Respecting George Bush

I have to admit to feeling a twinge of respect for W tonight when I read this account of his press conference today:

President Bush said Tuesday that the war in Iraq was eroding his political capital, [but] suggested that American forces would remain in the country until at least 2009.

In a quick remark at a White House news conference about the reserves of political strength he earned in his 2004 re-election victory — "I'd say I'm spending that capital on the war" — Mr. Bush in effect acknowledged that until he could convince increasingly skeptical Americans that the United States was winning the war, Iraq would overshadow everything he did.

Later, in response to a question about whether a day would come when there would be no more American forces in Iraq, he said that "future presidents and future governments of Iraq" would make that decision.

That statement was one of the few he has made that provides insight into his thinking about the duration of the American commitment in Iraq, and signaled that any withdrawal of troops would extend beyond his term in office.

One can't help buy admire a guy who is so committed to doing what he believes is right that he will sacrifice his entire Presidency and the immediate future of his Party in order to stay the course. I just wish this level of commitment had been made to something actually worth fighting for.

On a not entirely unrelated point, Tom Friedman said something I think is REALLY inportant in his Op-Ed piece a couple of days ago (subscription required). His take-off point was the Dubai ports deal, which he (quite rightly) characterized as the most "ignorant, bogus, xenophobic, reckless debate" imaginable. This is right, of course, but that is not what caught my eye. In the very next sentence he goes on to capture, in a sentence, what is truly wrong about so much of the American weltanschauung right now:

If you had any doubts before, have none now: 9/11 has made us stupid.

As is (sadly) so often the case with Friedman, he misses his own point, for he spends the rest of the article first quoting the now infamous interview Dr. Wafa Sultan gave to Al Jazeera (this is not a war between religions or civilizations; it is a clash between medievalism and modernity, between civilization and backwardness, between the civilized and the primitive, between barbarity and rationality, etc., etc.) and then argiung that in this sort of war Dubai is precisley the type of Arab country we ought to be cultivating.

But I want to go back to that one sentence: "9/11 has made us stupid." Was ever anything truer said? That sentence has haunted me ever since I read it. And it came back to me again when I read about Bush's press conference.