George W. Bush Was Right

William Butler Yeats sure had the Age of Obama right:

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere 

The ceremony of innocence is drowned.

Yeats goes on to suggest that “surely some revelation is  at hand.” Public opinion polls are modern democracy’s substitute for revelation. And there’s an interesting new poll at hand. One might even call it revelatory.

What does CNN’s recent survey reveal? That for the first time in a decade, more Americans now have a favorable than an unfavorable view of George W. Bush. Viewed positively by only a third of Americans when he left office in 2009, Bush had improved to 46 percent/51 percent favorability/unfavorability a year ago. He’s now at 52/43.

Now it’s of course true that 52 percent of Americans can be wrong. They were when they voted to reelect President Obama in 2012. But in this case, we think they’re saying something instructive. What they’re saying is that George W. Bush was—basically—right.

Bush was right to take the jihadist threat seriously after 9/11 (though he may have fallen prey to euphemism at times in describing it). He was right to insist on legislation that authorized surveillance and other efforts to thwart and defeat the terrorists.

Bush was also right to see that the combination of terrorism, Islamic jihadism, and weapons of mass destruction is particularly dangerous. He was right to think that Iraq, Iran, and North Korea posed particular threats. It’s unfortunate he couldn’t do more about Iran and North Korea—but his administration ended with Iraq pacified and reasonably calm, and with pro-Western and anti-jihadist elements strengthened in Iran and Syria. Unfortunately, he was succeeded by an administration that failed to support those forces in Iran in 2009, or in Syria in 2011.

Bush was right that there is no substitute for American leadership in a dangerous world, and that “leading from behind” is no substitute for .??.??. leading. He was right to see that preemption would at times be necessary in dealing with 21st-century threats, and that, like it or not, there would sometimes be no substitute for American boots on the ground. He was right to sense that the old Middle East was unsalvageable, and that a freedom agenda aimed at fostering constructive regime change was right and necessary. 

Bush certainly made mistakes. His first-term team of Rumsfeld, Powell, and Rice was often dysfunctional. He was too slow to react to setbacks in Iraq, though he deserves enormous credit for the surge in 2007, which effectively won the war. He failed to deal decisively with Iran even after the mullahs had been intimidated and weakened by the intervention in Iraq, and in his second term (with the exception of the surge) backed off pretty much across the board, even leaving the Israelis to deal with the Iranian-North Korean nuclear plant being built in Syria—an abdication of American responsibility that set an unfortunate example for his successor.

Bush’s mistake was not his ambitious foreign policy agenda. It was the failure to educate the country as to its merits and necessity and then the decision to retreat from it more than perhaps he had to. The Bush Doctrine and the freedom agenda should have been pursued more robustly. The problem with Bush was that he wasn’t Bush-like enough.

Perhaps Bush wasn’t quite up to the task he set for himself and for the country. But which president in the last century got it all right? Franklin Roosevelt deceived himself about Stalin. China went Communist and North Korea invaded the South on Harry Truman’s watch. Ronald Reagan pulled out of Lebanon in a way that encouraged the Iranian regime, and other jihadists, to believe that terror worked.

But those presidents were all basically right, and so was Bush. Bush was perhaps most like Truman, who got the big picture right and laid the groundwork for a reasonably successful U.S. foreign policy for subsequent decades. But Truman, who left office even less popular than Bush, had a responsible and competent successor. Bush had no such luck.

Truman’s party returned to power after eight years. Eisenhower’s vice president was defeated, as Obama’s heir likely will be. And when Truman’s party returned to office, the torch passed to a new generation with John Kennedy. But it was a torch Truman lit. 

In his eulogy to Yeats, W. H. Auden wrote,

Follow, poet, follow right

To the bottom of the night,

With your unconstraining voice

Still persuade us to rejoice.

Whose will be the unconstraining voice that will, in 2016, persuade us to emerge from the depths of Obama’s foreign policy and rise to our historic task? 

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William Kristol is editor of The Weekly Standard, which, together with Fred Barnes and John Podhoretz, he founded in 1995. Kristol regularly appears on Fox News Sunday and on the Fox News Channel.