A Sea Change in Public Perception
Or reality gradually overcomes narrative.
We’ve already seen the reluctant admission by AP (published on a Saturday and carried on only 230 of its member papers) that the the War in Iraq has shifted to our favor.
I noted the Wall Street Journal‘s nod to this reality earlier.
Now the academe weighs in as well:
There is, as the saying goes, more. Much more, in fact.
I think I’m just going to sit here and listen to the far off sound of heads ‘sploding.
Hat Tip: Hot Air.
We’ve already seen the reluctant admission by AP (published on a Saturday and carried on only 230 of its member papers) that the the War in Iraq has shifted to our favor.
I noted the Wall Street Journal‘s nod to this reality earlier.
Now the academe weighs in as well:
A Truman for our times
The received wisdom is that President Bush has been a foreign policy disaster, and that America is threatened by the rise of Asia. Both claims are wrong—Bush has successfully rolled back jihadism, and the US will benefit from Asian growth
By Edward Luttwak
Propsect Magazine
That George W Bush’s foreign policy has been a total failure is now taken for granted by so many people that one usually hears it stated as a simple truth that need not be argued at all.
It has happened before. When President Harry S Truman said in March 1952 that he would not seek re-election, most Americans could agree on one thing: that his foreign policy had been a catastrophic failure. In Korea his indecision had invited aggression, and then his incompetence had cost the lives of some 54,000 Americans and millions of Korean civilians in just two years of fighting—on both counts more than ten times the number of casualties in Iraq. Right-wingers reviled Truman for having lost China to communism and for his dismissal of the great General Douglas MacArthur, who had wanted to win it back, with nukes if necessary. Liberals despised Truman because he was the failed shopkeeper who had usurped the patrician Franklin Roosevelt’s White House—liberals always were the snobs of US politics.
...
Yet the costly Iraq war must also be recognised as a sideshow in the Bush global counteroffensive against Islamist militancy, just as the far more costly Korean war was a sideshow to global cold war containment. For the Bush response to 9/11 was precisely that—a global attack against the ideology of Islamic militancy. While anti-terrorist operations have been successful here and there in a patchy way, and the fate of Afghanistan remains in doubt, the far more important ideological war has ended with a spectacular global victory for President Bush.
There is, as the saying goes, more. Much more, in fact.
I think I’m just going to sit here and listen to the far off sound of heads ‘sploding.
Hat Tip: Hot Air.
