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History will say that we misunderestimated George W
Bush |
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By Andrew Roberts
Editorial: The Telegraph.co.uk
Last Updated: 11:01pm BST 21/06/2008 |
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As he leaves the White House at the end of his second term, the
President has a poll rating of only 23 per cent, and is widely
disliked and even despised. His foreign policy has been judged a
failure, especially in view of the long, painful, costly war that he
declared, which is still not over.
History may place President Bush in a far better light than he
currently enjoys
He doesn't get on with his own party's presidential candidate, who
is clearly distancing himself, and had lost many of his closest
friends and staff to scandals and forced resignations. The New
Republic, a hugely influential political magazine, writes that his
historical reputation will be as bad as that of President Harding,
the disastrous president of the Great Depression.
I am writing, of course, about Harry S Truman, generally regarded
today as one of the greatest of all the 43 presidents, and the man
who set the United States on the course that ended decades later in
the defeat of Communism.
If the West wins the modern counterpart of that struggle, the War
Against Terror, historians will look back in amazement at the
present unpopularity of George W Bush, and marvel at it quite as
much as we now marvel at the 67 per cent disapproval rates for
Truman throughout 1952.
Presidents are seldom remembered for more than one or two things;
the rest slip away into a haze of historical amnesia. With Kennedy
it was the Bay of Pigs and his own assassination, with Johnson the
Great Society and Vietnam, with Nixon it was opening up China and
the Watergate scandal, and so on.
George W Bush will be remembered for his responses to 9/11 in
Afghanistan and Iraq, but since neither of those conflicts has yet
ended in victory or defeat, it is far too early categorically to
assume - as left-wingers, anti-war campaigners and almost all media
commentators already do - that his historical reputation will be
permanently down in the doldrums next to poor old Warren Harding's.
I suspect that historians of the future will instead see Bush's
decision to insist upon a "surge" of reinforcements being sent into
Iraq, combined with a complete change of anti-insurgency tactics as
configured by General Petraeus, as the moment when the conflict was
turned around there, in the West's favour.
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.
While of course every individual death is a tragedy to the bereaved
families, these great achievements have been won at a cost in human
life a fraction the size of any past world-historical struggle of
this magnitude.
The number of American troops killed and wounded in Iraq and
Afghanistan is equivalent to the losses they endured - for a nation
only a little over half the size in the mid-Forties - capturing a
single island from the Japanese in the Pacific War.
British losses of 103 killed over seven years in Afghanistan bears
comparison to a quiet weekend on the Western Front in the Great War,
or the numbers the Army loses in traffic accidents in peacetime.
History can lend a wider overall perspective to what are
nonetheless, of course, immeasurably sad events.
History will also shine an unforgiving light on those ludicrous
conspiracy theories that claim that the Iraq War was fought for any
other reason than to implement the 14 UN resolutions that Saddam
that had been flouting for 13 years.
The CIA and MI6 believed, like almost every other intelligence
agency in the world, that Saddam had WMD, and the "Harmony"
documents seized and translated since the fall of his regime make it
abundantly clear that he was also supporting almost every
anti-Western terrorist organisation imaginable.
Historians will appreciate how any War Against Terror that allowed
Saddam to remain in place would have been an absurd travesty.
When the rise of al-Qa'eda is considered by historians like Philip
Bobbitt and William Shawcross, it will be President Clinton's
repeated refusal to act effectively in the 1990s, rather than
President Bush's tough response after 9/11, that will be held up as
culpable.
Judging by the rise in the value of the Iraqi dinar, the huge drop
in the number of Iraqi deaths in the insurgency, the number of
provinces now cleansed of al-Qa'eda, and the level of arms
confiscations by the Iraqi Army in Sadr City, the new American
"clear and hold" tactics have succeeded far better than the cynics
ever thought possible even 12 months ago.
Give Iraq five, ten or twenty years, and Bush's decision to
undertake the surge - courageously taken in the face of all bien
pensant and "expert" opinion on both sides of the Atlantic - will
rank alongside some of Harry Truman's great decisions of 1945-53.
If that happens, the time will come when George W Bush will be able
to say what Lord Salisbury called the four cruelest yet sweetest
words in the English language: "I told you so."
Editorial: The Telegraph.co.uk
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2008/06/22/do2201.xml |
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| This page last updated on
Thursday, October 30, 2008 07:58:47 PM
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