“History” Seems Likely To Declare A President Obama Among America’s Greatest

No, that title is not an April Fool. One might perhaps think, though, that it is Harvard’s Joseph Nye, March 30 in the LA Times, doing the kidding:

President Bush used the fifth anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq to reaffirm his belief that history will vindicate him. He likes to compare himself to Harry Truman, who left office with low poll ratings because of the Korean War but today is held in high esteem by most historians…

…Truman biographer David McCullough warns that about 50 years have to go by before a presidency can be historically appraised. But by this stage of Truman’s presidency, the Marshall Plan and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization were already judged to be solid accomplishments, whereas Bush lacks comparable successes to compensate for his mismanagement of Iraq.

There’s another wartime president who may be a more instructive comparison when speculating how future historians will regard Bush: Woodrow Wilson…

…Wilson vowed to make the world safe for democracy, and Bush tried to transform the Middle East by imposing democratic government on Iraq. Many of Bush’s speeches about promoting democracy abroad could have been given by Wilson. The expressed ideals in both men’s proposed visions of changing other countries were unachievable given our nation’s capacities.

History tends to be unkind to the unlucky, but historians also judge leaders in terms of the causes of their luck. Even if unexpected events lead to a more stable and peaceful Middle East 20 years from now, future historians will probably criticize the way Bush distributed the risks and costs of his actions in the region….

…Bush, unlike Wilson, will leave office without a military victory in his war…

Although it is possible that future historians will vindicate Bush like they have Wilson, the odds do not favor him..

His Bush-Wilson comparison is hardly new. Mr Nye is certain Mr Wilson was superb and left behind stunning accomplishments. Even as one here who also thinks Mr Wilson was and did, it is remarkably unscholarly of someone like Mr Nye, however, while appraising Mr Bush during his equivalent only of Mr Wilson’s year of 1920, complacently to claim somehow to be able to pass studied judgement on how Mr Bush will almost inevitably be seen as a flat failure 80 years from now.

Meaning Mr Nye really should leave such conjecture to newspaper columnists and bloggers. But he insists on jumping in. So, standing matters on their head because we must live in the present, what we do know is that, curiously, many of such scribblers scoff at Mr Wilson, directly and indirectly, just as they scoff at Mr Bush.

Idealism? Democracy? Rubbish, we hear endlessly. Just as it was with Mr Wilson, when those who “knew better” in 1919 sniffed how Eastern Europeans creating states from the rubble of the Austro-Hungarian Empire couldn’t cope with self-government, today Mr Nye warns southwest Asian peoples can’t either.

Democracy had to be “imposed” on Iraqis. Many to most couldn’t have actually desired it for themselves and were simply unable to have it because they were ruled by a Stalinist thug? Surely they must have preferred the thug — even though every major poll of them demonstrates the overwhelming majority are pleased he is gone. But then didn’t we also impose democracy on (West) Germany, Italy and Japan and elsewhere in the late 1940s, through military occupation alliances and economic blackmail aid? Certainly not, right?

Time will tell. But Mr Nye is in a rush: he cannot graciously even possibly grant that if Iraq turns out well, some of the credit might well deserve to go to Mr Bush. In fact, if it does succeed, it must have been despite him.

Somehow, Mr Nye’s craftily framed “tails you lose, heads I win” historical approach never seems to apply to historians of a Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman. Western European successes after WWII are trumpeted and laid at FDR’s feet, and particularly at Mr Truman’s. What about neither having prevented or reversed the Soviet imposition of non-democratic communist governments on Eastern Europe? Does their “failure” in that policy realm in any way weigh negatively against successes?

We never really find out: the Marshall Plan and NATO were pronounced “accomplishments”, and Mr Bush doesn’t have one of those, and that’s that. But is it that simple, though? Pulling off the rose-tinted glasses for a moment, given an America then being awash in wealth choosing largely to underwrite European reconstruction and joining in the organizing of a defensive military alliance (neither primarily for altruistic reasons, but owing to hard-headed national security concerns, remember), the benchmarks for those being considered “successful” (statesmanly paying out billions, and statesmanly signing a multi-state alliance treaty) seem almost bound to have been reached pretty quickly and relatively straightforwardly.

In contrast, in another place and time other forward-thinking policies may well require decades even before some sense of the results begin to trickle in — if they ever do. One major reason is that the infrastructure upon which to re-build is so small, or the aid is even creating the very infrastructure itself, from scratch. According to the Washington Post (hardly a big supporter of Mr Bush), December 2006:

…The president has tripled direct humanitarian and development aid to the world’s most impoverished continent since taking office and recently vowed to double that increased amount by 2010 — to nearly $9 billion.

“…The moves have surprised — and pleased — longtime supporters of assistance for Africa, who note that because Bush has received little support from African American voters, he has little obvious political incentive for his interest.

“I think the Bush administration deserves pretty high marks in terms of increasing aid to Africa,” said Steve Radelet, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development…”

In contrast, 1950 Europe mostly didn’t need it from scratch. For instance, Europe had lots of good roads and railroads, which had been damaged or destroyed in the fighting. Those needed replacing and repairing; but they didn’t need to be built where there had never been any before. On the other hand, much of Africa doesn’t know what a good road or railroad even looks like.

In a world today in which the U.S. does not possess a corner on most of the global economic strength — unlike in 1950 — that Africa help sounds rather “Marshall-Plan-ish”, at least insofar as such might be possible in today’s economic climate. But Mr Bush won’t be getting any high marks for “accomplishment” on that from Mr Nye. Moreover, it doesn’t even rate a half-blip on his Cassandra-like rearward-pointing radar screen, placed 50 years forwards.

