I SAY to the House, as I said to ministers who have joined this Government, I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat. We have before us an ordeal of the most grievous kind. We have before us many, many months of struggle and suffering.
Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend and oppose any foe in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.
It’s hard work. I understand how hard it is. I get the casualty reports every day. I see on the television screens how hard it is. But it’s necessary work. And I’m optimistic.
All right. I know it’s unfair to juxtapose two of the most skillfully crafted pieces of oratory in history with a hasty response to a question in a live television debate. I know too that Churchill and Kennedy were both, in their separate ways, using a set-piece speech at the outset of their administrations to frame the scale of the struggle that history had commanded them to lead. And my concern is not that George W. Bush will never match the oratorical skills of these two giants. My concern is that there is a persistent and pernicious deficit in the language of America’s leaders in the war against terrorism, and the real challenge that this necessary struggle poses for all civilised people.
We are in a fight — in Iraq, Afghanistan and, if we don’t succeed in those two countries, in all kinds of other places and at home, too — against an enemy that has ambitions every bit as large as those of the foes that Churchill and Kennedy faced down. Indeed, unlike those enemies, this one may be more dangerous since it is not constrained by a rational will to live.
But President Bush’s words, and sometimes his actions, risk making it all sound like a slightly tricky multiple-choice test or an afternoon with the crossword puzzle.
As NBC’s Saturday Night Live lampooned Mr Bush after the debate last week: “Believe me, Jim, we’re working hard. Cause, it’s, ah, hard work. And we’re working hard. Every day. We’re working evenings. Ordering in. Working hard together.”
The Bush Administration has never levelled with the American people about the true nature of this struggle. It never told them that genuine sacrifices would be necessary. Instead, it promised Americans that they could win a couple of wars, crush the enemy, liberate the Middle East and be home in time for supper — oh, and that they could have their taxes cut, too.
There is a reason for this reluctance to talk about the scale of the struggle. The unspoken fear is that the American people don’t have the stomach for it. In the 1990s Americans got used to believing that war could be won by remote control in Nintendo wars in which whole enemy battalions could be wiped out with the flick of a switch. The US suffered fewer than a hundred combat fatalities in the first Gulf War, despite the predictions of the naysayers; it suffered no deaths at all in liberating Kosovo from Serb tyranny. Why should this fight be any different?
As a conservative quipped recently to me, only half in jest: “I supported this war when I thought it was going to be easy, quick and cheap. If I had known it was going to be difficult, long and expensive, I would never have signed on.”
Yet, by any standards the successes so far in this war are substantial. The Taleban toppled in Afghanistan; al-Qaeda’s legions hounded across the world; in Iraq, a murderous regime bent on terrorising its people and its neighbourhood eliminated; in Libya, Saudi Arabia and now even Syria, the first signs that powerful lessons are being learnt.
The cost has been a little more than a thousand allied lives, a few thousand Iraqi and Afghan civilians and a similar number of victims of terrorism. By any historical measure this is an astoundingly low cost-benefit ratio, if I can be permitted to use such a bloodless term for such pain. The US lost 58,000 service men and women in Vietnam — for rather less benefit.
But the war is not won. Indeed, the US and Britain, the two nations for which history seems to have demanded a special role in the cause of liberation, are in danger of losing it because their publics cannot see the worth of the sacrifices made.
A slim majority of Americans now think that the war was a mistake. The failure to find weapons of mass destruction, confirmed yesterday by the Iraq Survey Group, has undoubtedly helped to strengthen the perception of the war being a mistake. But the main reason is that the US is losing men and Iraq seems so far away from being pacified. If there had been no WMD, and the US had succeeded sooner in calming Iraq, you can be sure that the Americans (and the British) would have deemed the war an overwhelming success.
The presidential election now presents a real peril for both countries. The choice facing Americans is a stark one. John Kerry would, it is now evident, pursue a strategy aimed at getting America out of Iraq as quickly as possible. In the presidential debate last week, and on the campaign trail, the line he has now finally decided to take is that the war was wrong and the US needs to be out of there.
Kerry is promising some pretty implausible things in the process — that somehow France, Germany and various Arab nations will come rushing to America’s aid so that the GIs can come home.
But the main import of what he says is this. His election would represent the ultimate proof of Americans’ global attention deficit disorder — a year and a half into a war on terror, they want out.
President Bush gets another chance to make his case to the American people tomorrow night in the second debate, in St Louis, Missouri. Dick Cheney laid it out for him on Tuesday in the vice-presidential debate; but in the end the vice-presidential candidates are irrelevant.
If Mr Bush fails to make the case this time, he will not get another chance.
gerard.baker@thetimes.co.uk
