From The Telegraph via Hot Air’s news links:
No one – least of all Bush himself – denies that mistakes were made in the early days after the (unexpectedly early) fall of Baghdad, and historians will quite rightly examine them. But once the decades have put the stirring events of those years into their proper historical context, four great facts will emerge that will place Bush in a far better light than he currently enjoys.
The overthrow and execution of a foul tyrant, Saddam Hussein; the liberation of the Afghan people from the Taliban; the smashing of the terrorist networks of al-Qa’eda in that country and elsewhere and, finally, the protection of the American people from any further atrocities on US soil since 9/11, is a legacy of which to be proud.
There are plenty of other observations and predictions that will madden the BDS afflicted, there, as is evident from the comments. About the only thing I really disagree with is the author’s characterization of TNR as an important political magazine.
The author was partly correct.
TNR = SELF-important political FICTION magazine.
If I hadn’t seen that exact same thing occur with Reagan I wouldn’t believe it. Back in the 80s Reagan was vilified in much the same way as GWB has been, mentally defective cowboy, war-mongering monkey, etc. etc. When he finally died I braced for impact, but the impact never came. Those on the left who didn’t express express respect feigned it, and those who didn’t feign it at least remained mostly silent, for a whole week. So it would appear that the left’s bad faith is more about temporal opportunism than anything else.
yours/
peter
you fucking idiot. Al Alquaeda is ascendan5. The one good news I heard is that many surrounding countries will release Iraqi artifacts which were stolen and smuglled..
which they demonstrate with their ever increasing attacks all over the world. oh wait…
Who the hell is “Al Alquaeda”?
Someone has been drinking again.
Cynn, you sound maddened.
– Um, cynn, think you might want to sort of recheck conditions in Iraq on that al Qaeda thing.
– Hell, its been almost a year since the torrent of video’s and Bin Laden tapes from him and his “cabinet” of murdering fuckheads used to arrive almost weekly.
– You must have missed the recent criticism heaped on him by several of the Arab Brotherhood leaders for being so stupid all hes been accomplishing is blowing up Arabs for the most part since 9/11.
– al Qaeda is in bad shape in a lot of ways, and in the coming year I expect as the Afghans get fed up with the remnants hitting and then running back across the Pakistan border, that last bastion of al Qaeda hidey holes is going to go up in smoke as well.
– Bin Laden is quickly becoming a pyryha with just about everyone. Hes down to where the only thing keeping him alive is the tribal protectionism thing, and that could disappear in a heart beat if Pakistan and the Afghans, with American support start blowing up things in the Northern Pakistan areas. When that happens, and I expect to see it start soon, they’ll ship him back in a pine box to the US COD.
Cynn spewed all over his keyboard and now the keys are all funky.
The thing that has struck me most about Bush has been his complete disregard for polls, memes and pop politics. He has by God done what he thought was truly right and truly needed doing and to hell with the Nielsen Ratings. Don’t know if history will notice that, but I have.
I noticed that once in office he never seemed to kvetch much in public about the bag of shit that Clinton left behind that he had to deal with. Pretty much the opposite behavior from his political opponents, who by contrast do nothing but kvetch about him.
Sdferr –
I think the six weeks beginning with the end of June are going to rewrite the “lame duck” chapter of a whole lot of PoliSci texts.
I thought that Bush was masterful in avoiding even the hint of blame hanging/fault finding in the aftermath of 9/11; he did in fact give the Democrats and media a chance to fight on the home team.
Alas, they chose otherwise. Starting about thirty seconds after they got their heads around the fact that Bush wasn’t going to indict Clinton’s administration when he so clearly held all the cards to do so. It was the Left that demanded the 9/11 commission; as soon as the roster was published it was clear that job one was to whitewash the failures of the nineties… and job two was to shove whatever would fit right up Bush’s ass… regardless of cost to the nation, or the effect on confronting/defeating Islamist terror. Which they refused to view outside of the legal arena anyway.
Just a few random thoughts, you understand.
I think it’s not how Bush will be remembered that pisses off the disloyal opposition, but rather how they will.
Feckless, petty, cowardly, and dishonest don’t, as a rule, mean stupid. It’s going to be a pretty weak defense, for sure.
BMoe, not only has he disregarded polls, he TOLD us what he was going to do, and did what he said. A politician, for Christ’s sake…
Yeah, I like President George Walker Bush, and I don’t care who knows it.
That doesn’t mean I think everything he has done is right, but I know he has done what he thinks was right. I admire the hell out of him for that.
I am constantly amazed by the willful ignorance of the moonbats.
