Peggy Noonan

Let’s take a look at three Republicans, one of whom says he won’t run for president, one of whom says he may, and one who will.

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, on a radio call-in show in Philadelphia, was asked again this week if he’s tired of being asked if he’ll run for president. No, he said, “I’m a kid from Jersey who has people asking him to run for president. I’m thrilled by it, I just don’t want it.”

It was vintage Christie. He loves the kid-from-Jersey stuff, and he’s good at it. He has, and one suspects cultivates, a kind of working-class patina (blunt, disheveled, overweight, no-nonsense, satirical) that Republicans of a certain sort used to sniff at and now adore. Their ideal candidate would be a guy who looks and talks like a union boss but quotes Hayek. Anyway, Mr. Christie’s Philadelphia comments were almost as good as what he told Matt Bai of the New York Times in February. When Bai asked him if the presidential talk was getting tiresome, Mr. Christie broke into an imitation of a politician taking himself too seriously: “Oh, Matt, please, stop asking me about whether I should be president of the United States! The leader of the free world! Please stop! I’m exhausted by the question! I mean, come on. If I get to that point, just slap me around, because that’s really presumptuous. What it is to me is astonishing, not exhausting.”

What’s interesting about the Christie-for-president thing is it doesn’t go away, even after months of Shermanesque announcements that he isn’t ready and doesn’t want it. Why would that be? In part it’s that he says “no” with charm and deep cleverness. He could say, “I’ve only been governor for 16 months, I don’t have anything remotely like the level of experience needed at a time like this.” But he doesn’t, quite. And it’s possible he just thinks President Obama’s going to win and doesn’t want to be the guy who loses to him.

What I suspect people like most about him, apart from policy, is what they liked about Tim Russert: He was normal. A lot of people at this point in history think only the abnormal run for president. Only the abnormal want their finger on the button or want responsibility for epic economic decisions. Or maybe people think only weirdos and dullards want it—weirdos because they like the heightened nature of everything about the presidency, dullards because they don’t fully understand what they’re getting into. The fact that Mr. Christie says he doesn’t want it marks him as normal, which makes people want him more. He can give as many Shermanesque statements as he likes, but if the field continues to look thin he’s going to face a draft-Christie movement.

Actually there was a report this week that big Iowa donors are coming to meet with him late in the month, so maybe it’s already begun.

*   *   *

Newt Gingrich announced he is in this week. The news hit some in the media with a certain electric jolt, but not Republicans, most of whom assumed he was running and seem not that interested. Mr. Gingrich is a vigorous and compelling explainer of generally conservative positions and beliefs, and he will be interesting in debate. But . . . well, I have yet to meet a Gingrich 2012 supporter. He is a vivid figure who drew a vivid response during the Clinton years. He turned off people then whom he will never win to his side. He is politically and personally controversial; those who worked with him longest in the House liked him least. After 30 years on the national scene, he will find his candidacy affected by the old maxim that friends come and go but enemies accumulate.

On the hustings, he’ll always draw appreciative crowds, and they’ll stand in line for his autographed books. But they will not choose him for president. They will say, “He should be in the next cabinet, an idea man who runs—or, better, creatively shuts down—some big agency.”

*   *   *

Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels told reporters at a lunch in New York 10 days ago that he has set a deadline on his deliberations. He’ll decide if he will run for president “by the end of the month.” I asked if he’d announce his decision soon after. Yes, he said, he didn’t want to play it “cute.” If he decides to get, in he’ll get in. This month ends the day after Memorial Day. Daniels has a book due out in the fall. It would be odd to announce a few months before its release that you weren’t running, for that would undercut the ostensible purpose of a book—to disseminate your views—and undercut sales.

My biggest takeaway from the lunch is what a great actor he is. I couldn’t tell from his demeanor, comments, language or expression which way he’s leaning, and at this point he at least knows that. His office says his schedule is free Memorial Day weekend, except for the Indy 500, which he plans to attend, subject to change.

Vroom vroom. Maybe more will start there than cars.

*   *   *

If we’re coming up on an election year, we’re about to enter Full Oppo Shakedown. Republican operatives and hirelings are doing opposition research—digging deep, following personal and financial leads—on the guys who are running against their candidates. Obama operatives also be on the case, or already are. And so a thought on personal lives and the current election year.

I think it’s possible that this year, because of the special nature of the times—we live through unprecedented and ongoing crises in the economy and foreign policy—the American people may be less interested in the personal stories, foibles and family situations of those running for president than in the past. They’ll still be interested, but these things won’t seem as serious or even decisive as they have sometimes been. The current air of crisis may make such things look like a luxury the country can ill afford.

The reigning assumption, or cliché, is that the American people have a censorious side and are puritanical about their politicians, demanding a lifetime of personal rectitude. I don’t think that’s been true in the modern era. When Bill Clinton was elected in 1992, he won in spite of being famously surrounded by rumors about his personal life. Gennifer Flowers held news conferences, the National Enquirer was in on the act. People elected Mr. Clinton anyway. They didn’t judge him harshly. They knew that on becoming president he wouldn’t do anything embarrassing. Then came Monica Lewinsky, which was his mistake: The past is the past, but that was the present—and in the Oval Office! For that they punished him, with the strictest punishment there was: impeachment.

I think Americans right now, but particularly with the current crises, will be generally inclined to give pretty much everyone a break. As long as all mischief is confined to the past. They won’t accept it in the present. That’s what did in John Edwards. It wasn’t rumors of past girls, it was a girl on the plane during the campaign. Americans will come down on you hard for that.

If it weren’t Osama bin Laden we just killed, he’d be giving interviews in the hills right now taunting the great Satan that once again lied. We’ll get to that in a moment.

Let’s start with credit where it’s due. The U.S. Navy SEALs did it and deserve our profound thanks and deep admiration.

It was President Obama who told CIA chief Leon Panetta: Get this guy. When presidents insist, the guy tends to get got. It was Mr. Obama who made the decision not to bomb the house with predators or B2s, because that way we wouldn’t have known if we’d got Osama. It was Mr. Obama who decided to do it the hard way, the way that would allow us to know we’d succeeded. It was Mr. Obama who’d have taken the blame if the operation had gone wrong, and things like this are tricky and often go wrong because they have a thousand moving parts and almost every part has to move right. And it’s not as if the president was operating from a position of political strength. It was Mr. Obama who, having made the decision, apparently didn’t micromanage. He did his job and let the military do theirs.

It was Mr. Obama who decided—rightly—to stiff Pakistan, not to tell them of the operation but to allow them to be exposed and humiliated in front of the world. Which they richly deserve. They accept our aid and hide our enemies. Every day they frighten the world with their chronic instability, their Wild West ways, their infiltrated military, their nuclear weapons. At a certain point you have to say “Enough.” Mr. Obama said it very nicely. And by the way, that silence you hear from the U.N. on charges of violating Pakistan’s sovereignty? That’s the silence of the civilized world thinking, “Good. They had it coming.”

It was well and brilliantly done. It reminded the world that American might can be wielded with American competence. It highlighted the brilliance of the U.S. military when it is given clear goals and full resources.

