With 2,000 American soldiers dead in Iraq, the nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court getting mixed reviews, and the special counsel in the Valerie Plame leak case, Patrick Fitzgerald, turning up the heat on the White House, President Bush is reportedly frustrated. No wonder. He’s turned a sweeping popular vote mandate in the 2004 election into a sagging approval rating. Those of his aides who aren’t petrified of being indicted are moping around the White House.

Part of the problem is the fact that a special prosecutor has been appointed in the Plame case. In a July 23, 2004, editorial, “The Boldness of the President,” we cited Justice Scalia’s dissent in Morrison v. Olson,* the case in which the Supreme Court upheld the idea of an independent prosecutor. Justice Scalia warned of the danger that unleashing an unaccountable prosecutor against a president could shake his courage. “Perhaps the boldness of the President himself will not be affected – though I am not so sure,” The Great Scalia warned.

At the time we were speaking of how the Whitewater special prosecutor, Kenneth Starr, had stripped the boldness from President Clinton.The report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States recounted how much Mr. Clinton ended up delegating to a subordinate, Samuel Berger, who four separate times flinched instead of ordering an attack on Osama bin Laden.

Now, though, it appears that it is Mr. Bush whose boldness is being sapped. He flinched from the fight with the Senate that would have come by picking a Supreme Court nominee in the mold of Justice Scalia or Clarence Thomas – a nominee with a clear constitutional conservative paper trail – and chose instead to pick Ms. Miers. She deserves a fair hearing, but choosing her looked like an effort to avoid a fight.

The same can be said of Mr. Bush’s handling of Iran and Syria, two fronts important to achieving success in Iraq. He has talked tough, as he did earlier this month in his speech to the National Endowment for Democracy, naming them as “guilty of murder” and enemies of civilization, remarks he reiterated yesterday. But rather than American military strikes at regime linked targets in those countries or stepped-up public financial support and training for opponents to the regimes at Damascus and Tehran, Mr. Bush is taking a multilateral approach to these problems, working through the United Nations as if this were the Kerry administration.

One of the reasons that we and, no doubt, so many other Americans are such fans of the president is his courage. He displayed it in launching the Iraq war, in making his cuts in taxes on income and dividends and capital gains, and in seeking private accounts as part of Social Security. Others have offered Mr. Bush tactical suggestions for regaining his standing in the polls and overcoming the blahs. It seems to us that what the president needs to do is to reach down and find his boldness, beginning with a way to regain the offensive in the war on Islamic extremist terrorism.

* The “Olson” in the case is Theodore Olson, who would be a fine choice for Mr. Bush to name to a spot on the Supreme Court. He could be counted on to understand the threats to a president’s boldness.