Will response to Sept. 11 make Bush a great president?
By JAMES O. GOLDSBOROUGH / THE SAN DIEGO UNION-TRIBUNE
As this dreary year winds to an end, I find myself thinking about great men, wondering if we will ever see any again. Or is it that we never know they were there until they are gone?
Academics like to think of history as made by immutable forces. The human landscape is not shaped by individuals, but by economics, as the Marxists claimed, or by the search for power, glory or security.
People born before World War II grew up believing there were two great men of our times: Churchill and Roosevelt. Later, I came to believe de Gaulle was in their class. David Ben Gurion, Israel's first leader, ranked de Gaulle ahead of Churchill, noting that Churchill had the British empire behind him, while de Gaulle was alone.
These great men had one thing in common: war. When historians rank our presidents, they usually come in the order: Lincoln, FDR, Washington, the ones who won our great wars. Wilson, who brought America victoriously through World War I, is in the near-great group. Lyndon Johnson is ranked low, for he lost a war.
War can be redeeming. Roosevelt was seen as a dilettante when elected, and his New Deal was viewed by many as an assault on the Constitution. Had Churchill died in 1940, it is said, he would be remembered as a failed politician. De Gaulle was an obscure colonel in 1940, condemned to death as a traitor in 1940 when he fled to Britain.
"To be great," wrote de Gaulle in his memoirs, "you must have great events (il faut épouser les grands événements)." How many mediocre presidents might have lifted themselves had they been in office in 1860, 1917 or 1940? How many of that faceless presidential cast between Jackson and Theodore Roosevelt (excepting only Lincoln), might have reached greatness?
Or how many would have failed -- as James Buchanan did on the eve of the Civil War, as Lyndon Johnson did, or as George McClellan surely would have had he defeated Lincoln in 1864?
Not all great presidents have had wars to fight, and not all presidents who have fought successful wars have been great. Bearing this in mind, we come to George W. Bush, whose administration was going nowhere until Sept. 11.
Does Bush now have a chance to enter the American pantheon?
From time to time a panel of distinguished historians ranks our presidents. The practice was started by Arthur M. Schlesinger in 1948, and has been continued by his son, Arthur Jr. In a recent poll, the usual top three were followed by six near-greats: Jefferson, Jackson, Polk, Theodore Roosevelt, Wilson and Truman.
From that ranking, we see that war presidents are not the only ones ranked high. Jefferson and Jackson, who were not war presidents (as Washington was not), are ranked higher than Polk, who was a war president. T.R. is ranked higher than Wilson and Truman, who were war presidents.
Historians look beyond the mere fact of war. Did the president move the nation in new directions, as both Jefferson and Jackson did? Was his administration successful in its policies? Was the nation made better off by it?
FDR, who boldly addressed the causes and effects of the Great Depression, would have been great without war. The six near-greats hold their positions as much for domestic achievement as for war. When FDR insisted in 1938 that a memorial to Jefferson be built (to go with the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial), it was precisely because Jefferson had been a great domestic president, as FDR hoped to be.
The historians are ruthless rating presidents exclusively on achievement in office. Reagan and Kennedy, regarded by many as inspirational presidents, are put below average because their presidencies achieved so little. Grant gets no points either for his military career nor for his memoirs. Eisenhower suffers the same fate, though he, like Truman, has been moving up in the historians' polls.
I believe character and personal achievement do play a role in greatness. Lord Halifax, who should have been Britain's leader in 1940, could never have been Churchill, who had written 15 volumes of history by 1940 and was a heroic figure. De Gaulle's personal courage was legendary, and his four-volume memoirs are among the best in the French language. Jefferson was among the most gifted men of his time. Great leaders are also men of great talent.
Bush has done a first-rate job in leading America's war against the fanatics who attacked us Sept. 11. It is too early, however, to grade him, for too much depends on how he handles the postwar phase, and on the domestic content of his presidency.
It is possible to win the war and lose the peace, as did Wilson. It is also possible to win the war and lose the election, as did Bush's father.
For now, I'd put Bush in the same group as Gerald Ford, who, like Bush was honest, competent and completely uninspiring. Two average men elevated to the presidency by accident.
War or not, Bush has a long way to go. His foreign policies are still marked by a counter-productive unilateralism, and his domestic policies by the same supply-side fixations that wrecked Reagan's presidency.
Bush has been given an enormous political lift by Sept. 11. The rest is yet to be determined.
Goldsborough can be reached via e-mail at jim.goldsborough@uniontrib.com.