And it had to be done, for us and the world.

Osama’s importance is that he was the leader of al Qaeda, but his mystique resided in the fact that he attacked America and got away with it. He killed nearly 3,000 people in a brutal assault and lived to tell the tale. He launched a war and taunted us from the hills. He was invincible, the “strong horse.” This gave him charisma, which he used to rouse and recruit the young, the ignorant and the unstable.

That’s over now. He has been answered. The U.S. action said, “You didn’t get away with it. You are not invincible. You are dead. Followers, please note.”

Is the world safer with bin Laden dead? Who knows. But it is better.

*   *   *

However, and with our president there is always a however, he has spent almost every moment since his Sunday night speech displaying both a tin ear and a chronic tendency to misunderstand his own country. His refusal to release more evidence that Osama is dead is allowing a great story to dissolve into a mystery. He is letting a triumph turn into a conspiracy theory.

Here is the fact of the age: People believe nothing. They think everything is spin and lies. The minute a government says A is true, half the people on Earth know A is a lie. And when people believe nothing, as we know, they will believe anything. We faked the moon landing, there was a second gunman in Dallas, the World Trade Center was blown up in a U.S.-Zionist conspiracy, Hitler grew old in Argentina.

There will always be people who believe conspiracy theories, and with the Internet there will be more. They are impervious to evidence. But people who care about the truth need to be armed with evidence to refute them.

Mr. Obama misunderstands all this. He tells Steve Croft Sunday on Sixty Minutes that showing photos of the dead Osama would be to “spike the football.” “We don’t trot this stuff out as trophies.” Trophies? Who does he think we are?

It’s not about pride, it’s about proof. “We got him, shot him and immediately threw him in the sea” is not enough. The U.S. government should release all the evidence it has that does not compromise security. Pictures of Osama are said to be gruesome. Then get the least gruesome one and put it out. Release the DNA evidence, incriminating information found in the house, and pictures of the raid. If there was a passport under the mattress, make it public. And let the SEALs tell their story. Allow them, if they are willing and eager, to go on “Nightline,” “Frontline” and “60 Minutes.” If they cannot be identified or don’t wish to be, put a blue dot over their faces, filter their voices, and don’t use their names.

All of this should be put in one big package and released to the world. In this way you give the nation and the world data, and a lot to talk about. That talk will crowd out and diminish conspiracy theories and deather denialism.

Americans don’t want to spike the ball. They just want to show they crossed the goal line.

Two closing thoughts. One has to do with the reaction of young men to the news of Osama’s death. I saw it last Sunday night with a wordless but emotional high-five from a boy with whom I’d lived through 9/11. After midnight his friend, with whom we’d shared those days, came over for hugs all around. On the TV there were the celebrations that broke out in New York and Washington, and the young Marine smoking a stogie in front of the White House. There were the cheering young men of West Point, and the young people of many universities, including Yale, among whom was a veteran of the Australian forces in Afghanistan. The next night he looked like one happy, hung-over soldier.

Young men, mostly, fought the wars and are fighting them. Young men took to the streets Sunday night. It was their night. They’d seen their country do something brilliant and brave and right, and it was as if they were visiting for a moment the America their parents had told them about. They were 10 or 15 when it all began, on 9/11. Now the guy who did it sleeps with the fishes.

And so they cheered: “USA! USA!” It was good to hear that again. It was especially good to hear it from them.

Finally, people talk about “closure,” but there’s no such thing as closure. You absorb life, including its blows, and move on. If you’re lucky or work hard, adversity makes you better, stronger, deeper. You’ll never not mourn, because you’re human and that’s the way we’re built. But there are moments when something happens—you take a turn, or a new understanding happens. There are times when you realize a certain point in the arc of mourning has been reached. There are times when justice happens.

Such a time was brought to us this week by U.S. Navy SEAL Team 6. They made a whole country feel young again.

Hooyah, baby. Hooyah.

One of the greatest moments in the history of faith was also one of the greatest moments in modern political history. It happened in June 1979.

Just eight months before, after dusk on Oct. 16, 1978, a cardinal had stepped out onto the loggia of St. Peter’s Basilica to say those towering, august words, “Habemus papem”—”We have a pope.” The cardinal pronounced the new pontiff’s name in Latin. Not everyone understood or could hear him, and the name sounded odd. For 456 years the church had been electing Italian popes. This didn’t sound Italian. The crowd was perplexed.

Then the new pope came out—burly, light-haired, broad cheekbones. He looked Slavic. He looked like a Pole! It was Karol Wojtylwa, the cardinal from Krakow. It was a breakthrough choice—so unexpected and unprecedented—and you knew as you watched that a whole new world was beginning. This was a former manual laborer who wore brown scruffy shoes, who was young (58) and vibrant (a hiker and kayaker). He was a writer, an intellectual who’d come up during the heroic era of the European priesthood, when to be a priest in a communist-controlled nation was to put not only your freedom at risk but your life.

Poland went wild with joy; Krakow took to the streets. The reaction was world-wide. They had vigils in the Polish neighborhoods of Chicago, and block parties in Boston.

*   *   *

And here is the great moment of faith that became a great moment of history. John Paul II, naturally, wanted to return as pope to visit his homeland. This put the communist government in Warsaw in a bind. If they didn’t invite him, they’d look defensive and weak. If they did, he might spark an uprising that would trigger a Soviet invasion.

They invited John Paul to come on a “religious pilgrimage.” On June 2, 1979, he arrived at an airport outside Warsaw, walked down the steps of the plane, and kissed the tarmac. The government feared tens of thousands would line the streets for the motorcade into town.

More than a million came.

In a mass in the Old City, John Paul gave a great sermon. Why, he asked, had God lifted a Pole to the papacy? Why had Poland suffered for centuries under political oppression? Perhaps because Poland is “the land of a particularly responsible witness.” The Poles had been chosen to give witness, with humility, to the cross and the Resurrection. He asked the crowd if they accepted such an obligation.

“We want God,” they roared. “We want God!” This from a nation occupied by an atheist state.

John Paul said the great work of God is man, and the great redeemer of man is Christ. Therefore, “Christ cannot be kept out of the history of man in any part of the globe, at any longitude or latitude. . . . The exclusion of Christ from the history of man is an act against man!”

It was brilliant. He wasn’t asking for a revolution or an uprising, he wasn’t directly challenging the government. He just pointed out that God himself sees one unity in Europe, not an East and a West divided but one continent. And so must we all.

But it was what happened a week later, at the Blonie field outside Krakow, that led directly to 1989, and the fall of the Berlin Wall. That was the event that made political history.

It was June 10, near the end of the trip. Everyone was tired. There was to be a last outdoor mass. The government had not allowed it to be publicized. But words spread, and two million people came, maybe three million. It was the biggest gathering in Polish history. Here John Paul took on communism more directly. He exhorted the crowd to receive the Holy Spirit. “I speak . . . for St. Paul: Do not quench the Spirit. . . . I speak again for St. Paul: Do not grieve the Spirit of God!”

