A Good Day

If George W. Bush has a barometer measuring good and bad days in the Oval Office, I’m pretty sure there are two things that should invariably push its needle strongly into the “good zone”:

1. The New York Times comes off of its editorial high horse (read: high chair) and calls something Bush advocated “remarkably successful”.

2. An Arab leader openly and seriously considers erecting a statue of Bush in the heart of a major Middle Eastern city.

If your presumed haters are giving you praise, you must be doing something right.

Well, both of these things occurred this week, shortly after 8 million Iraqis went to the polls to vote in democratic elections. The NYT was, of course, sure to lead its editorial with the doom and gloom caveat that many Sunnis were broadly “disenfranchised”. (The effectiveness of that word seemed significantly diluted by the fact that they used it four years ago to apply to grannies punching butterfly ballots in Palm Beach). Nonetheless, they mustered their highest form of praise and conceded that the elections sent a “message that all but the most nihilistic of the armed insurgents will have to accept”. (Leave it to the Times to seek nuance by dividing head-lopping insurgents into levels of nihilism).

Hell surely froze over again as Ali Fadel, Baghdad’s mayor called Bush a “symbol of freedom” and mused that he might install a statue of the President in one of the city’s major thoroughfares. This is the President whose father’s evil and grimacing likeness serves as a doormat in Baghdad’s Al Rashid Hotel.

I had been thinking before Sunday that George W. Bush would go down in history as a combination Woodrow Wilson and Lyndon Johnson. Iraq was looking increasingly like a Johson-style quagmire fueled by a lofty but naïve set of Wilsonian principles. Bush, like Johnson, seemed callous to the mounting casualties, and his pronouncements of “promoting freedom” and “ending tyranny” sounded increasingly hollow given conditions on the ground. Having supported the war from the start, I was preparing for the possibility that the effort to make Iraq safe for democracy might go the way of the League of Nations.

Eight million purple fingers later, however, things are looking a lot better. Rather than compare him to Wilson and Johnson, historians may in fact compare Bush to two more flattering examples of Presidential leadership on the world stage: Harry Truman and Ronald Reagan. It was Truman’s no-nonsense approach that laid a sturdy foundation for our long slog in the Cold War and aggressively positioned America as freedom’s defender. It was Reagan’s steely resolve that finally finished the commies off and precipitated the fall of the Berlin Wall. As that century showed, articulating democracy’s aims and actually achieving them are two different things, often decades apart. If all goes reasonably well in Iraq, however, Bush may end up having done both in just eight short years.