Yet what might future historians think of that Africa assistance? Probably not much either, for Mr Nye spending a great deal of time ruminating on how he feels future historians will view Mr Bush (and he’s hardly the only one ever to have done so, as we know) is inadvertently revealing.

Consider this: about the only Republican presidents pre-1981 rated overwhelmingly positively today by historians are Lincoln (who has almost assumed deity-like qualities — despite the Civil War having vastly contributed to “climate change” — so is almost now above party), Theodore Roosevelt, and to a lesser extent, Dwight Eisenhower. Of course, not only were Ike and TR not “arch-Republicans” (Ike only became a Republican prior to running for president, and TR didn’t hesitate to form a third party), but those non-Lincolns always come with major qualifiers.

Ike has long been relegated to detached, disinterested, and even doddering. We are seeing increasingly also that Theodore Roosevelt, who had been generally considered the greatest Republican apart from Lincoln, and one of the greatest presidents, now being re-discovered (yet again) by liberal opinion not for having, say, the original idea for a “League of Nations” (it wasn’t Mr Wilson’s).  Instead, TR is some sort of a closet “warmonger” and, as if to try to position him alongside their views of the current president — …1899-1902: U.S.-Philippine War. He did not start the war, but supported it even after congressional hearings about U.S. troops’ use of the water torture… — a champion of “torture.”

Thus it is hardly earth-shattering to discover Mr Nye emphatically believes Mr Wilson had won “his [good] war”. To get to that neat, historical chapter wrap-up, however, presumably Mr Nye didn’t canvass opinion from among the dead of Auschwitz, Hamburg, Warsaw, Omaha Beach and thousands of elsewheres in the later conflict that could well be said to have come about because Mr Wilson had failed to secure “the victory” he had “won” 25 years before. Wait, but isn’t that curt “re-appraisal” there of Mr Wilson patently unfair? It wouldn’t seem to be any more so than asserting, bald-faced, that if Iraq 20 years hence is a reasonably secure, democratic state (or maybe even three of them), that Mr Bush deserves none of the credit.

It’s amazing how presidents like Mr Truman and Mr Wilson seem readily to undergo “re-appraisals” years later by historians, leading to those presidents’ places in “history” improving. Given that tendency, Mr Carter is likely shortly due for a major “re-appraisal” and inevitable uptick also. One also suspects a President Obama won’t have even to wait: he’ll probably be pronounced “great” within weeks of his inauguration.

Why? Could that be less because of “accomplishments”, and more because most high-profile historians are . . . well, often “cheerleading” liberals and Democrats? (If they aren’t some version of Marxist, that is.) In comparison, when conservative publications do their surveys, there seems a slightly different take: Mr Eisenhower is often considered “greater” than Mr Wilson, and one Grover Cleveland rates higher than John F. Kennedy.

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Elsewhere, taking a similar stance, Mr Nye some months ago had lamented:

…The effects of the 9/11 terrorist attacks have thrown us off course. Since the shock of 9/11, the United States has been exporting fear and anger rather than our more traditional values of hope and optimism. Guantanamo has become a more powerful global icon than the Statue of Liberty…

Curiously, on the same March 30 his LA Times piece above appeared, this other story also did:

…[Sgt. Matt] Maupin’s remain(s) were found in Iraq, nearly four years after he was captured by insurgents, his parents said…

…Maupin was a 20-year-old private first class when he was captured on April 9, 2004, after his fuel convoy was ambushed west of Baghdad. He had been driving a supply truck.

Arab television network Al-Jazeera aired a videotape a week later showing Maupin sitting on the floor surrounded by five masked men holding automatic rifles. That June, Al-Jazeera aired another tape purporting to show a U.S. soldier being shot. But the dark and grainy tape showed only the back of the victim’s head and not the actual shooting…

Yes, talk about “unlucky” for Mr Bush. While they did regularly commit massacre, even SS didn’t summarily murder ALL military prisoners. Just how might a Wilson (who didn’t even have to face the SS), FDR or Truman have coped as commander-in-chief during a savage conflict with an enemy who, in total disregard and violation of every known “law” of war (it’s not even debatable), murders every uniformed U.S. serviceman taken prisoner?

Has Mr Nye discovered another one of those previously? If not, when his latest research undoubtedly reveals one, hopefully he’ll share their identity with us. Or, looked at another way, when one hears of the barbarity that unlawfully ended the life of Sgt Maupin, one finds oneself fervently wishing there were a jihadist version of Guantanamo in order to up the level of this conflict at least to civilized. After all, from such a location, unless they choose to die by their own hand, all U.S. prisoners would emerge alive eventually too, and be able then also to share with us in BBC interviews their “incredible” stories of horrific mistreatment.

How easy it is to forget that if a prominent current candidate for president had been a young serviceman captured by this enemy, he’d assuredly be dead now. And while we’re on the subject of “our more traditional values of hope and optimism“, I’m sure I can’t be the only American who would be more than happy if need be to see the Statue of Liberty dismantled and its parts given to jihadists, so they could use the pieces to construct proper cells for captured U.S. servicemen . . . if that would mean those prisoners would definitely get home alive. Then, when this war’s won, we’ll just build another damn statue, ‘cos, someone should inform Mr Nye, America isn’t about a statue.