“You must be strong, my brothers and sisters. You must be strong with the strength that faith gives. . . . You need this strength today more than any other period in our history. . . . You must be strong with love, which is stronger than death. . . . Never lose your spiritual freedom.”

The mass was stirring, with crowds saying, again, “We want God!” But here is the thing. Everyone at that mass went home and put on state-controlled television to see the coverage of the great event. They knew millions had been there, they knew what was said, they knew everyone there was part of a spiritual uprising. But state-run TV had nothing. State-run TV had a few people in the mud and a picture of the pope.

Everyone looked at the propaganda of the state, at its lack of truthfulness and its disrespect for reality, and they thought: It’s all lies. Everything the government says is a lie. The government itself is a lie.

The Solidarity movement took on new power. The Communist Party lost authority; the Polish government in time tottered, and by 1989 the Soviet Union itself was tottering.

Twenty-three years later, in an interview, the Solidarity leader Lech Walessa told me of how John Paul galvanized the movement for freedom: “We knew . . . communism could not be reformed. But we knew the minute he touched the foundations of communism, it would collapse.”

*   *   *

John Paul went on to a fruitful papacy of historic length, 26 years. He travelled more than a million miles to 149 countries. He didn’t bring the world to the church, he brought the church to the world. He was shot and almost killed in 1981, survived and went to Rome’s Rebibbia Prison to make sure his would-be assassin, Mehmet Ali Agca, understood he’d been forgiven. And at the end, sick with Parkinson’s, he did what statesmen don’t do: He made his suffering public, as if to say, “We who are imperfect, who are not beautiful, who are in pain—we too are part of the human race, and worthy of God’s love.” He insisted on the humanity of the weak, the wounded, the unborn.

And when he died, there was the miracle of the crowds. John Paul had been old and dying for a long time, and the Vatican knew he’d been forgotten. They didn’t plan for crowds.

But when he died, people came running. They dropped what they were doing and filled the streets of Rome, they got on trains and plans and Rome was engulfed.

Four million people came.

They travelled from every country in Europe and beyond, they had nowhere to sleep, they filled the streets carrying candles.

There had never been anything like it. Old Rome had seen its popes come and go, but the crowds came and wouldn’t leave until he was buried. And when his coffin was carried out and shown to them, they roared.

“Santo Subito!” they said. Make him a saint.

And now this weekend he will be beatified, a step toward sainthood. He will become Blessed John Paul the Second, and nobody will misunderstand his name.

Some will speak of mistakes and sins in his papacy, and they are right. But saints are first of all human, and their lives are always flawed, full of contradictions, and marked by stark failures. Yet they are individuals of heroic virtue. As he was.

Santo Subito. Make him a saint. And by the way, expect crowds.

I want to talk a little more this holiday week about what I suppose is a growing theme in this column, and that is an increased skepticism toward U.S. military intervention, including nation building. Our republic is not now in a historical adventure period—that is not what is needed. We are or should be in a self-strengthening one. Our focus should not be on outward involvement but inner repair. Bad people are gunning for us, it is true. We should find them, dispatch them, and harden the target. (That would be, still and first, New York, though Washington too.) We should not occupy their lands, run their governments, or try to bribe them into bonhomie. We think in Afghanistan we’re buying their love, but I have been there. We’re not even renting it.

Our long wars have cost much in blood and treasure, and our military is overstretched. We’re asking soldiers to be social workers, as Bing West notes in his book on Afghanistan, “The Wrong War.”

I saw it last month, when we met with a tough American general. How is the war going? we asked. “Great,” he said. “We just opened a new hospital!” This was perhaps different from what George Patton would have said. He was allowed to be a warrior in a warrior army. His answer would have been more like, “Great, we’re putting more of them in the hospital!”

But there are other reasons for a new skepticism about America’s just role and responsibilities in the world in 2011. One has to do with the burly, muscular, traditional but at this point not fully thought-through American assumption that our culture not only is superior to most, but is certainly better in all ways than the cultures of those we seek to conquer. We have always felt pride in our nation’s ways, and pride isn’t all bad. But conceit is, and it’s possible we’ve grown as conceited as we’ve become culturally careless.

We are modern, they are not. We allow women freedom, they do not. We have the rule of law, they do not. We are technologically sophisticated, they are the Flintstones. We have religious tolerance. All these are sources of legitimate satisfaction and pride, especially the last. Our religious pluralism is, still, amazing.

I lately think of Charleston, S.C., that beautiful old-fashioned, new- fashioned city. On a walk there in October I went by one of the oldest Catholic churches in the South, St. Mary’s, built in 1789. Across the street, equally distinguished and welcoming, was Kahal Kadosh Beth Elohim, a Jewish congregation founded in 1749. They’ve been across from each other peacefully and happily for a long time. I walked down Meeting Street to see the Hibernian Society, founded in 1801. My people wanted their presence known. In a brochure I saw how the society dealt with Ireland’s old Catholic-Protestant split. They picked a Protestant president one year, a Catholic the next, and so on. In Ireland they were killing each other. In America they were trading gavels. What a country! What a place. What a new world.

We have much to be proud of. And we know it. But take a look around us. Don’t we have some reasons for pause, for self-questioning? Don’t we have a lot of cultural repair that needs doing?

*   *   *

Imagine for a moment that you are a foreign visitor to America. You are a 40-year-old businessman from Afghanistan. You teach a class at Kabul University. You are relatively sophisticated. You’re in pursuit of a business deal. It’s your first time here. There is an America in your mind; it was formed in your childhood by old John Ford movies and involves cowboy hats and gangsters in fedoras. You know this no longer applies—you’re not a fool—but you’re not sure what does. You land at JFK, walking past a TSA installation where they’re patting the genital areas of various travelers. Americans sure have a funny way of saying hello!

You get to town, settle into a modest room at the Hilton on Sixth Avenue. You’re jet-lagged. You put on the TV, not only because you’re tired but because some part of you knows TV is where America happens, where America is, and you want to see it. Headline news first. The world didn’t blow up today. Then:

Click. A person named Snooki totters down a boardwalk. She lives with young people who grunt and dance. They seem loud, profane, without values, without modesty, without kindness or sympathy. They seem proud to see each other as sexual objects.

Click. “Real Housewives.” Adult women are pulling each other’s hair. They are glamorous in a hard way, a plastic way. They insult each other.

Click. Local news has a riot in a McDonalds. People kick and punch each other. Click. A cable news story on a child left alone for a week. Click. A 5-year-old brings a gun to school, injures three. Click. A show called “Skins”—is this child pornography? Click. A Viagra commercial. Click. A man tried to blow up a mall. Click. Another Viagra commercial. Click. This appears to be set in ancient Sparta. It appears to involve an orgy.

You, the Kabul businessman, expected some raunch and strangeness but not this—this Victoria Falls of dirty water! You are not a philosopher of media, but you know that when a culture descends to the lowest common denominator, it does not reach the broad base at the bottom, it lowers the broad base at the bottom. This “Jersey Shore” doesn’t reach the Jersey Shore, it creates the Jersey Shore. It makes America the Jersey Shore.