Popular president unlikely to voice ugly truths
by Gene Collier
Coming up on 100 days since the terrorist attacks, not enough time that a plane can fly by without being scrutinized for altitude and stability, not enough so the imagination doesn't see it breaking apart in a fireball, not enough so the imagination doesn't do the same to skyscrapers on certain majestically clear mornings.
The government gives us bin Laden on tape, once having warned the media about doing the same, but it still cannot give us bin Laden live, unplugged. Bin Laden's own smooth criminal tour apparently rolls on. There are no T-shirts listing the destinations, so we don't know the next venue. Somalia? Pakistan? Saudi Arabia? Iran? With something like 8 million illegal immigrants in the United States, might Osama summer in Boca Raton?
None of this compromises the success of the Bush administration in fighting terrorism since Sept. 11. Much has been accomplished, and both the president and the military he commands have been forthright in stating that there is simply no quantifying how much remains to be accomplished. No one scorched by 9-11 takes any solace in the knowledge that one can now see a movie and fly a kite in Kabul.
But with the Taliban fallen and bin Laden's al-Qaida network crippled, the looming end of the war's first round begets another roll of the administration's coalition dice, especially if there is all-out war over the Palestinian issue and/or between Pakistan and India. Even if neither situation immolates, George W. Bush should start Round 2 by leveling with an American public that gives him close to a 90 percent approval rate and has shown amazing patience and support for his ready-mix global vision.
He should tell the nation that the mission at hand requires that the United States lie down with rats, that it seek and cultivate associations at odds with its principles, that if, as Bush has already stated, civilization itself is at stake, then intelligence is even more important than muscle, and that civilization-saving intelligence is, at its core, now only available from the slimiest players in human politics.
Are we big enough boys and girls to hear this, or do we have to be pacified by nonsense like "We will not distinguish between terrorists and the nations that harbor them" and "You're either with us or you're with the terrorists"? America's being patronized with that. It's cheap, B-movie twaddle. And it's not true.
Pakistan is with us? Only officially and only for a price. A month after it had said it was cooperating with the multinational anti-terror coalition, Pakistan was still providing safe passage for weapons and ammunition bound for Taliban installations from its bandstand on the most active terrorism superhighway in South Asia. It was only after Western intelligence officials complained that supplies were choked off and the Taliban began to collapse from the inside. Pakistan was the first partner we jumped into bed with after Sept. 11.
Saudi Arabia is with us? Perhaps officially, perhaps royally and perhaps not for long if the Israeli-Palestinian atrocity fest becomes fully uglified. Saudi Arabia is with us only in compliance with its the-insatiable-oil-customer-is-always-right policy and so far as we provide an educational destination for its top students, but it hasn't done nearly enough to discourage the kind of religious extremism that resulted in 15 of the 19 Sept. 11 hijackers being Saudis. Bin Laden himself is a Saudi dissident, and at least one of the figures in the recently released video reportedly spoke in a dialect localized in southern Saudi Arabia.
Even our staunchest European coalition allies have come to recognize Saudi-American relations as troublesome if not incestuous. It was reported on "Newsnight," the BBC's popular current affairs program, not only that America's strategic interest in Saudi Arabia is blunted by U.S. inquiries into suspected terrorists in that country, but that it had been told by a highly placed U.S. intelligence source that there had always been "constraints" on investigating Saudis (and) that under Bush it had gotten much worse. In Paris, a new book by two French intelligence analysts quotes the late FBI deputy director John O'Neill thusly: "The main obstacles to investigating Islamic terrorism were U.S. oil corporate interests and the role played by Saudi Arabia in it."
Our next new "friend" is likely to be Iran, positioned as it is as hotly opposed to the regime of Iraq's Saddam Hussein. Never mind that the State Department listed Iran as the most active state sponsor of terrorism in the world only last year and that factions within Iran's government clearly support Hezbollah and Hamas.
If the president is sure that these are the kind of alliances necessary for a dangerous new century, so be it. Let's put them all in the official team picture and stop strutting around as if we're above the fray.
Gene Collier's e-mail address is gcollier@post-gazette.com.
War Creep
They were the hot wars in a cold war against communism: Korea, Congo, Vietnam, Cuba, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Angola, Grenada, even Afghanistan
Each was different. Each took a heavy toll. But each more or less helped to end the 45-year-long cold war.
Now, after this latest war in Afghanistan, a list of potential wars in the campaign against global terrorism is being drawn up in Washington.
Is Yemen next? Somalia? A few islands in the Philippines or Indonesia? Perhaps Iraq?
Tough choices. Any war is messy, but it's even messier when an enemy is not really a nation but a netherworld network of monied militants who will resort to anything, even suicide and chemical weapons, and who hide out in Muslim sanctuaries of chaotic countries.
