Tuesday, June 17, 2008
Blue moon alert: The Guardian argues Bush improved security
It is not every day that The Guardian publishes a column like this:
For all Bush's verbal infelicity, diplomatic brusqueness, negligence in planning for post-Saddam Iraq, and insouciance regarding standards of due process when prosecuting the war on terror, the world is a safer place for the influence he has exercised.
When Bush ran for president in 2000 he was an isolationist advocate of scaling back America's overseas commitments. But after 9/11, he was right in not interpreting the attack as confirmation that America was stirring up trouble for itself. The theocratic barbarism responsible for the attack on the Twin Towers was driven not by what America and its allies had done, but by what we represented. In the words of Osama bin Laden, illegitimately appropriating for himself the mantel of Islam, "every Muslim, the minute he can start differentiating, carries hate toward Americans, Jew, and Christians".
The most fundamental decision in western security policy in the past seven years has not been the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. It has been the recognition that the most voluble adversaries of western society are not merely a criminal subculture, and still less an incipient liberation movement. Rather, they are a reactionary, millenarian and atavistic force with whom accommodation is impossible as well as intensely undesirable.
The grand strategy pursued by the US under Bush has overestimated the plasticity of the international order, but it has got one big thing right. There is an integral connection between the terrorism that targets western societies and the autocratic states in which Islamist fanaticism is incubated.
Damning with faint praise, to be sure, and there is much more in the column critical of the Bush administration's foreign policy. It is, after all, The Guardian. The core message, though, is that George W. Bush broadly understood the strategic challenge when it mattered, and correctly resisted those in the West who would have pursued a more accomodationist strategy against Islamist terrorism.
10 Comments:
By 
, at
Tue Jun 17, 10:33:00 AM:
I believe you'll read and hear a lot more along these lines in the years to come. Bush made a fundamentally humanitarian choice to displace fanaticism and at least try to replace it with something better. The failure or success of that strategy will soon no longer have anything to do with him and, judging from this article, that realization is starting to concern some people who, to this point, have done everything in their power to thwart this very process.
sirius_sir
By 
Dawnfire82, at
Tue Jun 17, 10:52:00 AM:
I've long said that history will likely judge Bush kindly. Assuming, of course, that Iraq manages to stand on its own feet. If it falls, he'll probably be seen as a misguided idealogue who was foolish to trust that an Arab democracy could be set up at all, much less on the ashes of a dictatorship like Saddam's.
By Mrs. Davis, at
Tue Jun 17, 11:54:00 AM:
Bush will indeed be treated well by history and I suspect we don't yet know half the reasons why.
By , at
Tue Jun 17, 12:55:00 PM:
Blue Moon alert, indeed.
At the time it was becoming clear that we were about to go to war with Iraq, I remember telling my wife, "I don't give a ***** about the weapons of mass destruction, and I don't think George Bush does, either."
A day or so later, I was briefly discussing the run-up to the war with my car mechanic, who said, "I always hate to see us do something like this, but that whole part of the world has to change."
He is clearly more intelligent than most, because even then he could see--as perhaps more people are now becoming able to see--that Bush is attempting to bring about a new order of things.
Glendower
By , at
Tue Jun 17, 01:40:00 PM:
How or why the Guardian let this one slip out is beyond me.
And no, I don't think that history will be particularly kind to GWB, because the people who will write the history of this era will intellectually and politically be more like Christopher Chambers than Dawnfire82, or Escort81, or Tigerhawk.
Having said that, I voted for him twice, and given the choice of John McCain, Barack Obama, Ron Paul, Hillary Clinton or Bob Barr, I would vote for him again.
Screw the Guardian and their neo-Marxist leanings. Up the Republic. And thank you for not smoking.
-David
By , at
Tue Jun 17, 04:15:00 PM:
Good column but the vast majority of the comments are a veritable compendium of anti-bush media cliches. Far more illustrative of a certain mindset than the facts on the ground.
By , at
Tue Jun 17, 05:39:00 PM:
Oliver Kamm will be subject of an auto da fe. Thus are all heretics dealt with.
Zhombre
By Andrew X, at
Wed Jun 18, 12:26:00 AM:
"A day or so later, I was briefly discussing the run-up to the war with my car mechanic, who said, "I always hate to see us do something like this, but that whole part of the world has to change."
I love this. The fact is, a multitude of college professors using five syllable words could argue that mechanic into the ground with how wrong he is.
Thus magnificently proveing Orwell's marvelous adage "The man must be an intellectual to believe such nonsense, no ordinary man (or car mechanic) could ever be such a fool."
By Gary Rosen, at
Wed Jun 18, 01:51:00 AM:
"I love this. The fact is, a multitude of college professors using five syllable words could argue that mechanic into the ground with how wrong he is."
I'm typical of a lot of people who read "right-wing" blogs nowadays - a lifelong Democrat whose gradual rightward drift was accelerated by 9/11 and voted Republican for President the first time in 2004.
Of all the votes I made for Democrats, none chagrin me more now than voting for Jimmy Carter in 1980 (voting for Clinton doesn't come close). How could I have been such a moron? After all, I was supposed to be a "smart guy", college educated and so on. And I think back on the Reagan Democrats - typically blue collar workers with a high school education or even less. But they saw what I could not see, and understood what I did not understand.
By , at
Thu Jun 19, 12:37:00 PM:
Gary, I'd say you are indeed a 'smart guy.' You figured it out, despite your intellectual predilections. From my experience, most people coming from your point of view--by which I mean the intellectual left--seem never to make the transition. It takes a big man to admit he was wrong and start fresh.
