A Screech of Hawks

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Aides to the President counsel patience, and there is some wisdom to that. "It reminds me of last August," said one last week. "The same sort of headlines and complaints--and then the President spoke at the U.N., and everyone was back on board. Wait till he makes the case." No doubt the President will make an effective State of the Union speech this week; he usually does. But there's more to leading the world into war than set-piece speeches--and Bush has seemed decidedly unpresidential at times in recent weeks, flustered and impatient. "I'm sick and tired of the lies and deception," he said on Jan. 14. A President should never sound so juvenile. Indeed, his testiness may be evidence of a deeper frustration: Bush seems to have been blindsided by the institutional entropy of the U.N.--and the chronic grandstanding of the French and Germans. (It was being whispered last week that he blamed his Secretary of State for the mess, which may help account for Colin Powell's own hawkish pique.) It is true that Bush's bluntness forced the U.N. to act last fall--and true too that "Old Europe," to coin a phrase, seems far more comfortable with a toothless League of Nations-style operation than with decisive action of any sort. But Bush--and his divided Administration--have been less than magisterial in their poker game with Saddam, a game that seems destined to end as so many did in the Old West, with a gunfight.

The State of the Union speech will not be Bush's last word on Iraq, according to aides. A more elaborate case for war--with more substantial evidence, perhaps--will be made in February. When it comes, one hopes the President will be forthright about two rather sticky points. He must prepare the nation for the possibility of an imminent terrorist attack. And he will have to be honest about what comes next, after the inevitable military victory: the likelihood that large numbers of American troops will have to remain in Iraq for years to come. There should be no illusions about the difficulty of Mesopotamian nation building. It has been attempted on this same ground many times before, by many other superpowers, and none--none--has ever succeeded. The last to try was England. Winston Churchill, a superhawk hero of the 20th century, ran the occupation, saw the futility of it and favored retreat. "We are paying 8 millions a year," he wrote his Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, in 1922, "for the privilege of living on an ungrateful volcano."