the only place that he directly addresses the bush administration is in one sentence in the middle of the column:
President Bush briefly admitted last summer to Matt Lauer that the war on terror couldn't ever be won, but he got so much criticism that he promptly backtracked. It was a textbook Washington gaffe: perfectly true but terribly inconvenient.except the problem with bush's statement was not that it was "inconvenient" it's that it directly contradicted almost everything that bush has said and done since 9/11. in his speechs over the past three and a half years, the president has repeatedly vowed to win the war on terror. his administration even claims the right to detain people without trial, not forever as some critics claim, but rather until the war on terror is won. if iraq really is a "critical front in the war on terror" and that war cannot be won, then what the hell is the point of being there? in other words, the reason bush's comments were so inconvenient is because, if true, it meant that most of the bush foreign policy agenda is built on air.
tierney agrees that we cannot win the war on terror, but refuses to follow that point to its logical conclusion. the answer isn't just learning to live without fear, it's getting leaders whose policies are based on reality.
