Posted by
On the Right on Sunday, June 22, 2008 4:13:21 PM
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.
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.
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.
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.