Bush urges patience in terror war

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.

Last month, former Vice President Al Gore accused Mr. Bush of exposing Americans to greater danger of terrorist attacks “because of his arrogance, willfulness and bungling at stirring up a hornet’s nest that poses no threat whatsoever to us.”

Mr. Bush yesterday addressed head-on the comments of his 2000 presidential election opponent.

“Some say that by fighting the terrorists abroad since September the 11th, we only stir up a hornet’s nest,” Mr. Bush said. “But the terrorists who struck that day were stirred up already.

“If America were not fighting terrorists in Iraq, and Afghanistan, and elsewhere, what would these thousands of killers do — suddenly begin leading productive lives of service and charity?” Mr. Bush said. “Would the terrorists who beheaded an American on camera just be quiet, peaceful citizens if America had not liberated Iraq?

“We are dealing here with killers who have made the death of Americans the calling of their lives,” he said. “And America has made a decision about these terrorists: Instead of waiting for them to strike again in our midst, we will take this fight to the enemy.”

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