President’s Iraq policy will be more appropriately judged decades from now
When a politician in a democracy has climbed to the top of the greasy pole there is no where else to go but down and out.
This is the nature of democratic politics and, ironically, this is its virtue above any other form of government, for no elected president or prime minister is a monarch for life.
The thing that should matter most to a politician on reaching the top of the greasy pole is to do what is right as he sees it from that height, and have faith that history will judge fairly irrespective of contemporary opinions rarely rising above partisanship.
Doing what is right when a democracy is threatened from within or attacked from outside is almost without exception a bitterly contested matter. It is also a standard which separates leaders seeking praise of their contemporaries from those prepared to bear the derision of the moment for history’s assessment.
The acrimony in American politics in the midst of a war is not unexpected for democracies. As I watched on Tuesday night as George Bush, America’s 43rd president, gave his sixth State of the Union address to the U.S. Congress my thoughts went back to Harry Truman, America’s 33rd president.
Truman assumed the presidency in April 1945 on the death of President Franklin Roosevelt. He would be elected on his own merit to the White House in November 1948.
Truman’s presidency, especially in the years after 1948, was riddled with foreign policy difficulties when Americans longed for peace after the tumult and sacrifices in the war against Germany and Japan. Instead Americans were drawn into an entirely new sort of great power rivalry in the infancy of the nuclear age against the Soviet Union and worldwide communism, while smoke from World War II was still in the nostril of survivors.
Truman barely won the 1948 election, and then the Korean War just about destroyed his presidency. He was vilified by opponents in the Congress, and his cabinet secretaries were derided.
Truman’s standing in the public opinion poll plummeted to the mid-twenties ahead of the 1952 presidential election, and he decided not to seek re-election.
He once observed, “Everybody wants something at the expense of everybody else and nobody thinks much of the other fellow.”
David McCullough, Truman’s biographer, wrote that the president confided privately that “there were more prima donnas per square foot in public life in Washington than in all the opera companies ever to exist,” and they opposed merely for the sake of opposing.
Stood firm
But Truman stood firm despite the vagaries of domestic politics. He was the architect of containment—the policy to deny expansion of Soviet communism in a divided Europe and a weak and unsure Asia—that became the defining element of U.S. foreign and military policy through the next eight administrations until the “evil empire,” as Ronald Reagan described the Soviet Union, crumbled and vanished.
Historians have reassessed the opinions of Truman’s contemporaries and reached their consensus, as George Bush contemplates his departure from the White House, that Roosevelt’s successor deserves to be ranked among America’s great presidents.
Bush has broadly defined the nature of America’s commitment to defeat radical Islamism, the fascist ideology of our time, as Truman did in containing communism.
Fifty-five years after Truman’s presidency ended in acrimony, American forces remain on the Korean peninsula and, most likely, so will American forces remain for some unknown numbers of years in Iraq securing the region after Bush departs from Washington.
And George Bush, not unlike Harry Truman, will be judged fairly long after his partisan critics have bitten dust and been forgotten.
He is a member of the Board of Directors for the Center for Islamic Pluralism based in Washington, D.C., a Senior Fellow with the Canadian Coalition for Democracies, and an academic-consultant with the Center for Security Policy in Washington, D.C. He has been a consultant with CIDA on development issues and has published widely in academic journals on foreign policy matters and area studies of the Middle East and South Asia.
Mansur is featured on the documentary Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West produced by the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He also unsuccessfully ran for the Canadian Alliance party in 2000.
Mansur has been accused by Canadian Islamic Congress of using "provocative, self-serving rhetoric", and for "promoting an anti-Arab and anti-Muslim agenda".
He is an Ismaili Muslim.
At a press conference on October 2, 2008, Mansur stated that "Islam is my private life, my conscience...[but] my faith does not take precedence over my duties...to Canada and its constitution, which I embrace freely;" "I am first and most importantly a Canadian;" "only in a free society will you find Islam as a faith and not a political religion." Mansur also criticized New Democratic Party Leader Jack Layton, whom Mansur said "has gone to bed with Islamists", because he is running candidates in Ontario and Quebec who are closely identified with the push for Sharia law.
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