True Greatness with the Passage of Time

Mr. Quarter could not agree more the with assessment of Andrew Roberts who writes in The Australian that when the background noise of the 24 hour news cycle abates, history will surely judge the George W. Bush Presidency differently. He is correct that the weak kneed elites of the East Coast and Europe are so completely blinded by their Bush Hatred, that only the objective viewpoint of history will truly give George W. Bush the credit he is due.

Excerpts of Mr. Roberts article are provided below because, frankly, Mr. Quarter couldn't have said it any better.

"One thing [historians] will doubtless conclude is that the measures [Bush] took to lock down America's borders, scrutinise travellers to and from the US, eavesdrop on 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 but for the passage of the Patriot Act. There are 3000 people who would have died in the August 2005 airliner conspiracy if it had not been for the superb inter-agency co-operation demanded by Bush after September 11."


With regard to Iraq, Mr. Roberts summarizes quite nicely: ".... the obvious fact that there was a good case for invading Iraq [was] based on 14 spurned UN resolutions, massive human rights abuses and unfinished business following the interrupted invasion of 1991 will be recalled.

History will show that, in common with the rest of his administration, the British government, Saddam Hussein's own generals, the French, Chinese, Israeli and Russian intelligence agencies, and of course the Secret Intelligence Service 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.

Bush assumed that the coalition forces would find mass graves, torture chambers, evidence for the gross abuse of the UN's food-for-oil program, 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."

"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 used on only three suspects, one of whom was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, al-Qa'ida'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?"

And bringing Libya into the fold of civilized nations was a Bush accomplishment. Mr. Roberts summarizes as follows: "History will probably, assuming it is researched and written objectively, congratulate 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 Muammar Gaddafi's WMD program was sitting behind glass in a museum"

George Bush certainly bears little or no responsibility for the current economic crisis as Mr. Roberts ably points out: "The credit crunch, brought on by the Democrats in Congress insisting on home ownership for non-creditworthy 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 $US700 billion ($1 trillion) 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. "


Mr. Quarter believes that George W. Bush will, in the light of history be viewed as a fine man and one of the greatest Presidents.