Bush’s Success Partly Lies in Measured Response

Triumph doesn’t look like too strong a word to describe not only the progress of the military campaign in Afghanistan, but the way President Bush has managed the politics of it at home and abroad.

The key to Bush’s success may be that he has simultaneously expressed and restrained America’s outrage. He’s shown unwavering determination to exact revenge against Al Qaeda and prevent future terrorist attacks. But he’s resisted pressure to precipitously widen the war (say to Iraq) or expose U.S. troops to greater risks in the hope of quicker results in Afghanistan.

The administration hasn’t been as sure-footed on the domestic issues related to the war: Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft, though mostly solid on substance, has been needlessly divisive in accusing his critics of aiding the enemy. But in conducting the war itself, Bush has shown keener instincts; he’s been resolute, not rash. While Bush has displayed the anger virtually all Americans feel over Sept. 11, he doesn’t appear to be letting that rage shape his decisions. In the process, he has satisfied most hawks without frightening most doves, which helps explain a job approval rating that’s still approaching 90% and the virtual disappearance of grumbling about the war from governments abroad.

Each side of that equation--the determination and the restraint--has shown dimensions of Bush that weren’t entirely apparent before Sept. 11. The need to reassure and rally the country has forced him to accept a public role he ducked earlier in his presidency. Through his first seven months, Bush was so uncertain a public communicator that he recoiled from the microphone at precisely the moments the nation most expects guidance from its president--a school shooting in San Diego, a race riot in Cincinnati.

Bush can still uncork sentences where the words wander as aimlessly as cows that have slipped out of their pen. But since Sept. 11, he has shown an almost Trumanesque capacity to express what ordinary Americans are thinking. Bush has benefited from some artfully crafted speeches. But he has been most effective in the unscripted moments when he’s personified the nation’s determination to respond.

For many skeptics, the precise moment that Bush grew into his job was the September afternoon he clambered onto a pile of rubble that smoldered where the World Trade Center used to stand and promised, through a borrowed bullhorn, “the people who knocked down these buildings will hear all of us soon.” He showed the same impulse last week at his town meeting in Orlando, Fla., when a young boy asked him what his first thoughts were after he learned of the attacks. “I knew,” Bush replied, “that when I got all of the facts . . . there would be hell to pay for attacking America.”

It’s easy to see why that blustery language would strike a chord after the nation suffered such a wound. The trickier step for Bush has been to marry those hard words with measured actions. The temptation after Sept. 11 might have been to strike fiercely, almost indiscriminately, to satisfy the public demand for revenge. But the calibrated campaign against the Taliban--built around local ground forces and U.S. air power--has both minimized U.S. military casualties and avoided excessive destruction of civilian targets inside Afghanistan. Resolve, not fury, has been the watchword of this war.

That restraint has helped preempt the emergence of significant antiwar movements at home and especially in Europe. Yet the rapid progress toward overthrowing the Taliban and debilitating Al Qaeda has also declawed the domestic hawks who wanted Bush to commit ground troops. (The hawks do deserve credit for pushing Bush to escalate the military pressure early in the war when the Pentagon looked to be holding back while the State Department tried to negotiate a post-Taliban government for Afghanistan.) Pressure for more U.S. ground troops--and more aggressive use of those already there--will likely grow if our Afghan proxies can’t find Osama bin Laden. But for now, the administration has found a military balance that marginalizes political challenge from left or right.

“People are very comfortable with the plan that’s unfolding,” says Will Marshall, executive director of the Progressive Policy Institute, a centrist Democratic think tank. “They see it; they get it; and it makes eminent good sense to them, because it achieves the objective of destroying our enemies at the cost of minimal American casualties.”

This sense of proportion on the battlefield may have been more predictable than Bush’s emergence as a confident communicator; after all, prudence was the most honored word in his father’s foreign policy lexicon. But even that wasn’t guaranteed. Moderation wasn’t the hallmark of Bush’s early presidency, especially in foreign affairs. Through his first eight months, Bush had displayed a unilateralist streak on issues such as the anti-ballistic missile and global warming treaties that verged on contempt for foreign opinion.

That preference for acting alone hasn’t vanished: The Pentagon has steered the war by its own compass, without allowing for input even from America’s closest allies like Great Britain. But on issues such as assembling the post-Taliban government, Bush has shown sensitivity to opinion abroad without ever being imprisoned by it. He’s expressed America’s interests without seeming dismissive of others’--something he hadn’t managed before.

This record in Afghanistan should help Bush increase support if he decides to expand the war against terror to other countries, particularly Iraq. Absent a direct link to the Sept. 11 attack, any military action against Iraq would provoke much more resistance abroad and possibly at home. But it will be easier for Bush to make the case for force now that he has demonstrated he deliberates carefully before deploying it and then exercises it with care. “My hunch is if the circumstances were right for Bush to [act] in Iraq, I wouldn’t be surprised if the British and some other countries were there as well,” one European diplomat said.

From the start, administration officials have insisted that the war against terrorism will be a journey of many steps. Even with the collapse of the Taliban, that’s still true. But in this first step, Bush has found a balance of purpose and restraint that provides him a strong foundation for whatever comes next.

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Ronald Brownstein’s column appears every Monday. See current and past Brownstein columns on The Times’ Web site at: https://www.latimes.com/brownstein.