"Let the bloodbath begin" is the very first line of Patrick Buchanan's autobiography, Right From the Beginning. (The title is a triple entendre.) The author himself autographed it for me when I attended a rally for his short-lived presidential campaign in April 1992.
I have always admired Buchanan's style of writing: red meat served on the cleaver, still quivering. His politics, it turns out, is something else. He is a bigger basher of Israel than Jennifer "Rafah Sister City" Loewenstein and more trade protectionist than John Nichols. Now he has written a book (Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War) and the bad guy is Winston Churchill, whom Buchanan blames for turning "two European wars" into world wars. Sigh.
So, when friend John Marx e-mailed a Buchanan column titled "Is Bush Becoming Irrelevant," I read with avidity. But it turned out to be more garden-variety Bush-bashing. This one concluded:
Of Bush, it may be said he was a far better politician and candidate than his father, but as a statesman and world leader, he could not carry the old man's loafers.
Which is ironic, because Buchanan ran against the old man and his loafers in 1992. Now, Bush Junior's reputation is taking more incoming from his former press secretary, Scott McClellan.
Peggy Noonan, in a column in Saturday's Wall Street Journal, condenses McClellan's message as an indictment of our Iraq incursion -- "'a fateful misstep' born in part of the shock of 9/11 but also of an 'air of invincibility.'"
Fateful, certainly. Misstep? Too early to write that history, unless you are Harry "The War is Lost" Reid.
History thanks you, President W
History has a way of improving vision through a special process called "hindsight." Harry Truman mustered only a 22 percent approval rating in 1952, his final year in office. I hope you caught the wonderful PBS television retrospective last week on this great president. Bush, by contrast, is at 28 percent. (Read the Like Harry Truman in Korea, Bush had a war that started badly. Unlike Truman, Bush's war in Iraq seems likely to conclude a success. And nothing so distresses the left. Now we have Nancy Pelosi thanking the Iranians for the success in Iraq. The Iranians! Korea festers 56 years after the cease fire. The war, technically, continues. "Can't carry the old man's loafers?" What was the overriding criticism of Bush Senior? Allow me to refresh your memory: That he didn't finish Operation Desert Storm, that he did not roll back Saddam Hussein from Kuwait all the way to Baghdad. Saddam was free to fumigate certain ethnic groups and to finance suicide bombings throughout the Mideast. For eight years, beginning in 1993, Al Qaeda was cherry picking bombing targets in New York City, Washington D.C., two American embassies in Africa and, of course, the U.S.S. Cole in the Red Sea. When was the last terrorist bombing? Now we've got Libya moderating. Colombia is emerging from the drug lords. The leaders of the western world from the Czech Republic to Britain, Germany, Italy, yes, even France are strong allies of this president. When John McCain tells Barack Obama to go to Iraq before mouthing off about how the war is lost, it resonates. (That's why Ed Garvey pleads: "Please Barack, don't go for the bait.") Obama says he'll go. When your bluff has been called you gotta go. The President Has Kept Us Safe That is the title of an essay by the New Yorker Thane Rosenbaum for the Wall Street Journal on May 3-. He describes himself, by the way, as a "non-Bush voter." He writes:
With President Bush-bashing still a national pastime, it's notable how much international terrorism has been forgotten, and how little credit the president has received for keeping Americans safe.
Everyone on 9/12 and thereafter -- here in New York City and in cities across America -- was quite certain that the next terrorist strike was imminent.
Our incursion into Iraq, the Left tells us, radicalized a new generation of Arabs and served as a recruiting tool for Al Qaeda. Rosenbaum counters with this common-sense observation:
But when a professed enemy succeeds as wildly as al Qaeda did on 9/11, and seven years pass without an incident, there are two reasonable conclusions: Either, despite all the trash-talking videos, they have been taking a long, leisurely breather; or, something serious has been done to thwart and disable their operations.
Americans, Rosenbaum writes, "have short time horizons and, perhaps, even shorter attention spans.
Dean Barnett writing in The Weekly Standard's "The Blog"agrees:
Few remember that Abraham Lincoln spent years running a dreadful war effort presided over by the ineffective likes of George McClellan and Joe Hooker. And those who do remember such things view them charitably, as Lincoln got things right by the end. If President Bush does wind up also having gotten the big things right, something that seems increasingly likely, the enormous successes of his administration will dwarf the failures in history's eyes.
Barnett continues:
The situation in Iraq is looking promising, and there is a real possibility and perhaps even a likelihood that the Iraq war will leave as its legacy a remarkably civilized and progressive country by the standards of the region ... one that may serve as a beacon for it neighbors.
Perhaps more noteworthy is the CIA's assessment
So, go to Iraq, Barack. Take Ed Garvey, John Nichols, Ben Manski, Jeremiah Wright, and Michael Pfleger with you. Then come back and say which you prefer -- a Korean-style stalemate or success in Iraq.
Even in the next five months preceding the November election, George W. may not be quite the albatross our liberal friends have been hoping for.
