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GEORGE W. BUSH has been racing around the globe, as many presidents do during the last two years of their terms, trying his best to keep the ship of state afloat. However, almost every day, or at least every week, he seems to face a new crisis in Europe, Latin America, North Korea, Iraq, Iran, or Washington, D.C. The President certainly has grown in his job and is to be commended for his ability to jump from crisis to crisis, with an appropriate speech in hand, and to give the appearance of continued good health. Perhaps part of Bush's secret is being singleminded, some might even say stubborn, in defending what he believes is the basic winning theme of his presidency: keeping the U.S. safe from terrorists.

The President uses what he hopes is a conclusive argument when any citizen or, particularly, member of Congress, raises the question, "When are the troops coming home from Iraq?" Bush says that if we do not fight the terrorists in Iraq and instead pull out our troops in a cut-and-run fashion, the terrorists will follow us home and we will have to fight them on Main Street. Like most political arguments, this one partially is true, but hardly conclusive. Terrorists without doubt can penetrate our defenses and blow themselves up after they reach our homeland. While our defenders can stop most terrorists, they cannot stop them all, especially those who believe that they immediately will go to heaven if they martyr themselves.

In any war, it is hard to predict all outcomes. Our armed forces must do their best, however, to anticipate and prepare for any threats to the nation--and certainly, the first and most important duty of the commander in chief is to protect the homeland and to preserve our democratic way of life. Bush is doing his best to carry out this mandate, but appears to be sliding off the track laid out by his overseers, the American electorate. Bush has seen his approval rating plummet from extreme highs at the time U.S. troops captured Baghdad to unprecedented lows as the country finds itself bogged down in a civil war between the Sunnis and Shiites of Iraq. The principal difference between the two sects is that the Sunnis believe that the successor to Muhammed, who died in the year 632, should be elected (perhaps democratically), while the Shiites insist that the successor must be a direct descendent of Muhammad. There is no way the U.S. can win a civil war in Iraq. Saddam Hussein kept warring tribes under control by vicious tactics using his political parties (the Bathists) as spies and then rounding up the dissidents and shooting or gassing them.

Bush was convinced he could handle the problem a different way. His troops had failed to find weapons of mass destruction, his original justification for the U.S. invasion. In May 2003, in a grand gesture, the President flew to the USS Lincoln, an aircraft cartier steaming off the coast of San Diego and, with a huge banner in the background emblazoned with the words "Mission Accomplished," Bush declared that the heavy fighting was over. However, he did not count on the insurgents rearming themselves with the help of Syria, Iran, and others. The Iraqi war has claimed more than 3,500 lives, while over 24,000 others have been wounded. The war is in its fourth year, and the electorate has had enough. A majority believe it was a bad idea to initiate this conflict and that the U.S. should bring the troops home.

With the weapons of mass destruction argument for the war disappearing, and the electorate becoming impatient, Bush tried to create a new justification: forging democracy in the Middle East. In his second inaugural address, the President laid out his world vision for the next four years. War still was raging in Iraq and the first of a series of elections was scheduled there 10 days later. He spoke in sweeping terms: "The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world.... Every man and woman on this Earth has fights, and dignity and matchless value, because they bear the image of the Maker.... We have proclaimed the imperative of self-government because no one is fit to be a master and no one deserves to be a slave. Advancing these ideals ... is the urgent requirement of our nation's security, and the calling of our time.... So, it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world."

As expected, the U.S.'s drive to plant democracy firmly in the Middle East, beginning with the Iraqi elections, ran into fierce opposition from the terrorists. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the since-assassinated Jordanian born Al Qaeda chief in Iraq, declared war on democracy in an audio recording posted on the Internet Jan. 23, 2005. He stated: We have declared a fierce war on this evil principle of democracy and those who follow this wrong ideology. Al-Zarqawi railed against democracy for supplanting the rule of God with the rule of man and the majority, and that this was based on un-Islamic beliefs such as freedom of expression and separation of church and state. If Al-Zarqawi's statement of Muslim belief is accurate, the U.S. is faced with a wide gulf of Muslim disbelief when it tries to sell democracy in the Middle East.