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With all genuine respect, shouldn't the question be: "Bush: Effective Steward of the War on Terror?"?
Isn't that the question? I sense from such discussion that we Democrats just don't take the security threat posed by Al Qaeda, Iraq, etc., seriously enough. That we don't even realize there's a war on, for goodness sake. But, it's not true, to say the least. Some of us do take it very seriously. And just because Bush keeps saying he's a war time president doesn't change the fact that his team has shown such incompetence in conducting the war on terror and the post-war in Iraq.
Greg Djerejian, who has put his own boots on the ground in numerous war zones and post-war zones, doesn't sense Kerry gets how dangerous the world is:
There's, er, a lot going on--and I'm not confident that Kerry a) fully gets the stakes and b) will field a national security team that will be up to the challenge.
But doesn't that perception defy the demonstrable evidence of recent administrations and the comparative competence with which they have used force, and the principles they have cited for using it? Wouldn't an objective observer have to say the post-wars in Bosnia and Kosovo were conducted with more competence under the Clinton administration than the post-war was conducted in Iraq by the Bush administration? The fact is, basic levels of security were achieved from the moment General Nash crossed into Bosnia from Croatia, and when asked by the Bosnian Serbs for his passport, pointed to the machine gun toting lieutenant behind him and said, that's my passport. The Bush administration, Rumsfeld, for ideological reasons, were not willing to even recognize the need for more troops on the ground in Iraq, and the result has been disastrous. Why is Greg, who has real expertise in conflicts, willing to give the Bush team the benefit of the doubt when it has demonstrated so much willful incompetence in conducting post-war Iraq, post-war Afghanistan, and aspects of the war against al Qaeda? And why is he skeptical immediately off the bat about a prospective Kerry national security team, which could very well include people like Holbrooke, Biden, Beers, even Hagel or McCain, who have years of war time experience between them and who in my judgment have demonstrated so much competence in dealing effectively with a world they fully recognize is dangerous, and has evil in it that must not be accomodated?
P.S. A confession. I am not really a gauchiste, as Greg calls my site. I even protest-voted for Dole in '96, because I was frustrated it took Clinton and that weasel Warren Christopher so long to intervene in Bosnia. [And, just to be clear, the evidence was that any second Bush I administration, whose foreign policy team was led by James "We don't got a dog in that fight" Baker, would have never done the right thing in Bosnia, BTW, had it won in '92.] But when the Clinton team with its NATO partners did intervene in Bosnia, and later in Kosovo, they did a far more competent job than the Bush team has done in Iraq.
MORE discussion of this here and here.