Opinion Editorials
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STRONG DEFENSE AND LIMITED GOVERNMENT CAN BRING A REPUBLICAN RENEWAL
November 14, 2006
Strong defense and limited government can bring a Republican renewal
Hypocrisy is the most obvious of political sins. And the people will punish it. We were elected to reduce the size of government and enlarge the sphere of free and private initiative. Then we lavished money, in a time of war, on thousands of projects of dubious, if any, public value. We lost our principles and our majority. And there is no way to recover our majority without recovering our principles first.
Ronald Reagan vetoed a highway bill because it because it had 152 earmarks. Last year, a Republican Congress passed a highway bill with 6,371 special projects costing the taxpayers $24 billion. A Republican Congress spent $50 million for an indoor rainforest, $500,000 for a teapot museum, $350,000 for an Inner Harmony Foundation and
, and $223 million for a bridge to nowhere. I didn't see those projects in the fine print of the Contract with
, and neither did the voters.
We have more significant priorities ahead of us than finding new ways to spend money unwisely. Thanks, in part, to Republican economic policies,
still has the most productive, flexible and energetic free economy in the world. But to keep our nation prosperous, strong and growing we have to rethink, reform and reinvent: the way we educate our children, train our workers, deliver health care services, support retirees, fuel our transportation network, stimulate research and development and harness new technologies.
Our most important obligation, of course, is to protect Americans from the threat posed by violent Islamic extremists. They are moral monsters, but they are also a disciplined movement driven by an apocalyptic religious zeal, which celebrates martyrdom and murder, has access to science, technology and mass communications, and is determined to acquire and use against us and our allies weapons of mass destruction. The institutions that sustained us throughout the Cold War and the doctrine of deterrence we relied on are no longer adequate to protect us in a struggle where suicide bombers might obtain the world's most terrifying weapons.
To defend ourselves we must do everything better and smarter than we did before. We must rethink, renew and rebuild the structure and mission of our military, the capabilities of our intelligence and law enforcement agencies, the purposes of our alliances, the reach and scope of our diplomacy, and the capacities of all branches of government to defend us against the peril we now face.
We need to marshal all elements of American power: our military, economy, investment, trade and technology. We need to strengthen our alliances and build support in other nations, which must, whether they believe it or not, confront the same threat to their way of life that we do. And we must marshal the power of our ideals.
We must prepare, far better than we have, to respond quickly and effectively to another terrorist attack or natural calamity. I am not an advocate of big government, and the private sector has an important role to play in homeland security. But when Americans confront a catastrophe, natural or man-made, their government, across jurisdictions, should be organized and ready to deliver bottled water to dehydrated babies and rescue the aged and infirm trapped in a hospital with no electricity.
We must be honest about the war in
. Without additional combat forces we will not win. We must clear and hold insurgent strongholds, provide security for rebuilding local institutions and economies, arrest sectarian violence in
and disarm Sunni and Shia militias, train the Iraqi army, and embed American personnel in weak and often corrupt Iraqi police units. We need to do all these things if we are to succeed. And we will need more troops to do them.
They will not be easy to find. We should have begun to increase significantly the size of the Army and Marine Corps the day after 9/11. But we did not. So we must turn again to those Americans and their families who have already sacrificed so much in this cause. That is a very hard thing to do. But if we intend to win, then we must.
It is not fair or easy to look a soldier in the eye and tell him he must shoulder a rifle again and risk his life in a third tour in
. As troubling as it is, I can ask a young Marine to go back to
. And he will go, not happily perhaps, but he will go because he and his comrades are the first patriots among us. But I can only ask him if I share his commitment to victory.
The voters might not always agree with us, but when they see us act on principle, see us tackle the hardest problems and risk our personal ambitions, they will draw the right conclusion: that we are acting on their behalf, not just our own. Inspirational leadership challenges people. Be honest and determined to place the country's interests before anything else, and the people will give us our chance.
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