Was Bush right? - a growing chorus ponder, say "yes"

There is a growing list of "Could Bush be Right?" articles from Europe, America and the Left in general. One must always give credit to the opposition when anyone is self critical.


Here is a list of "Could Bush be Right?" articles, though a couple are from pro-war papers which is noted:

The Independent of London "Was Bush Right After All?", March 8, 2005
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=617840

Der Spiegel_of Germany "Could George W. Bush Be Right?", February 23, 2005 (prior post)
http://service.spiegel.de/cache/international/0,1518,343378,00.html

Der Spiegel Part II of the above regarding Bush's relationship with Putin "Could Bush Be Right -- Take Two", February 25, 2005
http://service.spiegel.de/cache/international/0,1518,343720,00.html

Newsweek of the United States "What Bush Got Right", March 14, 2005
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/7103594/site/newsweek/

Macleans of Canada "Maybe Bush Was Right", March 11, 2005
http://www.macleans.ca/switchboard/columnists/article.jsp?content=20050314_101916_101916

Khaleej Times of UAE reprints Newsweek's Fareed Zakaria article "What Bush got right"
http://www.khaleejtimes.com/DisplayArticle.asp?xfile=data/opinion/2005/March/opinion_March16.xml&section=opinion&col=

Cape Times of South Africa (subscription required) "Bush has been right", March 7, 2005
http://www.capetimes.co.za/index.php?fSectionId=331&fArticleId=2438182

Halifax Live of Canada "Three Cheers for Idealism", March 7, 2005
http://www.halifaxlive.com/artman/publish/idealism_070305_886.shtml

The Economist_of the United Kingdom "Democracy Stirs in the Middle East", March 3, 2005
http://www.economist.com/printedition/displayStory.cfm?Story_ID=3715809&CFID=52466717&CFTOKEN=1a3d0c2-179afbb4-cfa8-4a97-9ff3-8038162a44d1


Time of the United States with a Charles Krauthammer article (he supported the war strongly) "Three Cheers for the Bush Doctrine", March 7, 2005
http://www.time.com/time/columnist/krauthammer/article/0,9565,1035052,00.html


Chicago Sun-Times of the United States with a Mark Steyn article (he also strongly supported the war) "Election validates Bush's vision of Iraq", March 6, 2005
http://www.suntimes.com/output/steyn/cst-edt-steyn061.html

Boston Herald "America's thankless task: US forays pave way for real peace", March 6, 2005
http://news.bostonherald.com/opinion/view.bg?articleid=71787


US News & World Report "A sudden, powerful stirring", March 14, 2005
http://www.usnews.com/usnews/issue/050314/usnews/14fouad.htm

The Guardian of London
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1431533,00.html
doesn't quite give credit to Bush with this blame America line ("As the old Arab order crumbles, a revolution gets under way" March 6, 2005):
"So the source of the movement that some detect sweeping the Middle East is varied and complex. Some ascribe it to President Bush's vigorous championing of democracy in the region. Others point to long standing social and political currents, even suggesting that America's strategic interests have themselves inhibited reform among its loyal yet autocratic Gulf allies."

The Financial Times of London "Winds of Change in the Middle East", March 5, 2005
http://news.ft.com/cms/s/ee71b4ac-8d1c-11d9-9d37-00000e2511c8.html

The New Zealand Herald of New Zealand "Syria's withdrawal a sign of change across the Middle East", March 8, 2005.
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/index.cfm?c_id=2&ObjectID=10114169

The Times Online of the United Kingdom and supporter of the invasion "A taste of freedom", March 6, 2005
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2088-1512820,00.html


Chicago Sun-Times "What's So Shocking About Having Second Thoughts", February 2, 2005
http://www.suntimes.com/output/brown/cst-nws-brown02.html


Le Monde of France (in French) with a translation from The Belgravia Dispatch (http://www.belgraviadispatch.com/archives/004405.html) "Printemps arabe", March 8, 2005.


CLAUDIA ROSETT at The Wall Street Journal (Wednesday, March 9, 2005) ponders 'Will Vietnam be the next Iraq?' and answers - yes - Bush was right!