And don’t DARE try to bring up a fact – ANY fact.
It once was Dan, before it Beauchamped its reputation on an altar of Glass.
let the conservative answer that neocon idiotic BS from “Telegraph”
Sticking It Out
Posted by Christopher Roach on June 22, 2008
Conservatives historically have taken pride in their hard-headedness. It is supposed to be a manly persuasion with a long view, rooted in concepts like deferred gratification, the proper appreciation of applied violence, skepticism of fads and fashions, and a dour view of human nature. In lean economic times, conservatives counsel austerity and sound money, even if this means very painful effects of liquidation. In foreign policy, conservatives emphasize the anarchic nature of international relations and the need for a strong defense. Hard-headeness, however, always runs the risk of pig-headedness. There is also a time hard-headedly to cease doing something that has proven to be a mistake.
Conservatives should remember that just because many anti-American liberals oppose something, doesn’t make it right. The Iraq War is wrong for reasons pacifists and unpatriotic globalists don’t appreciate. As army veteran Andrew Bacevich observes, “The costs to the United States of sustaining this dependency are difficult to calculate with precision, but figures such as $3 billion per week and 30 to 40 American lives per month provide a good approximation. What can we expect to gain in return for this investment? The Bush administration was counting on the Iraq War to demonstrate the viability of its Freedom Agenda and to affirm the efficacy of the Bush Doctrine of preventive war. Measured in those terms, the war has long since failed.â€Â
The absolute worst reason to stay in this war is for some emotional notion of national honor and commitment to the troops, impulses that undergird the very unstrategic thinking of John McCain and numerous buck sergeants. War opponents and war proponents are both stuck in the sane sentimental humanitarianism that justifies or criticizes war with Wilsonian rhetoric of liberation. Both forget that even in the most just wars, war is at best a necessary evil. We don’t go to war to do the conquered a favor. We don’t stay to avenge the deaths or our men like some armed camp of Zulus. A nation sends its military to war to accomplish foreign policy goals. This same nation can and should withdraw these troops when it’s in our interests to do so, when those goals are out of reach, no longer important, or too costly. It is not as if Iraq is sacred American soil with which our nation has any historical connection. This is a foreign land half way around the world in a very bad neighborhood, populated mostly by uncivilized people, whom we do not understand and who do not appreciate our attempts to impose American-style government upon them.
We will suffer (but not unbearably) if we spend $20 or $30 trillion and a few thousand American lives pursuing the goal of nation-building in Iraq over the next decade. But even if everything turns out for the best, this will accomplish a strategic benefit worth some fraction of that. And then what? We’ll still have al Qaeda to worry about. North Korea will still remain an unpredictable, nuclear power. Our borders will be too porous. Our ranks of third world immigrants will remain too numerous. The Middle East will still produce large numbers of pissed-off young men who receive moral support to vent their anger at the western world in the dictates of their religion. The deterrent value of staying or leaving Iraq is a wash. Iran knows we won’t easily commit to a similar campaign on its territory. Russia and China will still be ascendant in their spheres of influence. Oil will still be scarce and in the hands of unstable autocrats and their resentful subjects.
The modest strategic benefits promised in Iraq to the U.S. and the Iraqis are very unrealistic. Vast swaths of people all around the world will not appreciate Iraq as a model of good government. At best, it will end up as stable and prosperous as Pakistan or Indonesia. Instead of seeing idealistic U.S. sacrifices for democracy, most Arabs and Muslims will perceive a marginally successful U.S. bid for power. Most of the world’s peoples will continue to be more passionate about religion, nationalism, ideology, wealth, prosperity, and tribalism than democracy and the rule of law. Not only that, they’ll treat these tangible goods as far higher priorities than democracy.
A democratic Iraq will remain contested by sectarian parties, and, for this same reason, uncompromising religious fanatics will not accept deviation from the pure regime dictated by Islamic Sharia law. Democracy will be seen as a decadent insult. No traditions of loyal opposition and the peaceful transfer of power will develop in Iraq for these reasons. Worse, the U.S., instead of being seen merely as a self-interested or incompetent party in the Middle East, will be seen as the prime mover of politically-empowered heresy.
Instead of taking the wind out of the sails of Islamic fundamentalism, a “successful†Iraqi democracy will be an irritant to either the United States or Islam. To the United States, it will show that democracy is not the same as constitutionalism, and that the U.S. has brought to power a regime that has a democratic imprimatur for the worst abuses of its ethnic and religious minorities, including Iraqi Christians. If the laws somehow resemble our own, the Iraqi state will be unstable and contested, a heretical insult to Islam, which demands Sharia. It will prove–as Britain and Spain have proven to themselves–that Islam and western freedoms and the rule of law are incompatible. Either way, “success†in Iraq would lead to a mountain of lies and denial. If the facts were looked at fairly, liberalism itself would be discredited, and the associated principles of open borders and multiculturalism would be dragged down in the reckoning.
