History Offers Lessons, but will Bush Listen?

“Despot, liar, thief, braggart, buffoon, usurper, monster, ignoramus.” Which president is being described? George W. Bush? No. Abraham Lincoln, according to Harper’s Magazine. Max Boot quotes this line in defence of the proposition that even successful and victorious presidents make mistakes and incur the ire of their constituents.

Boot is an astute enough thinker, especially on military matters, to recognise that the Iraq war has not been without failures and set-backs, and he acknowledges that “John Kerry is right to accuse President Bush of “colossal failures of judgment” in Iraq. But Boot also knows that this does not mean the Iraq campaign will be a failure as a whole.

Two lines in Boot’s piece, titled “History Can Offer Bush Hope…”, reveal Boot’s ideological preferences for the way to fight war. In reference again to Lincoln, Boot notes that Lincoln “ultimately won the war only by backing Ulysses Grant’s brutal attritional tactics that have been criticised as sheer butchery.” The implication is clear – victory often requires strategies that may seem deplorable but are in fact necessary for the greater good.

The second line is in reference to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s planning for the post-war environment. Boot writes,

His failure to occupy more of Eastern Europe before the Red Army arrived consigned millions to tyranny; his failure to plan for the future of Korea and Vietnam after the Japanese left helped lead to two wars that killed 400,000 Americans.

Of course, the occupation of Eastern Europe by the Soviets was not due to a failure to plan by Roosevelt. The occupation of Eastern Europe by the Soviets was the plan. Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin decided that the Soviets would be the first into Berlin. Patton could have advanced through Italy and reached Germany much more quickly than the final plan of invading through the middle of France. This choice, between invading through France or Italy, was as much a political decision as a military one, and a decision that Patton, for one, did not agree with. The decision was made, at least partially, as a concession to Stalin, to guarantee his continued cooperation.

Regardless of its simplification, what the line reveals is that Boot favours more long-term planning for the post-fighting period, especially with regard to dealing with ideological enemies in a cold war situation. This is, of course, a very wise, and obvious, idea—greater thought and more preparations would have minimised the incidence of insurgency in Iraq and made the transition much more easy.