Bush’s challenge: Defining an achievable military goal

On the brink of war, the preeminent political task usually facing a president is to rally the country’s support for military action.

As his speech to Congress Thursday night demonstrated, President Bush faces a very different political test: defining a sustainable and achievable goal for the military action that most Americans already support. His greatest challenge may be less rallying the country to arms than restraining its expectations of what military action may achieve, especially in the short run.

In all, Bush’s address was clearly the most assured and confident performance he has delivered on a national stage; for many Americans who have doubted his capacity, and even his legitimacy, it may have been the first time they saw him filling the presidency. “I thought it was A-plus,” said presidential historian Michael Beschloss. “Every word he said, you really knew he meant it.”

But what Bush didn’t have to do was as revealing as what he did.

The overwhelming public support for military retaliation -- which has been running near 90 percent in most polls -- has placed him in a fundamentally different position than his two predecessors, each of whom also placed U.S. service personnel in harm’s way. In similar speeches to the nation -- George Bush during the Persian Gulf War and Bill Clinton during the NATO campaign in Kosovo -- a president faced the burden of convincing skeptical Americans that those distant lands were worth the risk of American lives.

“When we went into the fight in the Gulf War or Kosovo, the public opposed those actions, and the job of the president was to change public opinion,” said Democratic pollster Mark Mellman. “We are way past that. The terrorists took care of rallying public opinion for the use of force.”

With support for force already assured, Bush had several other aims in his address: reassuring the country that his administration is taking all reasonable precautions to prevent another attack (including the dramatic announcement of a new Cabinet-level agency to coordinate anti-terrorism efforts); steeling U.S. troops for the conflict ahead; pointing a finger of blame at Osama bin Laden; and issuing a series of pointed ultimatums to the Taliban regime that shelters him in Afghanistan.

“The Taliban must act and act immediately,” Bush declared. “They will hand over the terrorists or they will share in their fate.” Above all, Mellman said in a conclusion echoed by many others, Bush’s challenge is “to channel the public’s feelings in a way that is supportive of a meaningful policy ... and to define very clearly what victory means.”

Though firm, resolute, often eloquent and warmly received, Bush’s speech still demonstrated how difficult a task that could be in a war without conventional battlefields, familiar military targets or even a generally agreed-upon definition of success.

“Americans should not expect one battle,” Bush warned the country, “but a lengthy campaign unlike any other we have ever seen.”

Even many who criticized Bush earlier in his presidency have said the president, following some initial uncertainty, has generally struck an effective and unifying balance in addressing the public since the Sept. 11 attacks. As he did again Thursday night, Bush has displayed resolve without appearing rash, and emphasized tolerance (for Arab Americans and Muslim Americans) as much as vigilance. Repeatedly through his speech, Bush urged Americans to refrain from scapegoating fellow Americans, whatever their ethnic or religious background.

The faintest note in Bush’s daily dialogue with the public has been in explaining exactly what this new kind of war will entail. That’s hardly surprising: Policymakers across the Western world are struggling to define a meaningful military campaign against an enemy as elusive as global terrorism. The simultaneous attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon was an event so unexpected that it has propelled virtually all Americans -- from the senior policymakers on down -- into uncharted territory.

But in that environment, some analysts believe the very use of the word “war” to define the conflict opens Bush to public expectations that the administration will have difficulty satisfying.

For days, Bush and his advisers have appeared sensitive to that risk; since first employing the word “war” 24 hours after the attacks, the president and his aides have devoted much of their public communication to explaining why the American response won’t look like a conventional war. It will not, for instance, produce the quick and decisive results that at times made the Gulf War look like a video game on CNN.

“Some of the major victories in this type of war may not be what people are expecting,” Dan Bartlett, the White House deputy director of communications, said shortly before the president’s speech. “Instead of sinking a ship, you seize $100 million in assets. But it’s war nonetheless.”

The effort to prepare the country for such an ambiguous and amorphous conflict continued in Thursday night’s speech. Bush went out of his way to stress that the coming struggle will look neither like the Gulf War -- “with a decisive liberation of territory and a swift conclusion” -- nor the campaign in Kosovo, with its casualty-free vision of an antiseptic war fought only from fighter jets at 20,000 feet.

Americans, he suggested, may have to accept the pain of casualties without the catharsis of dramatic, telegenic victories over massed armies or fixed targets.

“Let’s give him credit. He’s got a heck of a problem,” said historian John Milton Cooper of the University of Wisconsin. “This isn’t a war like we’ve known before. He handled that fine, but the proof of the pudding is going to come in the eating in the months ahead.”

Already substantial, the public’s confidence in the president’s handling of the crisis is likely to grow even greater after last night’s tour de force speech -- which, coming exactly eight months after his inauguration, may be the first Bush address to earn a place in the history books. There was no trace of the tongue-tied word-mangler lampooned on “Saturday Night Live.”

But Bush will face a continuing challenge of maintaining support in an unconventional conflict that is likely to test Americans in ways more profound than lengthening their wait at the airport. Bush’s words were strong and assured, but they committed him, and the nation, to a goal that may be no easier to fulfill than earlier government “wars” to eliminate drugs or poverty. The war on terror, Bush declared, “will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated.”

It was a stirring moment, one of many in a stirring speech. Now Bush returns to the far harder work -- translating those moving words into a practical set of actions that moves the nation closer to that distant goal.