It will become an ever more pressing issue for them as 2008 progresses – and Victor Davis Hanson writes a long article detailing many of the anti-Iraq/anti-Bush myths and their lack of credibility, and brings up this very valid point:
6. President Bush’s presidency was ruined in Iraq.
If we were to lose the war, then yes. But should we win, should a constitutional government stabilize, should al-Qaeda keep unraveling, and should the hiatus of terrorist attacks against Americans at home and abroad continue, then historians will rank Bush in Trumanesque terms: a similarly orphaned presidency that ended disliked — even as it crafted a strategy to defeat global Islamic terror by taking the fight to the heart of the Middle East, while establishing proof of America’s good intentions by fostering constitutional government that offered Iraqis an alternative other than the usual Middle East non-choice of theocracy or autocracy.
Bush was terribly damaged by a series of poor spokesmen, his own bellicose soundbites of 2002–3, a series of tell-all defections of former intimates and officials, and an inability to cut U.S. consumption of imported petroleum. But that said, years from now, historians will look at the record and the results, not the present rhetoric, and his legacy could well be — “He kept us safe.”
Indeed – but it might not be historians 50 years from now figuring this out, but the American people awakening to the realisation that our incomparable armed forces have won an amazing victory, and then crediting the man who lead the way, President George W. Bush. This could start to happen by mid-Summer, and therein lies the left’s big worry.
You see, the left owns defeat (as Limbaugh puts it), since 2004 they have been hammering home on the theme that the war is lost – not “will be lost” or “could be lost” but “is lost”; while it took some time for senior Democrats to hop on the defeatist bandwagon, we now have clear statements from a large number of senior Democrats, including Barack Obama, that the war was lost years ago…but that war allegedly lost years ago has actually been won, and the question which will be asked (especially by John McCain and the GOP) is how we can entrust our nation to people who were ready to throw in the towell at the first sign of difficulty? It does take a bit of courage to govern, and Democrats have shown themselves to either be contemptible fools, or rank cowards on the issue of the War on Terrorism.
Right now, we just get ever more shrill assertions that the war is lost – heck, for a while there our leftwing friends were even trying to convince us that Iraq’s smashing victory in Basra was a defeat! Eventually, however, the left – led by Barack Obama – will have to confront the fact that we’ve won and our troops are starting to come home crowned with glorious victory. It will be interesting to see them try and wriggle out of years of defeatist propaganda.
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