George W. Bush a Better Than Average President

Andrew Roberts of the Daily Telegraph commences his sum-up of the GWB presidency with a request by the usual airhead ditz American motherhood-hating "feminist." Then he puts a cap in the ample butt of the European and American corrupt and self-absorbed "elites," aided and abetted by a servile leftist media more corrupt than its entitlement-crazed masters.

The funhouse mirror-view of the print and electronic 24-7-365 news cycle has brought superficial celebrity hysterics to a new level, the level of political analysis, and Roberts approaches Christopher Hitchens Olympian perspective on what fools these media-crazed intelligentsia-enamored progressives be. Then he rationally recites a list of accomplishments:

The decisions taken by Mr Bush in the immediate aftermath of that ghastly moment will be pored over by historians for the rest of our lifetimes. One thing they will doubtless conclude is that the measures he took to lock down America's borders, scrutinise travellers to and from the United States, eavesdrop upon terrorist suspects, work closely with international intelligence agencies and take the war to the enemy has foiled dozens, perhaps scores of would-be murderous attacks on America. There are Americans alive today who would not be if it had not been for the passing of the Patriot Act. There are 3,000 people who would have died in the August 2005 airline conspiracy if it had not been for the superb inter-agency co-operation demanded by Bush
after 9/11.
The next factor that will be seen in its proper historical context in years to come will be the true reasons for invading Afghanistan in October 2001 and Iraq in April 2003. The conspiracy theories believed by many (generally, but not always) stupid people – that it was "all about oil", or the securing of contracts for the US-based Halliburton corporation, etc – will slip into the obscurity from which they should never have emerged had it not been for comedian-filmmakers such as Michael Moore.
Instead, the obvious fact that there was a good case for invading Iraq based on 14 spurned UN resolutions, massive human rights abuses and unfinished business following the interrupted invasion of 1991 will be recalled.
Similarly, the cold light of history will absolve Bush of the worst conspiracy-theory accusation: that he knew there were no WMDs in Iraq. History will show that, in common with the rest of his administration, the British Government, Saddam's own generals, the French, Chinese, Israeli and Russian intelligence agencies, and of course SIS and the CIA, everyone assumed that a murderous dictator does not voluntarily destroy the WMD arsenal he has used against his own people. And if he does, he does not then expel the UN weapons inspectorate looking for proof of it, as he did in 1998 and again in 2001.
Mr Bush assumed that the Coalition forces would find mass graves, torture chambers, evidence for the gross abuse of the UN's food-for-oil programme, but also WMDs. He was right about each but the last, and history will place him in the mainstream of Western, Eastern and Arab thinking on the matter.
History will probably, assuming it is researched and written objectively, congratulate Mr Bush on the fact that whereas in 2000 Libya was an active and vicious member of what he was accurately to describe as an "axis of evil" of rogue states willing to employ terrorism to gain its ends, four years later Colonel Gaddafi's WMD programme was sitting behind glass in a museum in Oakridge, Tennessee.

The hyperventilating exhalations of the delusional left [and a lot of spineless center-left fellow-travelers] spew endless quantities of calumny and obloquy on George W. Bush, projecting their cartoonish exaggerations unabated by any respect for reason or actual research---only polemics are allowed in the salons of the delusional truffle snuffers in the left-wing media. Actually, George W. Bush, despite jokes by clowns such as Leno and Letterman about his supposed illiteracy and ignorance, is a vastly read consumer of biographies and historical memoirs. Very unfashionable nowadays in this age of solecisms and ignorance of even elemental history on the part of the cable-news mafia on the Left. But GWB was also betrayed by former "allies," including the perfidious and corrupt president of France, who was a long-time friend of Saddam H. and who was almost certainly taking large payments [in gold specie as preferred by French politicians] from Saddam's half-brother, the Iraqi Ambassador to the UN complex in Geneva. Jacques Shh-iraq had already betrayed Valery Giscard D'Estaing and his own party by helping Mitterand defeat VGD'E in 1981, a fact Mitterand fessed up to on his deathbed. All so that Chirac himself would be POTRoF after Mitterand's socialism had worked its mischief for a dozen years---and Chirac himself was saddled with a socialist Prime Minister after botching up the Gaullist Party in the mid-'90s. But Chirac reserved his greatest incompetent treason for the Iraq situation, while the bullion arrived from Geneva to keep him on the side of tyranny and genocide [Kurdish, that is]. As his countryman Bernard-Henri Levy frequently shouts from the rooftops, Chirac was on the side of the demons by protecting Saddam and his Operation Anfal from eventual retribution. More from Roberts:

