the tindog coffeehouse

William McGurn writes in the Wall Street Journal that George W. Bush’s greatest failure was his victory in Iraq:

Mr. Bush’s disfavor in Washington owes more to his greatest success. Simply put, there are those who will never forgive Mr. Bush for not losing a war they had all declared unwinnable.

In other words, many people expected Iraq to be a complete and total failure, yet President Bush stubbornly proved them wrong, much to their dismay.

The article goes on to explain how this expectation of defeat is clearly rooted in “Vietnam thinking,” which begs the question: When everything is said and done, how will history ultimately judge the Iraq War?

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National Review’s Jay Nordlinger had a chance to interview President Bush about his presidency and put a whole bunch of quotes from the interview into his column.

Here are a few of the more interesting ones, but it’s worth reading the whole thing.

On the troop surge in Iraq:

“And I can’t remember the moment, but I know full well [National Security Adviser] Steve [Hadley] and I said, ‘We’re going to figure out and get to the bottom of this thing . . .’ And you’ve got to understand: With me, I’m thinking victory the whole time. And I fully understood the consequences of defeat — which are easier to explain, by the way, than the consequences of victory. And so we started to assess, and the different options started bubbling up, I guess, toward the end of the summer [’06] . . .

“The way it should work for a president on a decision this big is to make sure everybody has a chance to express themselves. I guess you could try to hastily make a decision of this magnitude and say, ‘This is the way it is.’ On the other hand, when you’re implementing a decision of this magnitude, where people’s lives would be at stake, it is important to give a lot of different stakeholders a chance to express their opinion. The president says, ‘It’s not working, we must assess, and what is it going to take to win?’

“And there were a lot of opinions during this period of time — a lot. Which is good for the president. You really don’t want homogenized decision-making. And opinions ranged from Get out, to Get out of Baghdad, step back, and hope the violence which will occur as a result of the vacuum doesn’t spill out.” Some people said, “Okay, some troops” — and eventually, “as a result of a lot of interagency working,” there were 30,000 additional troops: the surge. “Why? Because that’s what it would take to win, or to achieve the objective.”

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Yesterday marked the 5th anniversary of President Bush’s ill-executed “Mission Accomplished” speech aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, and of course the anti-Bush/anti-Iraq press were very quick to use it as another opportunity to label Iraq (and Bush) as a failure.

For all the polls and statistics, though, something occurred to me as I was driving home from work yesterday. Where have all the patriotic “Support Our Troops” yellow ribbon magnets gone? It used to be not so long ago that maybe every fourth or fifth car you saw had some variant of these magnets on them, either the traditional yellow variety or maybe the red, white, and blue version, perhaps even a camouflage version. There were also a lot patriotic bumper stickers or other stickers on car windows. Today? Very few.

Yesterday I began watching other cars (in addition to watching the road), looking for a patriotic sticker or magnet on the back of cars. Out of the maybe couple thousand cars I saw during my hour-plus drive home, I saw two cars with a “Support Our Troops” magnet. Two.

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