War is not a time of joy. These aren’t joyous times. These are challenging times, and they’re difficult times, and they’re straining the psyche of our country. I understand that. You know, nobody likes to see innocent people die. Nobody wants to turn on their TV on a daily basis and see havoc wrought by terrorists. And our question is, do we have the capacity and the desire to spread peace by confronting these terrorists, and sup porting those who want to live in liberty? That’s the question. And my answer to that question is, we must. We owe it to future generations to do so.… I’m going to do what I think is right, and if people don’t like me for it, that’s just the way it is.

President Bush was his steady self yesterday in an hour-long Washington press conference, not yielding on the substance while acknowledging that the American “psyche” has been strained by the war. It’s a difficult straddle for a president to make. He doesn’t want to encourage the terrorists by acknowledging publicly that they are rattling the American people. But he doesn’t want to seem isolated from or out of touch with the American people, some of whom are rattled.

The best way for Mr. Bush to end the strain on the “psyche of our country” would be to win some victories in the war. Our own sense is that Americans, without hungering for a wider war, nonetheless prefer winning to the alternative, and understand a victory is not going to be won by relying on 200 French troops waiting around Lebanon in the hopes that Hezbollah will, as Secretary Rice put it, “voluntarily” disarm. Nor will it be won by relying on the U.N. Security Council, i.e., Russia and China, to deal with the terror-sponsors in Iran and their ambitions for nuclear weapons. We had a presidential election over all this back in 2004 and voters went with the candidate of pre-emption over the candidate of French-style U.N. multilateralism.

The president has stressed, wisely, that this will be a long war. No one wants it to be any longer than it has to be. We are optimistic that America and its allies, including among freedom-loving Muslims, will eventually prevail, but it is not a sure thing. And if the American psyche is strained, it will have an opportunity come 2008 — sooner than it may seem — to select for itself a new wartime leader. We will be lucky to find one as steady and confident as the present president.