You surf on, hoping for a cleansing wave of old gangster movies. Or cowboys. Anything old! But you don’t find TMC. You look at a local paper. Headline: New York has a 41% abortion rate. Forty-four percent of births are to unmarried women and girls.

You think: Something’s wrong in this place, something has become disordered.

The next morning you take Amtrak for your first meeting, in Washington. You pass through the utilitarian ugliness, the abjuration of all elegance that is Penn Station. On the trip south, past Philadelphia, you see the physical deterioration that echoes what you saw on the TV—broken neighborhoods, abandoned factories with shattered windows, graffiti-covered abutments. It looks like old films of the Depression!

By the time you reach Washington—at least Union Station is august and beautiful—you are amazed to find yourself thinking: “Good thing America is coming to save us. But it’s funny she doesn’t want to save herself!”

*   *   *

My small point: Remember during the riots of the 1960s when they said “the whole world is watching”? Well, now the whole world really is. Everyone is traveling everywhere. We’re all on the move. Cultures can’t keep their secrets.

The whole world is in the Hilton, channel-surfing. The whole world is on the train, in the airport, judging what it sees, and likely, in some serious ways, finding us wanting.

And, being human, they may be judging us with a small, extra edge of harshness for judging them and looking down on them.

We have work to do at home, on our culture and in our country. A beautiful Easter to St. Mary’s Church of Charleston, and happy Passover to Kahal Kadosh Beth Elohim.

Suppose everything we think we know about the president’s political position is wrong? That’s what I think became clear this week.

You know the conventional wisdom. It is that unemployment ticking down, plus the economy inching back, plus the power of the presidency to affect events, equal a likely Obama victory in 2012. Smart people, especially Republicans, believe this. But how about this for a thought: It’s not true. It’s all wrong. Barack Obama can be taken, and his adversaries haven’t even noticed. In fact, he will likely lose in 2012. Only one thing can save him. More on that further down.

Let’s start with the immediate and go to the overarching. The president is immersed in another stressed and unsuccessful spring after a series of losing seasons. Internationally, he’s involved in a confused effort that involves bombing Libyan government troops and sometimes their rebel opponents, leaving the latter scattered and scurrying. Responsibility to protect is looking like tendency to deflect. Domestically, the president’s opponents seized the high ground on the great issue of the day, spending and debt, and held it after the president’s speech this week. In last week’s budget duel, the president was outgunned by Republicans in the House and outclassed by Paul Ryan, who offered seriousness and substance as a unique approach to solving our fiscal problems.

In this week’s polls: An Ipsos survey says 69% of Americans believe the country is on the wrong track, up five points since March. Zogby has only 38% of national respondents saying Mr. Obama deserves re-election, with 55% wanting someone new. Mr. Obama carried Pennsylvania in 2008 by double digits; a poll there this week shows only 42% approving his leadership, with 52% disapproving. Gallup had the president’s support slipping among blacks and Hispanics, with the latter’s numbers dramatic: 73% supported him when he was inaugurated, 54% do now. Support among whites on Inauguration Day was 60%. Now it is 39%.

We’re all so used to reporting the general trend of these polls that we fail to see their significance: The more that people experience his leadership, the less they like his leadership. There’s no real reason to think upticks in this direction or that will seriously change this. Another way to say it is that there have been upticks that might have benefited the president, and so far they haven’t.

At this point everyone mentions Mr. Obama’s personal approval numbers, which are consistently higher than his leadership numbers. The RealClearPolitics average puts his personal approval at 47.6%, which doesn’t sound bad. But let me offer a hunch based on conversations with people from many walks of life and all regions the past 18 months. The president’s personal numbers are probably lower than the polls report. Not that the polls are dishonest, but the American people don’t want to not like Mr. Obama. They don’t want to tell a young pollster that hey don’t like a man they elected two years ago, with excitement and hope, by a margin of 9.5 million votes. There are two things I have never heard, not once, in the past year: “I love this guy—I love Obama,” and “If only John McCain were president, everything would be better.”

I suspect, and it’s only a suspicion, that there’s a degree to which people tell pollsters they like Mr. Obama to take the sting out of the fact that they just told the pollster they don’t approve of his leadership.

We all get stuck in the day-to-day and lose sight of the overarching, but the overarching fact of Mr. Obama’s presidency is that he made a bad impression his first years in office and has never turned that impression around. He spent his first 14 months moving on what he was thinking about—health care—and not what the public was thinking about—the economic crash, jobs, spending. He seemed not to be thinking like everyone else, which underscored the idea that he was unresponsive to the crises they were seeing. It’s hard to get past that.

His speech this week brought together all the strands of his flawed leadership. It was at moments clever, but merely clever, not up to the needs of the moment—and cleverness in a time of crisis comes as an affront. The speech seemed oblivious to recent history, as if the president had just discovered something no one knows about, a problem with spending, and has decided to alert us to the danger. He said other politicians attempt to cut by focusing on “waste and abuse,” but he knows the real secret: The problem is entitlement spending. But addressing entitlements is all anyone serious has been talking about for years; it’s what the Ryan plan is all about!

The speech was intellectually incoherent. An administration that spent two years saying, essentially, that high spending is good is suddenly insisting high spending is catastrophic. The president appealed for bipartisan efforts but his manner and approach leave his appeals sounding like diktats. His attempts to seem above the fray leave him seeming distanced and unwilling to risk anything.

Most important, the speech signaled that the White House, after all this time, sees the question of spending as a partisan tool, a weapon to be deployed in an election, and not an actual crisis. This is disrespectful toward citizens who feel honest alarm.

Because of these flaws, the speech will have no afterlife, and a major speech with no afterlife might as well not have been given.

*   *   *

You would think Democratic professionals, who read the same numbers Republicans do and pick up similar trends, would be hanging their heads in despair.

They are not. They have hope. Their hope is that Republicans in the early caucus and primary states will go crazy. They hope the GOP will nominate for the presidency someone strange, extreme or barely qualified. They hope that in a mood of antic cultural pique, or in a great acting out of disdain for elites, or to annoy the mainstream media, Republican voters will raise high candidates who are unacceptable to everyone else. Everyone else of course being the great and vital center, which hires and fires presidents. The Democrats’ hope is that centrists will look at the Republican nominee and, holding their nose, choose the devil they know. Especially if the one they don’t know seems to have little horns under his hair.

Republicans voting in recent presidential primaries have tended to pick the candidates who are viewed as the moderate in the race—Bob Dole in 1996, George W. Bush in 2000, John McCain in 2008. But in truth, there are some pretty antic candidates out there this year.

The great question of the coming year is not, “Will Obama reignite his base?” or, “Will the Democrats outraise and outspend the GOP?” It is: Will the GOP be serious? Will Republicans be equal to their history, their tradition and the moment? If they are—if they recruit and support candidates who can speak to the entire country, who have serious experience and accomplishments, who are grounded and credible, then they will win centrist support. And with it they will likely win the thing without which they cannot achieve the big changes they seek, and that is the presidency.

