Let's Have a Truce

The

advantage and drawback of democracies are that, in the middle of wars, we get to have a bloody, impassioned, rhetorically charged, knockdown bare-knuckled fight over who will run the country. We get to lambaste a President, his military failures, his rationale for fighting, his domestic policies and any number of other things. We get to call his opponent a traitor, a war criminal, a flip-flopper, a weak-willed vessel who will say anything to get elected. And much of the time, we even mean it. And then we decide. And then we realize that we are still in a real war, that we still have real enemies to defeat and that the world didn't stop turning and churning while we were campaigning.

That was the case in 1944, when F.D.R. fought a very tough re-election campaign. It was equally the case in 1980, when the Reagan-Carter slugfest took place in the shadow of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. And at some point, especially in foreign policy, when the stakes are invested so heavily in the man in the Oval Office, you have to give the winner a chance, a fresh start, a honeymoon to do what he thinks is in the best interests of the country.

No, this doesn't mean an end to all criticism. But it does mean a willingness to put the bile and anger and passion of the past few months to one side, and a capacity to give even a man you voted against a chance to prove himself. If you lost, get over it. If you won, ditto.

I backed John Kerry on Nov. 2. I did so reluctantly but out of despair that the incompetence in Iraq was irreparable under President George W. Bush. At home, I was dismayed by the President's appalling fiscal record and by his catering to the most extreme elements of the religious right. I believed it was vital to hold him to account for his obvious failings. And the campaign helped do that. If it weren't for the last few months, Bush might still believe that he had conducted a flawless war and that the country was overwhelmingly behind him. After all, he gets all his information from his own hermetically sealed bank of advisers. But he surely understands now how divided the country has become under his presidency and how deeply flawed his war management has been.

But that is history now. He is our President for the next four years. And in wartime, that means we owe him a second chance in the conflict he is conducting. I hope he manages to find some Democrats to put in his Cabinet. I hope he realizes that his first-term strategy of reaching out only to his base was detrimental to the war effort and to the unity of the country as a whole. I hope we see more of the Bush who campaigned from the center in 2000 than the Bush who governed from the extreme right in 2004. But even if these hopes are dashed, he needs national support in the critical battle for Fallujah and throughout the Sunni triangle in Iraq. The military is poised for one of the bloodiest and most difficult of all its campaigns since the actual invasion. We cannot let them — or the Iraqi people — down. In the run-up to the Iraqi elections, on which hinges so much of the future in the war on terrorism, Bush needs the backing of his former opponents. For a while, at least.

Are we capable of this kind of shift in national mood? I have no idea. It has seemed at times as if we have been living in parallel universes this past year. The polarization, aided and abetted by Michael Moore, Mel Gibson, MoveOn.org and the Swift Boat Vets, among many others, has deepened into a variety of embitterments. But elections are — or should be — the antacids to this kind of dyspepsia. They are ways to clear the air, to settle the rancor for a while, to concede that the country as a whole has now decided one way or the other, however fuming you may still be inside. Lefties should lay off on the threats to move abroad; righties should quit the gloating. Neither is warranted. There's a difference between domestic opponents and foreign enemies. It's time we called a truce in the family squabble and turned again to the terrorists at our door.