Soccer Dad

Why we need Bush 2

On an earlier post I brought up some profiles of President Bush in the National Guard and at Harvard Business School. They paint a much different picture of the young George W. Bush from the media portrayal of an unserious slacker.
Well, I'm less worried about the past than I am about the future. A couple of recent articles have focused on the way President Bush views the world and how he intends to make America (and the world safer).
Jonathan Rauch compares George Bush and his effort at fighting global terror with Harry Truman and the inauguration of the Cold War.

Like Truman, Bush has set the country on a potentially long course of wearying and far-flung conflict, not because he wants to, but because "the alternative is much more serious." Is he biting off more than the country can chew? Probably, but so did Truman.

In an interview with Bernard Gwertzman, John Lewis Gaddis answers:
(Question and Answer follow)

Now that Iraq has fallen, do you expect there will be much positive fallout in the other Arab states, such as Saudi Arabia, that are not democracies?

This gets back to my point that, while the execution has been flawed, in many ways, in particular situations, one can make the case that the overall [administration] strategy has gone reasonably well. First of all, we have gone now, thank God and cross fingers, for well over two years without any recurrences of what happened on September 11. And it is easy to lose sight of how fearful all of us were that [the events of] September 11 were simply a precursor for something much worse that could happen at any moment. So the very fact that something much worse has not happened so far is in some way an indication that the larger strategy has worked.

Secondly, it seems to me that the real goal of the strategy has been one that the administration cannot publicly acknowledge: simply to frighten badly any state that might be thinking about supporting terrorists in the future. I like to use the analogy that [the strategy] is a little bit like the parking signs that Mayor Ed Koch used to have put up around New York City [that read], "Don't even think about parking here." This is the administration's objective with the strategy--"Don't even think about doing what the Taliban did in harboring al Qaeda."

In that sense, the administration has been quite successful. It has forced [changes in] problematic states whose intentions we had reason to doubt, like Libya and Iran, and in Pakistan, which had a record of supporting terrorism or supplying weapons of mass destruction to others. It is quite obvious that rethinking has happened in these states. There is even some ambiguity about the direction that Syria will be taking. But clearly, there has been sober rethinking in these states about the pluses and minuses of giving support to terrorists.

Overall, Gaddis seems quite impressed with President Bush. And its worth reading this synopsis of Gaddis's view from Tony Blankly:

As the Globe article describes in an interview with Mr. Gaddis: "Grand strategy is the blueprint from which policy follows. It envisions a country's mission, defines its interests, and sets its priorities. Part of grand strategy's grandeur lies in its durability: A single grand strategy can shape decades, even centuries of policy."

Whatever Thomas Friedman thinks, President Bush is on the right track. I don't think that Senator Kerry has a clue.

Posted by SoccerDad at February 15, 2004 11:03 PM