Taking down just Al Qaeda may not be all that simple. This American-led war on global terrorism could unleash all sorts of wars that the US may regret, much like the Vietnam war. One problem lies in defining the meaning of "global terrorism."
Take, for instance, last week's suicide attack on India's Parliament, which left 14 people dead. India claims it has evidence that all five of the suicide attackers were Pakistani and members of the Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed terrorist groups, which are based in Pakistan.
Both Pakistan and those groups deny any involvement in the attack. Yet they have, in the past, fought India for control of largely Muslim Kashmir.
If India's evidence is accurate, how should it - and the US - respond to this case of international terrorism?
The US can hardly let India strike Pakistan now, as the US did the Taliban in Afghanistan, when Pakistan is helping the US track down Al Qaeda. Both Pakistan and India have nuclear weapons; the US can't just let a war erupt.
Yet one militant group operating in Kashmir, Harkat-ul Mujahideen, is on a list of 27 terrorist entities whose assets were frozen by the US. And India claims those behind the Dec. 13 attack have ties to Al Qaeda.
All of this is taking place when a US aircraft battlegroup is making an unprecedented port visit to Bombay, part of warming defense ties between India and the US.
President Bush warned of a long campaign. Now he must be more specific, being careful that loaded words don't unleash unnecessary wars. (The Christian Science Monitor)
Bill Clinton: Life is more than the little boxes we live in
From the Dimbleby Memorial Lecture given by the former US President at the Institute of Education in London
I am confident that we have the knowledge and the means to make the 21st century the most peaceful, prosperous, interesting time in all human history. The question is whether we have the wisdom and the will.
The terrorists who struck the Pentagon and the World Trade Centre believe they were attacking symbols of corrupt power and materialism. My family and I have a different view of that. I was Commander-in-Chief of the people who worked at the Pentagon. My wife represents the people of New York in the Senate. I knew people who were on those airplanes. My daughter was in lower Manhattan. I met one of her friends who lost her fiancé. I talked to victims who lost their loved ones who were Jews and Christians and Hindus and Muslims, who came from every continent, including over 250 from the United Kingdom.
To me, all these victims represent the world I worked very hard for eight years to build, a world of expanding freedom, opportunity and citizen responsibility, a world of growth in diversity and in the bonds of community.
The deliberate killing of non-combatants has a long history. No region of the world has been spared it and few people have clean hands. In 1095, Pope Urban II urged the Christian soldiers to embark on the First Crusade to capture Jerusalem for Christ. Well, they did it, and the first thing they did was to burn a synagogue with 300 Jews. They then proceeded to murder every Muslim woman and child on the Temple Mount in a travesty that is still being discussed today in the Middle East. Down through the millennium, innocents continued to die, more in the 20th century than in any previous period.
In my own country, we've come a long way since the days when African slaves and Native Americans could be terrorised or killed with impunity, but still we have the occasional act of brutality or death because of someone's race, religion or sexual orientation.
No terrorist campaign has ever succeeded. Indeed the purpose of terrorism is not military victory, it is to change your behaviour by making you afraid of today, afraid of tomorrow and, in diverse societies like ours, afraid of each other. By definition, a terror campaign cannot succeed unless we become its accomplices and, out of fear, give in. In the years in which I served as President, we worked very hard to prevent a day like 11 September ever happening. Far more terrorist attacks were thwarted at home and around the world than succeeded, and large numbers of terrorists who did commit crimes were brought to justice.
We're gonna win this fight – then what? 11 September was the dark side of this new age of global interdependence. If you don't want to live with barbed wire around your children and grandchildren for the next hundred years, then it's not enough to defeat the terrorist. We have to make a world where there are fewer potential terrorists and more partners. And that responsibility falls primarily upon the wealthy nations to spread the benefits and shrink the burdens.
There are changes that poor countries have to make within that make progress possible. It's no accident that most of these terrorists come from countries that aren't democracies. If you're never required to take responsibility for yourself, then you're kept in a state of permanent immaturity where it's easy to convince you that your distress is caused by someone else's success.
So this is a fight we have to make everywhere. Which will be more important in the 21st century – our differences or our common humanity? Think about how important your differences are to you. Think about how we all organise our lives in little boxes – man, woman, British, American, Muslim, Christian, Jew, Tory, Labour, New Labour, Old Labour, up, down. We have to organise that, but somewhere along the way, we finally come to understand that our life is more than all these boxes we're in. And that if we can't reach beyond that, we'll never have a fuller life.