Thick histories may well be written about how President Obama—a Democrat from the leftward wing of his party, a use-of-force skeptic who campaigned against Iraq as a war of choice—came to involve the U.S. in a third Mideastern war. Much will be made of the regrets of a generation of party leaders that the U.S. did not move in 1994 in Rwanda, but that nation’s experience raises as many questions as it answers.

Rwanda was a real and actual genocide in which, in the Human Rights Watch estimate, 800,000 people were killed. Some say it was a million. Libya, in contrast, was a civil war with a dictator only threatening brutality toward his myriad foes. And a great nation’s foreign policy can’t be built on regrets, it can’t be built only on emotion, it has to be more steely-eyed than that, more responsive to immediate and long-term strategic needs.

Three weeks in, Libya seems sunk in stalemate. Der Spiegel reports the country continues to be split between government troops and rebels, the “seemingly rudderless attacking and fleeing” of the latter “causing the Western allies to despair.” Last week, NATO bombs killed 13 rebels by mistake. This week, the Washington Post reports, air strikes hit rebel forces near Ajdabiya, though it’s unclear whether the strikes were the work of NATO or the Gadhafi government, whose warplanes aren’t supposed to be able to fly in the no-fly zone. Al-Jazeera notes that “territory keeps changing hands,” casualties continue, and civilians are packing their bags. The Christian Science Monitor reports Libyans fleeing the war are contributing to an “immigrant crisis” in Italy. And the price of crude oil Thursday hit $110 a barrel for the first time in two and a half years.

What a mess. And the White House, immersed in the daily drama of the budget crisis, doesn’t look particularly beset. They look grateful for the change of subject.

But let’s stay on the subject.

It’s still worthwhile to consider some of the dynamics surrounding the U.S. decision. The influence of the media is one—a million microphones clamoring for action will tend to force action. The administration no doubt feared grim pictures from Benghazi and the damage those pictures could do to the president’s reputation and standing.

Another dynamic, I suspect, is a change in presidential leadership style the past few decades, toward a bias for dramatic or physical action, toward the seemingly bold move.

The other night I was with an old Reagan hand who noted that Ronald Reagan broke ground by speaking truth to and about the Soviets, by holding up his hand and saying “Stop,” by taking tough diplomatic actions, by working closely with the Soviets’ great foes, Pope John Paul II and Margaret Thatcher. But he didn’t break ground by literally breaking ground! He didn’t invade Eastern Europe. He was judicious about the use of military might.

Now “energy in the executive” is supposed by many to involve or include a quickness to consider military options or answers, accompanied by an assumption that American military power is endless.

But of course it’s not endless, and must be well-tended, and you’re not tending it when you’re spending it, which is what armed conflict is, a spending of power and resources.

We could use, in both parties and among all our foreign-affairs thinkers, a new or renewed respect for an old leadership style, one that involves prudential restraint.

Political operatives are sort of embarrassed by caution and judiciousness now, as if they are an indicator of weakness (the Democrats’ traditional worry) or a lack of idealism and compassion (the Republicans’ worry.) But carefulness in a leader is a beautiful thing. That is the message of “Eisenhower 1956,” David A. Nichols’s history of how Ike, the old hero of World War II, resisted great pressure to commit U.S. forces in the Suez Crisis and, later, the rebellion in Hungary. The whole book is a celebration of restraint. “Eisenhower the military man was not militaristic,” writes Mr. Nichols. “He did not think that there were military solutions to many problems.” He was happy to use his personal “military credibility” in deterring the Soviets but viewed war with them “as a last, not a first resort” and often talked about disarmament.

Eisenhower was no isolationist—James Reston noted in the New York Times that in his first inaugural, 41 of the 48 paragraphs were devoted to foreign affairs. But he knew how to read the lay of the land, the needs of the moment, and he could not see why America (despite the pleas of his old comrades in arms in Britain and France) should join them, and spend its blood or treasure in an attempted invasion of Egypt. In his memoir, he wrote: “I believed that it would be undesirable and impracticable for the British to retain sizable forces permanently in the territory of a jealous and resentful government amid an openly hostile population.”

Eisenhower’s actions in 1956 have never received the attention they deserve. In America, applause for the moderate will be moderate, approval for the restrained will be restrained. But Ike was at his greatest when he wasn’t waging war.

Two closing thoughts on the modern impulse toward U.S. international activism. The past 10 years, as a nation, we have lost sight to some degree of the idea of Beaconism—that it is our role, job and even delight to be an example of freedom, a symbol of it, a beacon, but not necessarily a bringer of it or an insister on it for others. Two long, messy, unending wars suggest this change in attitude has not worked so well. Maybe we could discuss this in the coming presidential campaign.

And this, too. Visiting Afghanistan last month, I saw the flood of money, the gushing pipeline of dollars, we are spending to win the love and support, and foster the peaceableness, of the people of Afghanistan. I was told of and saw pictures of the newly opened health-care centers and schools. I’d think: “This is very nice, very kind, but Camden, N.J., could use a clinic. Camden could use a new school.” We have such budget problems, a brutalizing tax system, an incoherent American culture. Don’t these things need our attention?

And when I returned, I didn’t think of seminars, debates and extracts in foreign-policy magazines. I thought of Charles Dickens. Of Mrs. Jellyby from “Bleak House,” that little tornado of conceit and self-righteousness who set herself to rehabilitating the world as she neglected her own family. Mrs. Jellyby “devoted herself to an extensive variety of public subjects, at various times, and is at present (until something else attracts her) devoted to the subject of Africa,” the narrator tells us.

One of her children has his head caught between metal railings. “I made my way to the poor child, who was one of the dirtiest little unfortunates I ever saw, and found him very hot and frightened and crying loudly.” Another of Mrs. Jellyby’s children fell down a flight of stairs and had no one to tend to or comfort him. But Mrs. Jellyby barely noticed and wasn’t disturbed. Her eyes seemed to look “a long way off,” as if “they could see nothing but Africa!”

Is there something of Mrs. Jellyby in our foreign policy?

I want to step back from the controversy over Libya and take a look at one definition of what foreign policy is, or rather what its broader purposes might be. Then I want to make a small point.

The other day I came across an extract from a debate that took place in the British House of Commons in July 1864. Benjamin Disraeli, the future prime minister, was arguing that the government’s policy in Germany and Denmark was a failure and deserved Parliament’s formal censure. In damning Westminster’s mismanagement, he drew a pretty good, broad-strokes picture of what a great nation’s foreign policy might look like.

First the damning. “Do you see,” Disraeli asks, “the kind of capacity that is adequate to the occasion? Do you find . . . that sagacity, that prudence, that dexterity, that quickness of perception” and that mood of “conciliation” are necessary in the transaction of foreign affairs? No, he suggests, you do not. All these characteristics have been “wanting,” and because they are wanting, three results have accrued: The policy of Her Majesty’s government has failed, England’s “influence in the councils of Europe has been lowered,” and that waning of influence has left the prospects for peace diminished.

