Vigorous criticism of President Bush in conservative circles stopped seeming heretical a long time ago. That Bush’s foreign policy has been disastrous is one of the ‘facts’ that many conservatives feel they must grudgingly grant to their liberal antagonists.
No doubt many conservatives came to this conclusion about Bush by independent reflection. But many others have probably succumbed to the natural desire to be within the pale by uncritically embracing received opinion. Edward Luttwak (a Cold War military strategist who took something of a political left turn after the collapse of the Soviet Union) thinks this received opinion happens to be demonstrably false .
Bush, he says, is like Truman: In the main his policies were extremely successful, a fact that his few conspicuous failures unfortunately obscured for some time. Perhaps Bush will have to wait for Iraq, like Korea, to be “half-forgotten” before his achievement in fighting terrorism gets the universal acknowledgment it deserves.
I am not competent to judge Luttwak’s argument, but it certainly seems worth the serious consideration of those who are.
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