[lit-ideas] Re: Harry S. Bush

I am sure there is a lot to say about this and other people will say or have said it. But the thing that sticks in my mind immediately is that history will not be kind to Bush re Iraq. The reason is not just the deaths and havoc he caused there, but because he enabled the most radical group in the Middle East to become dominant, Iran.
People have commented from time to time about the hyprocrisy of the first. Pres. Bush in supporting Saddam in the war between Iraq and Iran. Anyone who understands history, which the second Pres. Bush does not, knows that the reason for that to was to keep both Iraq and Iran from becoming dominant in the region. If I were a Muslim Iranian, I would consider president Bush the younger to be God's gift to Iran.
Predicting what historians will say or think decades from now is not very useful. But I can tell you that we are in decline from the devaluing of the dollar, inflation and more pragmatically, in just what I find for sale, or not, in super markets. 

Veronica
----- Original Message ----- From: "Eric Yost" <mr.eric.yost@xxxxxxxxx> 
To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Monday, August 18, 2008 2:20 AM
Subject: [lit-ideas] Harry S. Bush


This article, if people can read it without instant visceral backlash,
is sure to spark some controversy. It's a counterargument to both
Zakaria and Friedman.

full article at:
http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=10309



A Truman for our times

The received wisdom is that President Bush has been a foreign policy
disaster, and that America is threatened by the rise of Asia. Both
claims are wrong—Bush has successfully rolled back jihadism, and the US
will benefit from Asian growth
by Edward Luttwak

That George W Bush's foreign policy has been a total failure is now
taken for granted by so many people that one usually hears it stated as
a simple truth that need not be argued at all.
It has happened before. When President Harry S Truman said in March
1952 that he would not seek re-election, most Americans could agree on
one thing: that his foreign policy had been a catastrophic failure. In
Korea his indecision had invited aggression, and then his incompetence
had cost the lives of some 54,000 Americans and millions of Korean
civilians in just two years of fighting—on both counts more than ten
times the number of casualties in Iraq. Right-wingers reviled Truman for
having lost China to communism and for his dismissal of the great
General Douglas MacArthur, who had wanted to win it back, with nukes if
necessary. Liberals despised Truman because he was the failed shopkeeper
who had usurped the patrician Franklin Roosevelt's White House—liberals
always were the snobs of US politics.

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