Times Change
Yesterday, Victor Davis Hanson wrote:
As for Bush’s legacy, it will be left to future historians to weigh his responsibility for keeping us safe from another 9/11-like attack for seven years, the now increasingly likely victory in Iraq, AIDS relief abroad, new expansions for Medicare, and federal support for schools versus the mishandling of Hurricane Katrina, the error-plagued 2004-2007 occupation of Iraq, and out-of-control federal spending. As in the case of the once-unpopular Ulysses S. Grant, Calvin Coolidge, and Harry Truman, Bush’s supposedly “worst” presidency could one day not look so bad in comparison with the various administrations that followed.
And what about the years 2004-2007 in Iraq? Here’s Hanson’s “Sizing Up Iraq” from December 2004:
First, is the United States winning its engagements on the ground? The answer is an overwhelming yes—whether we look, most recently, at Samarra or at the thrashing of the Mahdists in Najaf. The combination of armor incursions, constant sniper attack, and GPS bombing in each case has led to decisive tactical defeat of the insurgents. Our only setback—the unfortunate pullback from Fallujah—was entirely attributable to our wrongheaded constraint, as if we somehow felt that releasing the terrorists from our death grip would either placate the opposition, empower the Iraqi government, or win accolades from the international community.
And in his 2006 “Winning the Iraq Wars” he not only claimed we weren’t making mistakes, but that no alternative strategy was possible at all:
Note also that after the hysteria over body armor and unarmored humvees, the Democratic opposition offers no real concrete alternatives to the present policy .
Why not? Because there are none.
Oh well.
22 Responses to “Times Change”
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November 28th, 2008 at 2:24 pm
I like how he talks about “the now increasingly likely victory in Iraq… new expansions for Medicare, and federal support for schools” versus “out-of-control federal spending” as if they had nothing to do with each other.
November 28th, 2008 at 2:35 pm
So I do think it is possible Bush will go down as merely a below-average President, and not one of the all-time worse.
Lying the country into a major war and legalizing torture are enough to assure George his infamous place in history.
November 28th, 2008 at 2:57 pm
Personal revisionism (lying about your past statements) is going to be a major growth industry over the next few years. Glenn Greenwald just caught the NYTimes in a nasty bit of it.
Bush is the worst we’ve ever had. Bar none. No doubt about it.
November 28th, 2008 at 3:15 pm
As for Bush’s legacy, it will be left to future historians to weigh his responsibility for keeping us safe from another 9/11-like attack for seven years
Fewer wingnut tropes rankle like this one. No mention is made of Bush’s responsibility for 9-11 (the warnings actively ignored and what have you). And personally, I thought that 9-11 was pretty fucking bad. Downright horrible, in fact. Look it up, man. Team Reality really needs to push back against this bulljive. Like five years ago.
November 28th, 2008 at 3:55 pm
hanson is conceding that at this point bush II is in fact the worst president in the history of this country — his only “hope” is that some future president will be worse.
pretty sad if that’s the best that a bush supporter can say.
and i don’t think that’s what bush himself had in mind when he said history would judge whether he was as bad as people say.
November 28th, 2008 at 4:03 pm
Re: So I do think it is possible Bush will go down as merely a below-average President, and not one of the all-time worse.
Our other pitentially “worst” presidents (Hoover, Buchanan, maybe Carter) were sandbagged by circumstances beyond their control to which, let it be said, they responded in ways incompetent, unimaginative and unavailing. W Bush inherited a country in a pretty good place and made a colossal mess of it.
November 28th, 2008 at 4:11 pm
As for Bush’s legacy, it will be left to future historians to weigh his responsibility for keeping us safe from another 9/11-like attack for seven years goo http://www.makkale.blogcu.com
November 28th, 2008 at 4:38 pm
As for Bush’s legacy, it will be left to future historians to weigh his responsibility for keeping us safe from another 9/11-like attack for seven years goo
Goo indeed. Given how loudly Bush & Co have trumpeted their minimal anti-terror “accomplishments” (Seas of David, anyone?), it seems unlikely that they would’ve kept knowledge of any actual thwarted major attacks a secret.
November 28th, 2008 at 8:46 pm
I’m not saying history will redeem him. But one way of putting my point is that we have participated in much more costly and unnecessary wars, and we have committed even worse injustices than the torture under Bush. For example, I would nominate the Civil War as more costly and slavery as an even worse injustice, and there are Presidents who both promoted slavery and helped cause the Civil War. I have a hard time seeing Bush ranked worse than those Presidents, bad as he has been.
I believe we have to judge our leaders in relative, not absolute, terms. It doesn’t make any sense to compare Bush’s position on slavery or woman’s suffrage to Jefferson or Washington. Times change. Similarly, it would be stupid to directly compare Tony Blair’s policies to those of King George the Mad, Cromwell or William the Conqueror.
Rather, just ask yourself: just how much would the country be better off had Gore been designated President? In terms of poor decision-making in their area of influence, few Presidents can compete with Bush’s terrible record.
November 28th, 2008 at 8:53 pm
And if you want to give credit to Bush for preventing another attack after 9/11, then you also have to blame his previous inaction regarding terrorism for 9/11 (partly). I would argue that he didn’t have much to do with both the attack and its aftermath.
After all, like another commenter said, had the torture/domestic spying programs really prevented another major terrorist plot, you can be sure it would have been leaked to the media the very next morning. That half-assed plan by a couple of inept islamists to bomb a military base in NJ sure was.
November 28th, 2008 at 11:12 pm
So we have morons here claiming, “Well, Bush wasn’t as bad as Nero, he didn’t burn the whole of Washington down – just New Orleans.”
Morons.
The Civil War may have been bad, but this is the 21st Century, not the 19th. So how about we compromise and say Bush is the worst President in the last, oh, 108 years?
November 29th, 2008 at 2:25 am
Surely Hanson is also uprating Clinton since he also kept us safe for 7 years after the first World Trade Center attack.
November 29th, 2008 at 2:56 am
My email today to Mr Hanson:
Time will tell, but my bet is that Bush will be remember as a great failure, who created his own failure.
December 10th, 2008 at 1:55 am
What we will never know for certain is the impact of the Dustin Pedroia story, of the baseball equivalent of
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