He stops to define terms: Regarding influence, “I mean an influence that results from the conviction of foreign Powers that our resources are great and that our policy is moderate and steadfast.” He seeks the return of a conservative approach. “I do not mean by a Conservative foreign policy a foreign policy that would disapprove, still less oppose, the natural development of nations. I mean a foreign policy interested in the tranquility and prosperity of the world,” one condition of which is peace. England should be “a moderating and mediatorial Power.” Its interest, when changes in the world are inevitable and necessary, is to assist so that the changes “if possible, may be accomplished without war; or, if war occurs, that its duration and asperity be lessened.”

Disraeli’s censure motion would narrowly fail and in the end not matter much. But there’s something satisfying and refreshing in his clear assertion of basic principles, of beginning points for thinking about foreign policy. A nation, to have influence, must be understood by all to be both very strong and very sober. Prosperity and tranquility are legitimate goals, peace a necessary condition. And there’s a paradox as great nations move forward in the world: In order to have a dramatically good influence, you must have a known bias toward the nondramatic, toward the merely prudent and wise. A known bias, that is, toward peaceableness. And here is my small point.

All this speaks to something I think we have lost the past 10 years—the generally understood sense in the world that the U.S. has a known bias toward the moderate and peaceable. I don’t here argue or debate the many reasons, the history, or the series of actions that have brought this about, only to note: It was a lot to lose! I think we want to get it back, or try to re-establish a good portion of it. Because there is great benefit in seeming to be a big strong nation that is unroiled, unruffled and unbattered by the constant high seas of the world. Passivity isn’t an option, and what’s called isolationism is an impossibility—we live in the world—but we are too much taken by the idea of dramatic action. We’ve become almost addicted to it, or that our presidents have.

*   *   *

There are always many facts and dynamics that prompt modern leaders toward dramatic and immediate action as opposed to reflection, serious debate, and the long slog of diplomatic effort. But are we fully appreciating that our media, now, seem to force the hand of every leader and require them to decide, move and push forward?

The bias of the media is for action, passion and pictures. It is television producers and website runners who are the greatest lovers of “kinetic” events. They need to fill time. They need conflict and drama. At CBS News years ago there was a producer who called the film, as it then was, of a military or street battle “the bang-bang.” The bang-bang was good for a piece. In a good minute-30 report there would be the stand-up opening by the correspondent, the statement of the besieged ruler or the aggrieved rebel, the map with arrows, the bang-bang, and then the closing summation. It was good TV! It is still good TV, and there is more TV than ever.

Every president has to know now that if there is fighting somewhere in the world, if there is suffering somewhere in the world, and the U.S. does not become involved, the scandal of that lack of involvement will become an endless segment on an endless television show full of endless questions. Why the inaction? Why are we doing nothing?

It should be noted that we are fighting now in Libya not because of mass slaughter but because of the threat of mass slaughter. Let’s say what the president’s supporters can’t say and his opponents won’t say: If the slaughter had happened, those pictures would have been very bad politically for the president.

Our foreign policy is increasingly driven by the needs of television programmers. I think I’ll repeat that: Our foreign policy is more and more being dictated by the people who do the rundowns for TV news shows.

A president who “does nothing” in the face of trouble, who does not respond to the constant agitation of dramatic videotape on television and the Internet, is called weak. He is called cowardly, dithering, unworthy. He is called Jimmy Carter.

So he and his administration feel forced to share the media’s bias toward action. No longer are leaders allowed to think what previous generations of political leaders knew, or learned: that when 10 problems are walking toward you on the street, you don’t have to rush forward to confront them. It’s wiser to wait because, life being messy and unpredictable, half the problems will fall in a ditch or lose their strength before they get to you. The trick is to handle with dispatch ones that do reach you. The talent is in guessing which ones they might be.

I know that this particular challenge to foreign policy sobriety is not new and is in fact at least 30 years old. But with the proliferation of media and technology, it is getting more intense. It will never lessen now. It will only build.

There ought to be a word for something we know that is so much a part of our lives that we forget to know it, we forget to see it, and yet it has a profound impact on the world we live in. We forget to fully factor it in, or we do factor it in but don’t notice it is a primary factor.

Every leader now must know the dynamic and be an active bulwark against it. He will have to discuss why we cannot allow our nervous, agitating media to demand our involvement in every fight.

A president has to provide all the pushback. Republicans should keep that in mind, too. They’ll have the White House soon enough. Some of their decisions will be at the mercy of television programmers too.

It all seems rather mad, doesn’t it? The decision to become involved militarily in the Libyan civil war couldn’t take place within a less hospitable context. The U.S. is reeling from spending and deficits, we’re already in two wars, our military has been stretched to the limit, we’re restive at home, and no one, really, sees President Obama as the kind of leader you’d follow over the top. “This way, men!” “No, I think I’ll stay in my trench.” People didn’t hire him to start battles but to end them. They didn’t expect him to open new fronts. Did he not know this?

He has no happy experience as a rallier of public opinion and a leader of great endeavors; the central initiative of his presidency, the one that gave shape to his leadership, health care, is still unpopular and the cause of continued agitation. When he devoted his entire first year to it, he seemed off point and out of touch.

This was followed by the BP oil spill, which made him look snakebit. Now he seems incompetent and out of his depth in foreign and military affairs. He is more observed than followed, or perhaps I should say you follow him with your eyes and not your heart. So it’s funny he’d feel free to launch and lead a war, which is what this confused and uncertain military action may become.

What was he thinking? What is he thinking?

Which gets me to Mr. Obama’s speech, the one he hasn’t given. I cannot for the life of me see how an American president can launch a serious military action without a full and formal national address in which he explains to the American people why he is doing what he is doing, why it is right, and why it is very much in the national interest. He referred to his aims in parts of speeches and appearances when he was in South America, but now he’s home. More is needed, more is warranted, and more is deserved. He has to sit at that big desk and explain his thinking, put forward the facts as he sees them, and try to garner public support. He has to make a case for his own actions. It’s what presidents do! And this is particularly important now, because there are reasons to fear the current involvement will either escalate and produce a lengthy conflict or collapse and produce humiliation.

Without a formal and extended statement, the air of weirdness, uncertainty and confusion that surrounds this endeavor will only deepen.

The questions that must be answered actually start with the essentials. What, exactly, are we doing? Why are we doing it? At what point, or after what arguments, did the president decide U.S. military involvement was warranted? Is our objective practical and doable? What is America’s overriding strategic interest? In what way are the actions taken, and to be taken, seeing to those interests?

Matthew Kaminski of the editorial board explains America’s role in the Libyan campaign.

From those questions flow many others. We know who we’re against—Moammar Gadhafi, a bad man who’s done very wicked things. But do we know who we’re for? That is, what does the U.S. government know or think it knows about the composition and motives of the rebel forces we’re attempting to assist? For 42 years, Gadhafi controlled his nation’s tribes, sects and groups through brute force, bribes and blandishments. What will happen when they are no longer kept down? What will happen when they are no longer oppressed? What will they become, and what role will they play in the coming drama? Will their rebellion against Gadhafi degenerate into a dozen separate battles over oil, power and local dominance?