"There's been a lot of talk since Sept. 11 about how President Bush's war-lovin' ways have galvanized terrorists, recruiting jihadis to the ranks. What's increasingly evident, however, is that the character suffering the real blowback is Osama bin Laden, who, as it turns out, jolted the U.S. into a global recruiting drive for democrats. Faced with an unprecedented attack on American shores, Mr. Bush smashed the mold for Middle-East policy, and with the invasion of Iraq lit a beacon for freedom-lovers in a part of the world that until quite recently was widely seen as having none.

"As it turns out, there are many. Already, Mr. Bush has been answered by the breathtaking election turnout in Iraq, the uprising in Lebanon, the tremors in Syria and Iran, the stirrings in Egypt and Saudi Arabia. But the effects hardly stop with the Middle East. In many places, people trapped under tyrannies are now watching. Ballots cast in Baghdad echo way east of Suez.
. . .

"f the world is changing, it is because the U.S. is hardly alone in prizing freedom. In every country are people who care about liberty--and in most places there are a few willing to pay dearly and take extraordinary risks to lead the way. Dr. Que [a dissenter in Vietnam] is one, and as we watch the Middle East, it bears remembering, as he says, that these are 'universal values,' that in many places there are people who given any chance at all will answer freedom's call."

 

Bits from columns of the noted Dutch commentators Heldring and Hofland, both of whom have blasted the American efforts in Iraq from the moment they were initiated. Here’s Heldring:

"The American neo-conservatives believed that Iraq, once liberated from Saddam Hussein, could be turned into a thriving democracy, a shining beacon for the entire Middle East. I have always though this to be a ridiculous idea, but truth be told following the elections where despite the terror more Iraqis participated than expected (more than in Holland during European elections), I have to reconsider this idea."


And here’s H.J.A. Hofland on the American efforts to bring democracy to the Middle East:

"For a long time it looked like nothing good was going to be achieved. The elections maybe have told us something different. We can’t disappoint the hopeful Iraqis by getting stuck in our own internal struggles in the West."

 

Too early to tell. Viet Nam had an election early on, too, as I recall.

 

I agree with you that it is too early to tell. But one thing I can readily admit is that the Iraqi election was quite different than the contrived rigged things controlled by Diemist goon squads that they called elections in Viet Nam. It truly does seem like the Iraqi people responded overwhelmingly to the chance to actually vote for someone as their leader, without coercion, and in the face of death threats from the militant Islamists/terrorists in hiding.

How this will all ultimately turn out, though, is a huge unknown - my gut feeling tells me it won't result in a U.S. friendly regime in the long run....

 

Carl,

I think you are probably right about the long run. It will likely end up being suicidal for any Iraqi government to be too cozy with the U.S.

It worked post WWII in Germany and Japan in part, I think, because the Allies were able to enforce peace within their borders, something that has yet to happen in Iraq. There was no effective, credible resistance movement in those counties. There is in Iraq.

More boots on the ground, in spite of Mr. Rumsfeld's statements to the contrary, might have been a good idea.

The torture business hasn't helped.

What I'd like to know is where the financial support for the Iraqi insurgents is coming from.

 

Also, one of the reasons reconstruction in Japan and Germany worked so well was because there was a lot of focus and a lot of money spent on building up their economies and national industries. Things were really, really bad in postwar Japan... there were children dying of malnutrition. But within a decade the economy shot upwards. The parallel with Iraq is interesting. On one hand, Iraq has huge wealth from its oilfields, but how much of that wealth is going to end up with the Iraqi people in the next decade? If most of Iraq ends up getting owned by foreign companies then the prospects for peace are slim to none. But if their economy improves and becomes stable and employment prospects also improve... it's a lot more possible.

 

Too early to tell my arse! Let's see...free elections in Afghanistan, Iraq, the Cedar revolution in Lebanon, democratic reforms in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the election of a moderate PLO, and even Libya recently abandoned their weapons of mass destruction. The Bush doctrine has caused a great wave of democracy throughout the middle-east.....may as well accept it.

 

Um...let's see what happens AFTER we remove our troops. Or perhaps, let's see if we DO remove our troops...

 

You are absolutely correct in this response. When you said it is too early to tell, you were speaking (I assume) in terms of historical periods/months/years/decades, not the "instant gratification timeframe" that most Americans now assume as the norm. So... yes, for right now it looks good for the U.S. with the election in Iraq, and all the other things starting to gather momentum in the region. But this is an area with a history that is more than 5,000 years old! This is an area where Islamic history itself it more than 1,500 years old, so for us to imagine that we can measure success by a single election and a few "pro democracy" movements gathering steam is patently ridiculous.

