International Herald-Tribune Op/Ed: "The Ghost Following Bush"

[Hissyspit]

http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/12/18/opinion/edgreenway.php

The ghost following Bush
By H. D. S. Greenway Published: December 18, 2007

On an Autumn night 300 years ago, Admiral Sir Clowdisley Shovell, hero of the British Navy, was approached on his quarterdeck by a sailor with a warning. According to the sailor's calculations, the fleet was headed straight for disaster. But Sir Clowdisley was a bold leader unburdened by doubt. He was dead certain he was headed in the right direction.

"Such subversive navigation by an inferior was forbidden in the Royal Navy," according to Dava Sobel in her brilliant book "Longitude," and so "Admiral Shovell had the man hanged for mutiny on the spot."

The 57-year-old Sir Clowdisley stayed the course, oblivious in his ignorance and upright in his optimism, until, one by one, his ships wrecked in the Scilly Isles with great loss of life, including his own.

Sir Clowdisley kept coming to mind as I was reading Robert Draper's "Dead Certain, the presidency of George W. Bush." Dissenters were not hanged in the Bush White House, but their exclusion from the quarterdeck was the bureaucratic equivalent of the long drop. At least Admiral Shovell had a man in uniform willing to bring him bad news.

In the Bush White House, no one said: "Let's slow down and rethink this," Draper writes.

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"I made the decision to lead," Bush told Draper. "And therefore there'll be times when you make those decisions; one, it makes you unpopular; two, it makes people accuse you of unilateral arrogance. And that may be true. But the fundamental question is: Is the world better off as a result of your leadership?"

Sir Clowdisley might have made the same statement and asked the same question. For an essential part of leadership is not just dead certainty, but finding the right course, and being flexible enough to change it when the circumstances warrant.

Iraq may be more stable now, but it was an unnecessary war in the first place and there is no end in sight. It is destined to drag on long after Bush has left the stage, perhaps longer than the Vietnam War, radicalizing another generation of Muslims and immeasurably empowering Iran. And under Bush's leadership, the war in Afghanistan may be lost too. It will be hard to argue that Bush has left the world in better shape than when he found it.

As for the American people, Bush, "the First Optimist, made pessimists out of them," Draper writes. A few Bush lieutenants sometimes wonder if, in the end, was "his compulsive optimism . . . worth the sacrifice of credibility?"

Draper poses the question: Was his plain speech just intellectual laziness, the strategic vision merely disrespect for the process, the boldness really recklessness, the strength an unreflective self-certainty? Draper doesn't answer the question.

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[flordehinojos]

1. three bones to pick and one resounding: Hell ,Yes!

Bone to pick no. 1: Iraq may be more stable now ...

but with thousands dead, thousands homeless, thousands refugees in otherlands ... how could iraq not seem to be "more stable now"?

i think that statement only pour sulphur in the wound inflicted on iraq by the bush psychopath and the rest of the BFEE.


Bone to pick no. 2: ." Draper quotes Condoleezza Rice as saying: "This is a time when the U.S. has unparalleled power and you can try and sit on it and husband it and use a little bit here and a little there . . . or you can try to make big strategic plays that will fundamentally alter things in the way that the U.S. did after 1947."

I think, Leave it up to little men, hardened security advisers and secretaries of state to want to be larger than life and make a darn mess out of the whole thing.Bush and Rice along with a few others have made such a mess out of the whole thing. Also, in bone to pick no. 3

Bone to pick no. 3: It is Bush's big, strategic moves that have gotten Americans into so much trouble, making one look nostalgically upon the less ambitious, but infinitely more competent, moves of his father's administration ...

it is my contention and it always has been that bush is simply living out his father's shadow and deep buried dream to possess, control and dominate the world... and his father has as much said that he supports every damn bit of everything his son is doing, has done and will continue to do.

And ... finally, the one resounding, Hell, Yes!: Bush looks to the ghosts of Churchill, and Harry Truman too, as heroes who were at one time considered failures, upon whom history now smiles. But, sadly, it's too late. It is the ghost of Sir Clowdisley that crowds the Oval Office.

I say ... Hell, Yes. And, Amen to that!