[BRIGADE] PJB: An Unreflective Man
Published: Tue, 01/13/09
By Patrick J. Buchanan
January 13, 2009
With his public approval where Harry Truman's stood when he left
office, George W. Bush gave his last press conference yesterday.
And like that predecessor he often identifies with, Bush showed a
Trumanesque defiance of his critics -- and a Trumanesque failure to
understand what ruined his presidency.
He denounced protectionism, as he has with dismissive contempt
since he went to New Hampshire a decade ago. But nowhere in his
defense of free trade was there any explanation for how Middle
America lost 3 million manufacturing jobs in his first term and a
million more in the last year.
Nowhere does there seem an awareness that the ideas he absorbed at
his father's knee and the Harvard Business School had resulted in
the de-industrialization of his country, an enormous and growing
dependency on Japan, China and Asia for the essentials of our
national life, and, now, for the borrowed money to pay for them.
Someone once defined tragedy as what happens when a beautiful
theory collides with a fact. And this is what has happened every
time a great empire -- be it the Spanish, British or American --
embraced free trade as its salvation.
President Bush says it was freedom that prevailed when he rejected
the pleas of weak-sister Republicans and backed the surge. But what
spared us a debacle in Iraq was an infusion of 30,000 combat
troops, an uprising against the murderers of al-Qaida and a U.S.
decision to buy off the Sunni tribes, a strategy besieged empires
have pursued for centuries.
Nor does there appear in Bush's self-assurance any awareness of the
cost of his Freedom Agenda. In Iraq, it is 4,000 U.S. dead, 30,000
wounded, hundreds of thousands of Iraqi dead, millions of refugees,
a pogrom against an ancient Christian community, and a strategic
victory for Iran and its Shia allies across the Middle East. When
last heard from, the Ayatollah Sistani -- the chief Shia cleric in
Iraq, who has welcomed Iranian but not American visitors -- was
calling for Muslims to stand up against Israeli criminality in Gaza.
Like Woodrow Wilson before him, Bush appears to believe that the
nobility of his goals -- expanding freedom and bringing an end to
tyranny in our world -- validates and will sanctify his decisions.
Like Wilson, he is a utopian. He fails to understand that idealism
has its delusions and disasters.
The war Wilson led us into "to make the world safe for democracy"
gave us Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin and 70 years of the most
barbaric empire in all history. The peace Wilson brought home led
straight to Adolf Hitler, the Third Reich and a second world war
far worse than the first.
The West's road to hell has been paved with good intentions.
President Bush rightly denounces Europeans who see Israel as always
wrong. Yet he behaves as though Israel can do no wrong. Sixteen
days into the Gaza war, with the Palestinian dead and wounded near
5,000, and a humanitarian catastrophe at hand, has our
"compassionate conservative" president uttered one word of
compassion for those whose losses outnumber the Israelis' 100 to one?
In defending his rejected immigration reform, President Bush
clearly sees himself as in the vanguard of decency, and admonishes
his party against being perceived as anti-immigrant.
But is this president oblivious to what is happening in his country
because of his and his father's failure to secure the border? Even
in rich, liberal Montgomery County, Md., one reads over the weekend
that there is a hardening of attitudes toward illegal immigration
after a spate of crimes and killings. Working-class Americans pay
the price of the idealism around the dinner table at the Crawford
ranch.
In his first five years, Bush himself has admitted, 6 million
aliens were arrested at the border, breaking into this country. One
in 12 -- 500,000 -- had criminal records. Is it anti-immigrant to
demand a halt to this invasion, even if it means troops on the
border? Is it truly compassionate, or an act of cravenness, to
insist that the answer is amnesty for 12 million to 20 million
illegals and absolution for the businesses that hired them?
Choleric and cocky Harry Truman may be Bush's role model. But it
was Dwight D. Eisenhower who had to clean up the mess Harry left
behind.
Six months into office, Ike had ended the Korean War. He had the
courage no president has since shown to tell the Israelis they must
get off occupied land. They did.
While surely repelled by Nikita Khrushchev, especially for the
Hungarian bloodbath of 1956, Ike had him up to Camp David in 1959
because, wicked as the Bolsheviks were, they had nuclear weapons,
and one must talk to them.
Prudence is the mark of the true conservative. Ike and Ronald
Reagan had it. Neither Bush nor Truman did. And that is why the
former left the country so much better off than did the latter.
Goodbye, Mr. President, and God bless.
SOURCE: http://buchanan.org/blog/2009/01/pjb-an-unreflective-man/