That being said, I sincerely DO hope that freedom and democracy take hold in the area, and even if it takes another era for it to really become meaningful, at least the precedent of foreign intervention bringing about something good for a change has been set.

 

The British governed the area from, what, 1919 through about 1948. They created Iraq. Their experiment in nation building was not altogether successful...

 

First don't we have to agree on the question? Bush was right (or not) about what?

If we can agree on what we're talking about, then maybe we can decide if he was right or wrong, or if it's too early to tell etc. I suspect that defining the question is nearly impossible, and this is part of the problem - a big part of the problem.

 

I took the question to be "On balance, was the President wise to invade Iraq?"

I still think it's too early to tell.

 

Remaking the ancient heart of the Abbasid Caliphate isn't going to be easy.

Muslims resent the West and its power and influence. They resent the changes that modern secularism and rationalism and individualism are having in their essentially medieval religio-political civilization.

Ironically, it's the dictators like Saddam that have been the champions of modernism in the Muslim world. Saddam comes from the same catalog as Nasser, Assad, Pakistan's Musharraf and the Indonesian generals. (The military is often a progressive force because they see the need to modernize and adopt technology.)

The people, the ones that the US trusts will be the engine of democratic change, are in many cases more traditionalist. They often embrace some kind of retreatist militancy, demanding the re-establishment of shariah and the traditional Muslim way.

The people vote, but they vote in the mullahs. We extol democracy as an answer to every question, but it isn't clear that democracy is always going to be a progressive force. So promoting democracy might not always be in our own best short-term interest, if the newly enfranchised voters desire something very different than we do.

Ironically, perhaps the most threatening and transformative thing that the West can do to the Muslim world is to befriend it, to love it (almost literally) to death with our media and our consumer products, with our youth-culture and our music videos, with the free and open lives of our women, and with our individualism and personal autonomy.

Distance learning might be more of a long-term corrosive than any number of US Army divisions.

Democracy will eventually become a progressive force. But that could be a generation away.

 

The ONE thing that will tell me more than anything else will be whether the Iraqi government will be willing and able to assert its authority over the country WITHOUT U.S. troops and law enforcement.

The South Viet Nam government never could; thus we were fighting for someone else's freedom. History shows that people have to be willing to fight for their OWN freedom. So far, in Iraq it doesn't look too good.

 

Excellent point

Good point Mr. Nosborne!!!


Thanks, Abner

 

You know all these early declarations of "democracy flourishing" and victory achieved remind me of another time period in history - the Soviet era, when the dawn of a new age was JUST around the corner, and all those new nations in Eastern Europe were SO glad to have the eternal light of communism shining upon their lovely lands..... Oh yes, our Red Army and KGB will make sure that there is no turning back from these lofty goals.... but they won't be needed for long. Not long at all.

Well, that was all BS too..... and so are our own imperialistic declarations of an "Iraqi democracy" backed up by US bayonets....

 

Iraq will evolve into a Turkey-style democracy. Iran will soon follow. Why? Because tens of thousands of western-educated businessmen are taking control of Iraq and they are waiting in the wings in Iran. Goofball Mullahs stand no chance in the face of free enterprise. I'm a big fan of foreign students in the US. Some years ago, we had a Chinese student work with or organization as an exchange student. When he arrived, he was nervous, stiff, and highly suspicious of Americans. After a couple of years, he was speaking English beautifully and chomping at the bit to get back to China to help reshape his country on the American model. Communist China will collapse like the Soviet Union -- not with a bang, but a whimper. I fear China not as a military adversary, but as an economic competitor that has learned its lessons from the West so well that it will crush us like bugs. In other words, they will likely be more capitalist than us. Just watch.

 

Clearly that will be the most important test of all, but I can't help but feel that there has beeen a real shift in the Middle East. Democracy, while not guranteed, has certainly become a viable possibility. I wonder if it isn't best for Democrats to want the best for our country and troops given the current situation instead of wanting what proves them and their idealogy right.

As to the lessons from Vietnam I am not so sure it is that clear. I don't remember Germany or Japan fighting for freedom but believe they have become both free and democratic. Similiarly several of the former Eastern-Block countries have turned into democracies without struggle after the Soviet collapse.

Ultimately the future of Iraq will depend upon the actions of its people. My hope is that our actions might be a help towards their freedom.