What happens if Gadhafi hangs on? The president has said he wants U.S. involvement to be brief. But what if Gadhafi is fighting on three months from now?

On the other hand, what happens if Gadhafi falls, if he’s deposed in a palace coup or military coup, or is killed, or flees? What exactly do we imagine will take his place?

Supporters of U.S. intervention have argued that if we mean to protect Libya’s civilians, as we have declared, then we must force regime change. But in order to remove Gadhafi, they add, we will need to do many other things. We will need to provide close-in air power. We will probably have to put in special forces teams to work with the rebels, who are largely untrained and ragtag. The Libyan army has tanks and brigades and heavy weapons. The U.S. and the allies will have to provide the rebels training and give them support. They will need antitank missiles and help in coordinating air strikes.

Once Gadhafi is gone, will there be a need for an international peacekeeping force to stabilize the country, to provide a peaceful transition, and to help the post-Gadhafi government restore its infrastructure? Will there be a partition? Will Libyan territory be altered?

None of this sounds like limited and discrete action.

In fact, this may turn out to be true: If Gadhafi survives, the crisis will go on and on. If Gadhafi falls, the crisis will go on and on.

Everyone who supports the Libyan endeavor says they don’t want an occupation. One said the other day, “We’re not looking for a protracted occupation.”

Protracted?

Mr. Obama has apparently set great store in the fact that he was not acting alone, that Britain, France and Italy were eager to move. That’s good—better to work with friends and act in concert. But it doesn’t guarantee anything. A multilateral mistake is still a mistake. So far the allied effort has not been marked by good coordination and communication. If the conflict in Libya drags on, won’t there tend to be more fissures, more tension, less commitment and more confusion as to objectives and command structures? Could the unanticipated results of the Libya action include new strains, even a new estrangement, among the allies?

How might Gadhafi hit out, in revenge, in his presumed last days, against America and the West?

And what, finally, about Congress? Putting aside the past half-century’s argument about declarations of war, doesn’t Congress, as representative of the people, have the obvious authority and responsibility to support the Libyan endeavor, or not, and to authorize funds, or not?

These are all big questions, and there are many other obvious ones. If the Libya endeavor is motivated solely by humanitarian concerns, then why haven’t we acted on those concerns recently in other suffering nations? It’s a rough old world out there, and there’s a lot of suffering. What is our thinking going forward? What are the new rules of the road, if there are new rules? Were we, in Libya, making a preemptive strike against extraordinary suffering—suffering beyond what is inevitable in a civil war?

America has been through a difficult 10 years, and the burden of proof on the need for U.S. action would be with those who supported intervention. Chief among them, of course, is the president, who made the decision as commander in chief. He needs to sit down and tell the American people how this thing can possibly turn out well. He needs to tell them why it isn’t mad.

The biggest takeaway, the biggest foreign-policy fact, of the past decade is this: America has to be very careful where it goes in the world, because the minute it’s there—the minute there are boots on the ground, the minute we leave a footprint—there will spring up, immediately, 15 reasons America cannot leave. The next day there will be 30 reasons, and the day after that 45. They are often serious and legitimate reasons.

So we wind up in long, drawn-out struggles when we didn’t mean to, when it wasn’t the plan, or the hope, or the expectation.

We have to keep this phenomenon in mind as we chart our path in the future. It’s easy to start a war but hard to end one. It’s as simple as that. It’s easy to get in but hard to get out. Even today, in Baghdad, you hear that America can’t leave Iraq because the government isn’t sturdy enough, the army and police aren’t strong enough to withstand the winds that will follow America’s full departure, that all that has been achieved—a fragile, incomplete, relative peace—will be lost. America cannot leave because Iraq will be vulnerable to civil war, not between Sunnis and Shiites, they tell you now, but between Arabs and Kurds, in the north, near the oil fields.

America is scheduled to leave Iraq this December, of course, but everyone seems to be waiting for Nouri al-Maliki’s government to request an extension. (A longtime observer told me he thought Prime Minister Maliki would not ask, in part because he assumes that if he gets in trouble the U.S. will come back.) Meanwhile, another observer told me, the December hand-off from the U.S. to the Iraqi government will actually be more like a hand-off from the Defense Department to the State Department, with the part of U.S. security forces played by contractors from Uganda.

In Afghanistan, America cannot leave because it is the 9/11 place, the place that helped 9/11 to happen. America cannot leave because, as the iconic Time cover had it, the Taliban will cut off women’s noses and brutalize them in other ways. America cannot leave because al Qaeda will return, fill the vacuum left by our departure, and create a new terror state. America cannot leave because of turbulent, dangerous Pakistan. America cannot leave because from the day we arrived, we invested blood and treasure, and it cannot have been in vain. America can never leave because American troops always bring their kindness and constructiveness with them, and their rule of law. Innocent people will be defenseless without them.

There are always a million facts and forces arrayed against the idea of America leaving. So America has to watch where it goes.

In the troubled future we are entering, America must be prudent as never before, know and respect its own interests and limits as never before. It must be careful of the lives of its soldiers. It must be careful, even, of its purse, which is something we haven’t always worried about, but must now, and not only because of the crash and the deficits. What if what just happened in Japan had happened on the San Andreas fault? What if it were a broken American nuclear reactor? You have to keep some wealth and force in reserve, you can’t just assume you’ll always be lucky.

These are the thoughts I brought back from a trip to Iraq and Afghanistan. I left with the sound of Defense Secretary Robert Gates’s speech at West Point ringing in my ears. The time for big counterinsurgency efforts such as those in Iraq and Afghanistan, he suggested, has passed: “In my opinion, any future defense secretary who advises the president to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should ‘have his head examined,’ as Gen. McCarthy so delicately put it.”

Who could argue? No one I spoke to in Iraq or Afghanistan protested Mr. Gates’s remarks. They are attempting to do their jobs through the end stages of both conflicts. In Afghanistan especially, the professionalism of the U.S. troops—we were at Bagram and Kandahar, at forward operating bases; they flew us at night in the dark in C-130s—is more than impressive, it is moving. They are well-trained, well-educated, skillful, and they would die for you.

Two points worth noting: You are aware in Kabul and elsewhere that the war is the work of a coalition, that the Brits are there and the French, and they fight. Everyone seems to have admired the Aussies; there is sympathy for the Poles, who were treated particularly badly by Afghans because their uniforms and faces reminded them of the Russians. And the logistical challenge of the surge—the scale, scope and speed of the movement of men and matériel—has the look of a small managerial masterpiece.

But in terms of a fully believable long-term strategy, the U.S. seems to be scrambling to find a thread that was lost somewhere between 2003 and 2009. We are nation-building in a nation that shows little sign of wanting us to build it. The military surge has been accompanied by a “civilian surge”—representatives of State, U.S. Agency for International Development and provincial reconstruction teams—that the Army, in an Orwellian locution, has taken to calling “The Uplift,” in hope you will too.

