to South America, presidents of both parties adhered to this containment strategy. However, containment was drifting into accommodation until President Ronald Reagan seized the rhetorical offensive and assured us “the march of freedom and democracy … will leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash heap of history as it has left other tyrannies which stifle the freedom and muzzle the self-expression of the people.” This moral certitude, coupled with the intention to achieve a military dominance over the Soviet Union could not keep up with, was sufficient to bring about the collapse of the Soviet Empire.

Like the WWIII, World War IV against Islamic Fascism is likely to be a long struggle employing economic, political, and military means. In an age where weapons of mass destruction are too conveniently available the stakes are very large.

The US was slow in coming to an appreciation that World War IV had begun even while we were still in the last stages of World War III. Indeed, the tensions of that war obscured the events that pointed to the growing terrorist threat. As far back as the 1970s, during the Nixon and Ford Administrations, offshoots of the Palestine Liberation Organization murdered American diplomats in Lebanon and the Sudan. During the Carter Administration, Islamic Fundamentalist under Ayatolla Khomeini seized 52 hostages in the US Embassy in the capital of Iran. Even the stalwart Ronald Reagan withdrew American troops from Beirut, Lebanon — troops placed there as a buffer to protect the PLO from the Israelies — with no effective response to the killing of 241 marines asleep in their barracks. Though the first President Bush forced Saddam Hussein’s Iraq to retreat from its invasion of Kuwait, the unwillingness to topple Saddam, fairly or unfairly, convinced Islamic fundamentalists that the West was too decadent and casualty adverse to seriously pursue their adversaries to the end.

The pace picked up in the 1990s as the US and US interests were attacked by Al Qaeda in Somila, at the World Trade Center in 1993, and the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia. The USS Cole lost 17 sailors in a suicide attack while refueling in Yemeni. It was not until the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon in 2001, that the US came realize that threat was grave and not a sporadic law enforcement issue.

Podhoretz argues that the previous weak responses convinced Al Qaeda that there would be few long-lasting consequences to any attack. “The sheer audacity of what bin Laden went on to do on September 11 was unquestionably a product of his contempt for American power. Our persistent refusal for so long to use that power against him and his terrorist brethren — or to do so effectively whenever we tried — reinforced his conviction that werae a nation on the way down, destined to be defeated by the resurgence of the same Islamic militancy that had once conquered and converted large parts of the world by sword.” This was a miscalculation on his part.

To set forth political framework for this struggle, the Bush Doctrine has emerged. Though the specifics may be altered with time, the framework is a thoughtful basis for pursing this fourth world war. While Podhoretz is anxious that we may not muster the will to purse the doctrine over the decades it will require, he does outline the four pillars of the policy: morality, sources, preemption, and accountability.

1. The first pillar is recognition of the crucial applicability of moral considerations in foreign policy. For the foreign policy “realists,” stability is guiding principle. Moral considerations obscure the delicate balancing require to maintain the status quo. While it is clear that there are times that one must deal with and perhaps eve accept unsavory and despotic regimes, it must be recognized that there is a real moral cost for such decisions. The cost is that the delayed and deferred legitimate claims of the governed can nurture the resentments that feed Islamic terrorism.
2. The second pillar is the assertion that the cause of terrorism is not poverty, but political repression as evidenced by the prosperous background of may terrorists. Draining the repressive swamps in which terrorism breeds requires the fresh drying winds of liberty and democracy.
3. During World War III, we relied on deterrence. The assumption was that no state would launch an attack against the United States for fear of nuclear retaliation. However, in a world where small, suicidal groups, only loosely associated with states, can cause large numbers civilian casualties, deterrence has lost its saliency. There is no one to retaliate against. Preventing such attack, through preemption becomes an option.
4. The fourth pillar is one of state accountability for allowing or encouraging terrorism. Such states are as culpable as the terrorists themselves. This extends to the PLO. Bush was the first president to explicitly call for an independent Palestinian state, yet only state that eschews corruption and terrorism and embraces democratic ideals . As Bush explained in 2002, “Today, Palestinian authorities are encouraging not opposing terrorism. This is unacceptable. And the Unites States will not support the establishment of a Palestinian state until its leaders engage in a sustained fight against the terrorist and dismantle their infrastructure.”

It was the United States that was decisive factor in the victories of the last three world wars. The United States has proved to be the single most important force in the spread of freedom, democracy, and posterity. The question is whether the United States will once again answer histories call. In the words, of Bush nomination acceptance speech:

“This moment in the life of our country will be remembered. Generations will know if we kept our faith and kept our word. Generations will know if we seized this moment, and used it to build a future of safety and peace. The freedom of many, and the future security of our Nation, now depend on us.”