Bush urges patience in terror war

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COLORADO SPRINGS -- President Bush yesterday tried to steel the American people for a decades-long struggle against terrorism, asking for the patience and determination that allowed another generation to win World War II and the Cold War.

"We are now about three years into the war against terrorism," Mr. Bush said in a commencement address at the Air Force Academy. "This is no time for impatience and self-defeating pessimism. These times demand the kind of courage and confidence that Americans have shown before."

Mr. Bush noted that in four years after World War II, Europe still had been experiencing starvation and strife, a dire situation worsened by the aggression of emerging communist powers China and the Soviet Union.

Mr. Bush suggested that if the hypercritical political climate of today had existed in 1945, the world would look quite different -- and be less free.

"If that generation of Americans had lost its nerve, there would have been no long twilight struggle [for freedom], only a long twilight," Mr. Bush said.

He spoke to a crowd of nearly 30,000, including 981 graduating Air Force cadets, at Falcon Stadium, four days before his scheduled visit to France to mark the 60th anniversary of the Allied invasion of Normandy.

The president compared the war on terror to World War II, quoting Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower's message to the troops before the D-Day landings but excluding the word "crusade," a word Mr. Bush had used once early in the war, offending many in the Muslim world.

"Soldiers, sailors and airmen of the Allied Expeditionary Force," Mr. Bush quoted the general as saying. "The eyes of the world are upon you. The hopes and prayers of liberty-loving people everywhere march with you."

Gen. Eisenhower's message included a passage that the troops were "about to embark on the Great Crusade, toward which we have striven these many months."

Mr. Bush's speech marked his most direct rebuttal to the accusations of Democratic presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry and his supporters that the president has mismanaged the war in Iraq and has no plan to deal with the continuing difficulties in the transition to sovereignty to Iraqis.