William Kristol

WHEN GEORGE W. BUSH first entered the White House, the conventional wisdom was that his inexperience and lack of vision in foreign policy would be compensated for by his wise and experienced cabinet. This may or may not have been a reasonable view at the time. Right now, however, it is clear that the most visionary and, yes, the wisest and most capable foreign policy-maker in the Bush administration is the president himself.

THE FRONT PAGE of the November 7 Washington Post says it all. The first headline, in large type: "Bush Urges Commitment to Transform Mideast." Below, in slightly smaller type: "Pentagon to Shrink Iraq Force." And below that: "Iraqi Security Crews Getting Less Training." It's a jarring juxtaposition. The president eloquently makes the case for a necessarily and admirably ambitious foreign policy.

"When I left office, there was a substantial amount of biological and chemical material unaccounted for. That is, at the end of the first Gulf War, we knew what he had. We knew what was destroyed in all the inspection processes and that was a lot. And then we bombed with the British for four days in 1998. We might have gotten it all; we might have gotten half of it; we might have gotten none of it. But we didn't know. So I thought it was prudent for the president to go to the U.N. and for the U.N.

REALITIES are sometimes unpleasant. Presidents are elected to confront such realities, and to deal with them. Evading them doesn't work. Pundits can afford to indulge in wishful thinking. Partisans can choose to preoccupy themselves with rock-throwing and blame-casting. But presidents have to govern. They have to deal with difficult realities--even if disingenuous liberals are capitalizing on them, and Democrats are distorting them.

Perhaps the biggest such reality for President Bush is the disarray within his administration.

THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION is asking Congress for an $87 billion appropriation to cover near-term troop deployment and reconstruction costs in Iraq.

DESPERATION BREEDS ILLUSIONS. The latest illusion, embraced reluctantly by the Bush administration and enthusiastically by its critics, is that the burden of establishing and maintaining security in Iraq can be substantially shifted off American shoulders and onto someone else's--whether it be the United Nations, Turkey, India, or the poor Iraqi people themselves. In principle, there is nothing wrong with trying to shift control back to the Iraqis. That should be our goal. Nor would any reasonable person deny that international assistance is essential to rebuilding Iraq.

THE 2004 presidential election will be the biggest in at least a generation. Perhaps more. The choice between Bush and Dean/Kerry/Hillary (to list Democrats in the order of their chance to become the nominee) will be the starkest since Reagan-Mondale in 1984. More will be at stake in terms of the direction of the country than in any election since 1980, or perhaps since 1964. After the last decade's noticeably smaller elections, in terms both of starkness of choice and magnitude of consequence, 2004 will be the real thing.

Let's start with foreign policy.

THE DAILY STANDARD welcomes letters to the editor. Letters will be edited for length and clarity and must include the writer's name, city, and state.

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William Kristol is a smart guy, but he appears to be making a silly mistake in Gephardt's 16 Words. Like other conservatives he is missing important nuances in the speech of a sophisticated thinker.

THE GOOD NEWS is that we may turning the corner in the debate on post-war Iraq. The phony Niger/uranium scandal has run out of steam: There never really was enough oxygen there to sustain a firestorm in the first place, and the release of excerpts from October's National Intelligence Estimate has made the notion of systematic deceit and deception incredible. More important, and despite the continued killings of American soldiers, the situation on the ground in Iraq may well be turning.

"George Bush has left us less safe and less secure than we were four years ago."

KARL ROVE is a genius. No--Rove probably gets more credit than he deserves for political smarts, and the president gets too little, so let's rephrase that: George W. Bush is a genius.

Almost two weeks ago, the president ordered his White House staff to bollix up its explanation of that now-infamous 16-word "uranium from Africa" sentence in his State of the Union address.

PRESIDENT BUSH has had an impressive and successful trip to Europe and the Middle East. But the president's June 1 meeting with President Hu Jintao of China, as described in an unnamed senior administration official's "background" briefing, makes one wonder if the bureaucracy has seized control of China policy from a preoccupied president, vice president and national security adviser. (The entire briefing is available at the White House website).