PRESIDENT'S MESSAGE

The Call of History

Several inescapable conclusions, including the following, can be drawn from President Bush's State of the Union speech, the intelligence data provided to the U.N. Security Council by Secretary of State Colin Powell, and the 27 January report to the Security Council by Hans Blix, the chief U.N. weapons inspector:

First: Iraq already possesses an unknown number of weapons of mass destruction, is in the process of building others, and is willing to use them against other nations--either directly or through terrorist surrogates.

Second: Preemptive action against the murderous regime of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein is both morally justified and militarily imperative.

Third: Such action would not be, as has been alleged, a costly and ill-considered diversion of military forces from the U.S.-led war on global terrorism but, rather, a politically and strategically necessary continuation of that war.

Fourth: No matter what the outcome, the current confrontation with Iraq will be only the second, but by no means final, phase of the war against international terrorism that began on 11 September 2001.

Fifth: The follow-on phases of that war will require continuing increases in U.S. defense spending not only to maintain current combat readiness but also--and of escalating importance, during the next several years, particularly--to build the ships, aircraft, sensors, weapons, and electronics/avionics systems and subsystems needed to ensure future combat readiness.

To amplify on the first of the preceding statements, it is indisputable that Iraq is still not complying with the terms of numerous U.N. Security Council resolutions it agreed to at the end of the 1991 Gulf War, and in the several years following. Nonetheless, there are still those who want more time for inspections, who seek "a broader coalition," who call for the "smoking gun." These are the same counsels of appeasement and procrastination offered in 1938 by British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain when he returned from Munich with a promise of "peace in our time." That illusory "peace" was quickly evaporated by the winds of World War II, which cost the lives of tens of millions of people.

Saddam Hussein and his henchmen must be seen for what they collectively are: a cancer on the global body politic. Some cancers in and on the human body go into spontaneous remission. But to hope for a similar remission of the military cancer personified in the Iraqi leadership is to argue against all military and medical logic, against all of the bloody lessons learned during the two world wars and hundreds of lesser conflicts of the past century, and against everyday common sense.

That same common sense tells us that a regime change in Baghdad might not absolutely guarantee immediate and enduring peace throughout the entire Middle East, but it would assuredly have an unnerving effect on the several other countries in that region, and elsewhere in the world, that, like Iraq, harbor, provide refuge for, and otherwise support terrorists.

Even so, the global war on terrorism will have to continue--on a global basis. Which means that the United States, as the inevitable leader of this first--and, we should all hope and pray, last--world war of the 21st century, must: (1) continue to rebuild, modernize, and maintain what are already the most capable air, naval, and ground forces in the world; (2) be willing to forward-deploy a significant percentage of those forces overseas in potential areas of crisis; (3) be able to sustain those forces on an indefinite basis if any of those crises erupt into actual conflict; and (4) maintain the political will, and courage, to stay the course for perhaps many years to come.

This is an extremely difficult task to impose on any nation. It undoubtedly would require the investment of billions of additional defense dollars every year, and the willingness to send hundreds of thousands of young Americans into harm's way.

The price would be high, therefore. Perhaps very high. But the cause would be noble--perhaps the most noble cause undertaken by any nation in all history: peace and freedom. Not just in our time, but for all time. And not just for the United States, but for all of the nations of the world--including some that could not currently be considered America's friends and allies.

"This call of history has come to the right country," President Bush correctly told us in his State of the Union speech. "We seek peace. We strive for peace. ... [But] sometimes peace must be defended. ... We sacrifice for the liberty of strangers ... [because we] know that freedom is the right of every person and the future of every nation.

"The liberty we prize," he also reminded us, "is not America's gift to the world; it is God's gift to humanity."

Timothy O. Fanning, National President