For those who grew up politically as conservatives, the invocation of "leadership" brought on skepticism. We remembered, with suspicion, calls on FDR to exercise leadership by, in effect, commandeering the U.S. economy and devising a behind-the-scenes campaign to involve us in a world war.
Retrospectively, we can be grateful for some of what he did, yet wary of the lengths to which submission to leadership can take us. Many grew up watching the "Fuhrerprinzip" -- the unquestionable authority of Adolf Hitler -- take over a country. By the time Hitler was dead from suicide, 50 million other people were also dead, and not by their own hand.
Yet there has seldom been a time when leadership was more greatly needed than it is now. President Bush is the only man critically situated to draw the attention of the voters to the implications of the Shiite offensive in Iraq. The headlines have featured very ugly developments. It began with the ambush and killing of four American security consultants in Fallujah, the mutilation of their corpses, and the exhibition of two of them, hanging from a neighboring bridge. That was followed by exquisite equivocations from the area's imams. They deplored the mutilation, but not the killing. Make certain, they in effect advised their flock, to kill American soldiers completely. Make sure they are good and dead before you drag them through the streets.
Then came the deaths in Sadr City, and the virtual takeover of Kufa, where the challenge becomes legendary. This is OK Corral time with very big stakes. The young Shiite cleric Muqtada al Sadr is entombed in that huge mosque in Kufa with its golden walls and what seems a small army resolved to defend him to the death. And Sadr has said that he welcomes death, as an alternative to tolerating one day more of American occupation of his country.
The U.S. military are in a profound quandary here. Sadr cannot be uprooted without simultaneously immobilizing perhaps a thousand bodyguards -- and igniting Shiite loyalists to destructive rage against our coalition.