Greatness

A podcast from PajamasMedia, Sanity Squad: The Presidents, discusses what makes a great president. They talk about Lincoln and how he was very unpopular at the time, yet history teaches us that he was arguably our greatest. What will history write about George W. Bush? One member of the podcast suggests that history will recognize him as great because he has taken the unpopular step of promoting democracy in order to protect America. I'm not so confident in today's academia. But if history is written by Victor Davis Hanson, Bush will be remembered by the facts and granted due repect.

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Why did a majority of Democratic senators — such as Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, Chris Dodd, John Edwards, Harry Reid, Jay Rockefeller, and Chuck Schumer — vote to authorize a war with Iraq on Oct. 11, 2002? And why is this war now supposedly George Bush’s misfortune and not theirs?

The original fear of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, of course, played a role in their votes — but only a role. In the 23 writs that authorized force to remove Saddam, senators at the time also cited Iraq’s sanctuary and subsidies for terrorists. Then there were Saddam’s attempts to assassinate a former United States president; his repression of, and use of weapons of mass destruction against, his own people; and his serial violations of both United Nations and Gulf War agreements. If paranoia over weapons of mass destruction later proved just that, these other more numerous reasons to remove Saddam remain unassailable.

Nevada’s Sen. Reid summed up best the feeling of Democrats that there were plenty of reasons to remove Saddam Hussein in a post-9/11 climate. He reminded his Senate colleagues that Saddam’s refusal to honor past agreements “constitutes a breach of the armistice which renders it void and justifies resumption of the armed conflict.”

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Throughout American history, it was usually the Democratic party that proved the more interventionist. Democratic presidents — whether Woodrow Wilson in 1917, Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1939-40, Harry Truman in 1950, John Kennedy in 1963 or Bill Clinton in 1999 — long battled Republican isolationists who insisted that it was never in America’s interest to fight costly wars abroad unless directly attacked by a foreign nation.

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Partisan advantage explains much of the present posturing against an opposition president. But mostly, the rising Democratic furor comes as a reflection of public anger at the costs of the war — and the sense that we are not winning.
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