With his characteristic openness and at times almost self-defeating honesty, Mr Bush has been the first to acknowledge his mistakes – for example, tardiness over Hurricane Katrina – but there are some he made not because he was a ranting Right-winger, but because he was too keen to win bipartisan support. The invasion of Iraq should probably have taken place months earlier, but was held up by the attempt to find support from UN security council members, such as Jacques Chirac's France, that had ties to Iraq and hostility towards the Anglo-Americans.
History will also take Mr Bush's verbal fumbling into account, reminding us that Ronald Reagan also mis-spoke regularly, but was still a fine president. The first
MBA president, who had a higher grade-point average at Yale than John Kerry, Mr Bush's supposed lack of intellect will be seen to be a myth once the papers in his Presidential Library in the Southern Methodist University in Dallas are available.
Films such as Oliver Stone's W, which portray him as a spitting, oafish frat boy who eats with his mouth open and is rude to servants, will be revealed by the diaries and correspondence of those around him to be absurd travesties, of this charming, interesting, beautifully mannered history buff who, were he not the most powerful man in the world, would be a fine person to have as a pal.
Instead of Al Franken, history will listen to Bob Geldof praising Mr Bush's efforts over Aids and malaria in Africa; or to Manmohan Singh, the prime minister of India, who told him last week: "The people of India deeply love you." And certainly to the women of Afghanistan thanking him for saving them from Taliban abuse, degradation and tyranny.
When Abu Ghraib is mentioned, history will remind us that it was the Bush Administration that imprisoned those responsible for the horrors. When water-boarding is brought up, we will see that it was only used on three suspects, one of whom was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, al-Qaeda's chief of operational planning, who divulged vast amounts of information that saved hundreds of innocent lives. When extraordinary renditions are queried, historians will ask how else the world's most dangerous terrorists should have been transported. On scheduled flights?
The credit crunch, brought on by the Democrats in Congress insisting upon home ownership for credit-unworthy people, will initially be blamed on Bush, but the perspective of time will show that the problems at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac started with the deregulation of the Clinton era. Instead Bush's very
un-ideological but vast rescue package of $700 billion (£480 billion) might well be seen as lessening the impact of the squeeze, and putting America in position to be the first country out of recession, helped along by his huge tax-cut packages since 2000.

More importantly, GWB showed exceptional moral courage when he backed Gen. Petraeus's daring plan to increase US troops in Iraq, the so-called Surge. Despite grandstanding by the likes of the cowardly Hillary Clinton and thedespicable NYT which allowed a cabal of treasonous whack-jobs [MoveOn.org] a discount in printing a manifesto the day the esteemed General testified in front of Congress, the Surge worked and girly-men like Harry Reid have had to eat their treasonous words about the war being "lost." If they had any sense of honor, they would feel shame, but they are shameless and without conscience.

Sneered at for being "simplistic" in his reaction to 9/11, Bush's visceral responses to the attacks of a fascistic, totalitarian death cult will be seen as having been substantially the right ones.
Mistakes are made in every war, but when virtually the entire military, diplomatic and political establishment in the West opposed it, Bush insisted on the surge in Iraq that has been seen to have brought the war around, and set Iraq on the right path. Today its GDP is 30 per cent higher than under Saddam, and it is free of a brutal dictator and his rapist sons.
The number of American troops killed during the eight years of the War against Terror has been fewer than those slain capturing two islands in the Second World War, and in Britain we have lost fewer soldiers than on a normal weekend on the Western Front. As for civilians, there have been fewer Iraqis killed since the invasion than in 20 conflicts since the Second World War.
Iraq has been a victory for the US-led coalition, a fact that the Bush-haters will have to deal with when perspective finally – perhaps years from now – lends objectivity to this fine man's record.

Roberts and The Telegraph demonstrate, as does Bernard-Henry Levi, that not all Europeans have succumbed to the collective hysteria engendered by the continent's loss of real power on the geopolitical stage.