President Bush for a safer world

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This is not a happy election season. Our nation is mortally threatened and deeply divided. We are divided not only by party affiliation, but by different visions of the nature of the threat and the means of defeating it. Each candidate embodies in his personality and public presentation these conflicting visions.

President George W. Bush sees the rise of global Islamist terrorism as an evil force and mortal threat, the causes of which must be extirpated, root and branch, in a global struggle. He believes that it is insufficient to merely track down the existing terrorists and contain the rogue states with capacity for weapons of mass destruction that may support them. Rather, he proposes, (and has begun to act upon thebeliefinIraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Pakistan and the Horn of Africa, among other places) to transform -- by military means if necessary -- the sick societies of the Middle East, Africa and Central Asia that have given rise to the appeal of terrorism.

Sen. John F. Kerry, while recognizing the malignant nature of the terrorists, sees that threat, or at least the solution to it, as somewhat less thoroughgoing. He has argued that if inspections had been continued in Iraq and sanctions maintained, then regime change by military force would have been unnecessary.

Mr. Bush, implicitly, has seen the danger of further exacerbating Arab street passions (and thus increasing short-term recruitment potential for terrorists) as a price worth paying (if necessary) to move forward the larger project of democratic or other benign transformation. Mr. Kerry has specifically cited such exacerbations as a reason why the Iraq war was unwise.

Neither candidate's vision lies comfortably on the mind. The sheer vastness and duration of Mr. Bush's solution leaves one wishing that the danger did not require so overwhelming a response. Many conservatives, as well as other Americans, wonder whether the project is doable.

On the other hand, this newspaper, and probably a small majority of the country, believe that Mr. Kerry's more limited proposed response does not even offer a theoretical end to the terrorist threat. And, in an age when terrorists may likely come to possess WMD, unless the danger is crushed, terrorism can never return to the level of mere nuisance suggested by Mr. Kerry. Even an occasional WMD attack on the United States would be a catastrophe, not a nuisance.

Mr. Kerry's proposed solution seems to recapitulate Winston Churchill's description of the coming of the Second World War: "the malice of the wicked was reinforced by the weakness of the virtuous ... the counsels of prudence and self restraint [became] the prime agents of mortal danger ... the middle course adopted from desires for safety and a quiet life led direct to the bulls-eye of disaster."

As between Mr. Bush's possible over-estimation of the scope of the solution and Mr. Kerry's clear under-estimation of it, we believe that true prudence calls for the maximum effort proposed by Mr. Bush. On that basis alone, we support Mr. Bush in the current election.

But whatever lessons history has in store for the next president, we believe that Mr. Bush's character and personality are better suited to those challenges.

If he has demonstrated anything in his first term, it is that he will not shrink from making the hard, unpopular decisions, if he judges them to be in the national interest. And, he has shown the determination -- yes, even the stubbornness -- to stick with those decisions when the pressure would be unbearable for most men.