Not Again
By Andrew Roberts in The Telegraph brushes the dust bunnies off the weak and overused Truman analogy to explain once again why the Bush administration — which has been a perfectly evident disgrace to anyone not toting around a paper bag and several jars of rubber cement — will someday be viewed as a triumph of democracy, whiskey and sexy. The analogy is stupidly familiar by this point, relying almost entirely on the observation that while Truman left office in a deep pit of unpopularity, he established a foreign policy framework that would eventually bear the United States aloft to victory in the cold war.
The premise is debatable enough; even if we concede that containment policy in Europe accomplished what it was supposed to, containment policy in the so-called developing world — Asia, the Middle East, Latin America and Africa — was nothing short of disastrous, for reasons that scarcely require description. Truman bears less responsibility for this fact than his numerous successors, but post-cold war wingnut triumphalism — which is partly responsible for the Truman myth invoked by Bush and his few remaining believers — requires a massive national amnesia on this point. The Korean War, which factored highly in Truman’s miserable approval ratings, froze US-Chinese relations for over two decades; helped to lock the nation into the awful monotony of ever-rising defense budgets; and provided the rationale for American commitments to the defense of French Indochina. Moreover, the American failure to forcefully roll back communism in North Korea encouraged Eisenhower and Kennedy to pursue covert operations that seemed less obviously risky than inconclusive and bloody police actions.
Still, it also bears mentioning that unlike Bush, Truman left office with a string of foreign policy accomplishments — the European Recovery (Marshall) Program, the formation of NATO, the creation of the United Nations, the Berlin Airlift – whose successes were widely acknowledged at the time. It takes an epic fit of optimism to argue — as Roberts does — that
once the decades have put the stirring events of those years into their proper historical context, four great facts will emerge that will place Bush in a far better light than he currently enjoys.
The overthrow and execution of a foul tyrant, Saddam Hussein; the liberation of the Afghan people from the Taliban; the smashing of the terrorist networks of al-Qa’eda in that country and elsewhere and, finally, the protection of the American people from any further atrocities on US soil since 9/11, is a legacy of which to be proud. . .
Every clause in that last paragraph is filled with a seam-bursting load of horseshit. Which is, I suppose, as proper an epitaph as one might imagine for a presidency that has brought otherwise sane people to miss Nixon.