*   *   *

What is ahead for all of the troops is a hard time that those on the ground say they believe will be decisive. Gen. David Petraeus referred to it this week in congressional testimony, but officers in briefings mentioned it every day: With winter over and the fields, including the poppy fields, harvested, the Taliban are about to launch a new offensive. They mean to answer the American surge with a “spectacular” surge of their own—suicide bombings, assassinations, IEDs, attempts to take back cities such as Kandahar. The American strategy is to beat them back and, in the process, break the back of the insurgency, forcing the Taliban to the bargaining table to take part in a negotiated political settlement. No one can explain exactly how this would happen, or what the elements of such a settlement might be.

The same people who tell you a settlement is the only way out, that the war will be resolved not militarily but politically, tend also to mention, later in the conversation, that the rising generation of the Taliban, the new ones coming up, are believed to be more radical and extreme than those who came to power in the 1990s and were sent packing, for a while, in 2001-02. So we’re hoping people who are even more extreme than the earlier Taliban will ask for a negotiated peace?

Meanwhile, support for the war among the American people is falling. The Washington Post this week had a poll saying two-thirds no longer think the war is worth it. Intensified fighting and higher casualties this spring and summer will likely further erode U.S. support.

America has now been in Afghanistan longer than the Soviet Union was; we mark the 10th anniversary of our presence in October. The surge is on, and we’ll know more in six months. But I’m thinking of a Pashtun taunt sometimes thrown at Americans: “You have the watches, but we have the time.”

I like Donald Rumsfeld. I’ve always thought he was a hard-working, intelligent man. I respected his life in public service at the highest and most demanding levels. So it was with some surprise that I found myself flinging his book against a wall in hopes I would break its stupid little spine.

“Known and Unknown,” his memoir of his tumultuous time in government, is so bad it’s news even a month after its debut. It takes a long time to read because there are a lot of words, most of them boring. At first I thought this an unfortunate flaw, but I came to see it as strategy. He’s going to overwhelm you with wordage, with dates and supposed data, he’s going to bore you into submission, and at the end you’re going to throw up your hands and shout, “I know Iraq and Afghanistan were not Don Rumsfeld’s fault! I know this because I’ve now read his memos, which explain at great length why nothing is his fault.”

Fault of course isn’t the point. You’d expect such a book (all right—you’d hope) to be reflective, to be self-questioning and questioning of others, and to grapple with the ruin of U.S. foreign policy circa 2001-08. He was secretary of defense until 2006, in the innermost councils. He heard all the conversations. He was in on the decisions. You’d expect him to explain the overall, overarching strategic thinking that guided them. Since some of those decisions are in the process of turning out badly, and since he obviously loves his country, you’d expect him to critique and correct certain mindsets and assumptions so that later generations will learn. When he doesn’t do this, when he merely asserts, defends and quotes his memos, you feel overwhelmed, again, by the terrible thought that there was no overall, overarching strategic thinking. There were only second-rate minds busily, consequentially at work

Second-rateness marks the book, which is an extended effort at blame deflection. Mr. Rumsfeld didn’t ignore the generals, he listened to them too much. Not enough troops in Iraq? That would be Gen. Tommy Franks. Turkey’s refusal to allow U.S. troop movements? Secretary of State Colin Powell. America’s failure to find weapons of mass destruction? “Obviously the focus on WMD to the exclusion of almost all else was a public relations error.” Yes, I’d say so. He warned early on in a memo he quotes that the administration was putting too much emphasis on WMD. But put it in context: “Recent history is abundant with examples of flawed intelligence that have affected key national security decisions and contingency planning.”

A word on the use of memos in memoirs. Everyone in government now knows his memos can serve, years later, to illustrate his farsightedness and defend against charges of blindness, indifference, stupidity. So people in government send a lot of memos! “Memo to self: I’m deeply worried about Mideast crisis. Let’s solve West Bank problem immediately.” “Memo to Steve: I’m concerned about China. I’d like you to make sure it becomes democratic. Please move on this soonest, before lunch if you can.” A man in the Bush administration once told me of a guy who used to change the name on memos when they turned out to be smart. He’d make himself the sender so that when future scholars pored over the presidential library, they’d discover what a genius he was.

Most memos prove nothing. It is disturbing that so many Bush-era memoirs rely so heavily on them.

But the terrible thing about the Rumsfeld book, and there is no polite way to say this, is the half-baked nature of the thinking within it. The quality of analysis and understanding of history is so mediocre, so insufficient to the moment.

Which gets me to the point at which I tried to break the book’s spine.

If you asked most Americans why we went into Afghanistan in the weeks after 9/11, they would answer, with perfect common sense, that it was to get the bad guys—to find or kill Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda followers, to topple the Taliban government that had given them aid and support, to destroy terrorist networks and operations. New York at the time of the invasion, October 2001, was still, literally, smoking; the whole town still carried the acrid smell of Ground Zero. The scenes of that day were still vivid and sharp. New York still isn’t over it and will never be over it, but what happened on 9/11 was fresh, and we wanted who did it to get caught.

America wanted—needed—to see U.S. troops pull Osama out of his cave by his beard and drag him in his urine-soaked robes into an American courtroom. Or, less good but still good, to find him, kill him, put his head in a Tiffany box with a bow, and hand-carry it to the president of the United States.

It wasn’t lust for vengeance, it was lust for justice, and for more than justice. Getting Osama would have shown the world what happens when you do a thing like 9/11 to a nation like America. It would have shown al Qaeda and their would-be camp followers what kind of unstoppable ferocity they were up against. It would have reminded the world that we are one great people with one terrible swift sword.

The failure to find bin Laden was a seminal moment in the history of the war in Afghanistan. And it was a catastrophe. From that moment—the moment he escaped his apparent hideout in Tora Bora and went on to make his sneering speeches and send them out to the world—from that moment everything about the Afghanistan war became unclear, unfocused, murky and confused. The administration in Washington, emboldened by what it called its victory over the Taliban, decided to move on Iraq. Its focus shifted, it took its eye off the ball, and Afghanistan is now what it is.

You’d think, nearly a decade after the events of Tora Bora, that Mr. Rumsfeld would understand the extent of the error and the breadth of its implications. He does not. Needless to say, Tora Bora was the fault of someone else—Gen. Franks of course, and CIA Director George Tenet. “Franks had to determine whether attempting to apprehend one man on the run” was “worth the risks.” Needless to say “there were numerous operational details.” And of course, in a typical Rumsfeldian touch, he says he later learned CIA operatives on the ground had asked for help, but “I never received such a request from either Franks or Tenet and cannot imagine denying it if I had.” I can.

Osama bin Laden was not “one man on the run.” He is the man who did 9/11. He had just killed almost 3,000 people at the World Trade Center, at the Pentagon, in a field in Pennsylvania. He’s the reason people held hands and jumped off the buildings. He’s the reason the towers groaned to the ground.

It is the great scandal of the wars of the Bush era that the U.S. government failed to get him and bring him to justice. It is the shame of this book that Don Rumsfeld lacks the brains to see it, or the guts to admit it.