Why Bush Stays Away

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President Bush's secret visit to Baghdad dramatized his commitment to the war and the troops. But it has not put to rest criticism that he has been unwilling to pay the proper respect to those who fought and died. "It's absolutely appropriate to be honoring our soldiers overseas in battle on a day like Thanksgiving," said Chris Lehane, a top adviser to presidential candidate Wesley Clark. But that's not sufficient. "It is more important to honor them every day," including "to appropriately honor the heroes coming back in caskets."

As dead American soldiers have come back from Iraq, Bush has been heavily criticized for not attending a single funeral and not once going to Dover Air Force Base to receive the coffins. One columnist wrote acidly that Bush has time to go around the country to do fund raisers but no time to receive the dead, cynically keeping election-season distance from the terrible consequences of his Iraq policy.

When 19 Italians were killed in Nasiriyah, they returned home to a dramatic public ceremony attended by Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. If Italy, why not America?

Because Italy is not America. The U.S. is carrying the fight at the epicenter of the war, the Sunni triangle. Italy is not. Loss for Italy has been (thus far) but a single event. American losses are daily, constant.

To be fair to the fallen, the President would have to be at Dover nearly every day. Why this soldier, why this patrol, why the crew of this shot-down helicopter and not another?

But it is more than a question of arbitrariness. It is a question of strategy. There is a war going on. The insurgents represent the remnants of a regime of torture and repression. They have no chance whatsoever of engendering a popular uprising. They have only one way of winning: by making U.S. casualties so painful that America decides to give up and go home.

That is the enemy's entire war objective: to inflict pain. And that is why it would be a strategic error to amplify and broadcast that pain by making great public shows of sorrow presided over by the President himself. In the midst of an ongoing war, a guerrilla war, a war that will be won and lost as a contest of wills, the Commander in Chief--despite what he feels in his heart--must not permit himself to show that he bleeds. He is required to show, yes, a certain callousness. He must appear that way to the insurgents, who will otherwise be encouraged to think their strategy is succeeding and therefore have yet more incentive to keep killing Americans until it does. And he must appear that way to ordinary Iraqis, who will not help us in this fight unless they are sure that the pain of our losses will not drive us out and leave them to the tender mercies of the Saddamites.

Of course the President cares. Presidents always care. But they can care too much. President Reagan cared desperately, obsessively about the American hostages in Beirut. He sold weapons to Iran, undermined his own war on terrorism and almost destroyed his presidency trying to get the hostages back. It was a terrible mistake. He should have instead adopted a steely callousness and refused to bargain.