Populist conservatism has been enlisted to support “sticking it out†in Iraq as a testament that we are indefatigable and serious in the face of liberal weakness. But the ring-leaders of this fiasco have more self-interested reasons for stoking this sentiment: our elites themselves would be discredited in the process of any withdrawal from Iraq. For them, better a long-term U.S. presence in a simmering war than a palpable expose of their wrong-headedness in the disastrous, illiberal Iraqi state that would exist without U.S. supervision and control.
—————————————————————————–
Yes, Bush will be remembered as an asshole who squandered all the good, who caused damage and destruction which will not justify ever the stated for the masses noble goals .
And the asshole already feels that, why do you think he stated recently that he worries history will perceive him as a warmonger?
Yes, he is better then Mugabe, but worse the Truman or any other president of the USA
sashal’s BDS is having a virulent outbreak. Anybody have a lotion for that?
Oh, another one who believes that “the world’s” perceptions are more important than what is real. I’m sorry, sasha, but I despise that.
Hey, how’s that consensus model working out with Mugabe, anyway?
C.Roach is not worried about perception, but reality, what will really happen.
Mugabe?
That killer dictator? Was anybody advocating for him?
World is full of assholes, and nobody as far as I remember appointed us to be the judge and policemen to other nations
Besides Jimmy Carter?
Somebody should hack down sasha’s cut-and-paste of an entire editorial. Ever heard of copyright, you idiot?
Typical reactionary leftist, stealing bandwidth.
Next time post a link, idiot.
Um, Cynn? You might want to update your boilerplate talking points. Most of the missing Iraqi artifacts have been recovered (and the initial totals were wildly inflated). But let’s see what those neocon bastards at the New York Times have to say about it: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/02/arts/design/02cohe.html?ei=5090&en=43eb094ba3910910&ex=1301634000&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss&pagewanted=all
Had 9-11 not transpired, Bush would likely have been an unremarkable single-term president, neither condemned nor praised in the history books.
Fortunately, as so often happens, this country showed again it’s knack for having the right person for the right time, in any given situation. If you doubt that, a cursory look through our history will validate the statement. So all you Bds sufferers will simply have to accept reality.
Ha ha ha! The Telegraph is right on the mark. History will be very kind to Bush. It has a way of rising above the emotional fray of the moment. Most men are imperfect–even great men. You don’t realize how diseased and delusional your so-called thinking is, you leftist schmucks. You’ve been brainwashed.
You done did a bad thing Trimegistus. F’r shame.
Who the hell is Christopher Roach, and why should we care. That kind of argument probably prevailed back in the day, when the Soviet Union was still around; back when they decided to let you into this country, Sashal. I guess
it was the argument for keeping the Berlin Wall up as well, because for it to fall would lead to World War 3; (that was the context behind the Day After). So because we didn’t go after N. Korea, which would have cost 37,000 dead Americans right away and a million South Koreans not long after; is a reason for abandoning Iraq, to be sliced and quartered to the Ilkwan Wahhabi, the
Syrian Army and the Iranian Quds force. This is an argument; actually it’s more like abuse; like that being practiced by Pat Buchanan & Nicholson Baker
in their pro Hitler screed.
Can you imagine what it must have been like, growing up known as “C. Roach”?
you may be on to something there, troy. ;D
and nobody as far as I remember appointed us to be the judge and policemen to other nations
Says the Russian…
I used to resent the notion of being the “policemen of the world”. Since GWI, I view things differently. I want our Nation to protect her interests, and defend violent attacks with greater violence. Our liberty in general and prosperity in particular are dependent on a world safe for commerce. As the most powerful nation, it’s ludicrous to think of allowing less powerful (but just as ambitious) nations leverage over our ability to guarantee the free flow of goods and services. We have to have a navy group around the Persion Gulf for instance, to be sure the oil tankers have free passage. You are a child if you doubt the need for a cop on that corner…
The irony is that Taki, the publisher of this upmarket Volkischer Beobachter, was the Scott McClellan of the Greek junta, whose existence was due to twenty
years of military and intelligence assistance; due to Truman’s intervening on behalf of their faction in the Civil War, which last twice as long as the fabled Iraqi ‘Civil War, 1946-1949, which in turn was supported by a regional power.