<p>Great post, BedHead.</p>
<p>Instead of defending Bush the Lesser and Clinton, Lets try to put Bush in an historical perspective. Is he worse than Hoover and Nixon? How about Carter, Harding or Tyler? </p>
<p>Any similarities in these bottom ranking administrations that we can learn from as the primaries heat up? Love to hear the thoughts out there.</p>
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<p>Nixon, not nearly as good as. Nixon’s twin failings (an almost socialist affection with directly messing with the domestic economy, and overweening paranoia) were offset by a real gift for international relations and the eventual extraction of the US from the Johnsonian mess in Vietnam. You can criticize him for not getting the US out of Southeast Asia sooner, but you can’t deny that US military levels started declining as soon as he took office, and kept dropping until the withdrawal was complete. I’ve never quite figured out why Nixon and the Republicans get the bad rap for the Vietnam war in US history, when it was two Democratic presidents and a Democratic congress that was responsible.</p>
<p>Hoover, probably not.</p>
<p>Carter, about the same.</p>
<p>Harding, much better than.</p>
<p>Tyler, tricky question. Tyler’s failings were all “inside baseball” problems. He rejected his party’s policies, they rejected him, and he spent his term in office being opposed by both his party and the opposition. He did have a GWB-like political tin ear, I suppose, but in terms of what his administration actually DID, I can’t come up with anything that was particularly damaging to the Republic. So, in that sense, I would say that Tyler was better than GWB, and may not even belong on a list of the ten worst presidents anyway.</p>
<p>Thanks for the thoughtful, informed post</p>
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<p>There was a long thread asking people to rank their best/worst presidents, and there was interesting discussion about it.</p>
<p><a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/showthread.php?t=291233&highlight=andrew+jackson[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/showthread.php?t=291233&highlight=andrew+jackson</a></p>
<p>I do believe that in terms of historical perspective, Bush’s relative ranking in the last decile of bad presidents will still be up for grabs. What will determine his eventual ranking, I believe, is going to be our performance in Iraq, security concerns such as whether a nuke is detonated in our city any time soon, our economic performance relative to our twin economic deficits particularly in light of how the dollar/interest rates do. If anything dramatic happens or falters on his watch or close to it, he will be seen very concretely as not minding the shop in the face of real threats.</p>
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<p>If you think the Iraq War was a misguided distraction from our real security concerns, as I always have and an increasing and now overwhelming number of Americans do, you will see his being tied with Carter as an utter joke. Carter was a dithery, ineffective leader. But he wasn’t an amateur like Bush who got us into a draining war that will have cost us $1 trillion and achieved little good for us or our allies. There is no comparison, if you look at policy outcomes. I do agree that for his crimes and his drawbacks, Nixon had real genius in certain areas.</p>
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<p>At a certain point, an Administration must assume responsibility for a bad policy, unless it acts to change it. But you hit on a key point. The reason I always thought Vietnam had value as an analogy for Iraq is exactly this: we are damned if we leave (because it may be perceived as signaling weakness to enemies) or if we stay (because our mission is unachievable or at least not being achieved). Nixon faced such a dilemma, and one could argue, shouldn’t therefore be blamed for the war stretching on.</p>
<p>This also explains the contortions the Democrats are going through to avoid getting out in front on Iraq by taking the boldest steps possible to bring the troops home. They don’t want to “own” Iraq the way that Nixon found himself owning Vietnam. Nixon similarly didn’t want to pull out quickly and have to admit defeat. The War was started by a Republican president presiding over a Republican congress. Whatever is said about bipartisanship in the vote, this is an overriding reality. Look how Bush posits the choice so often: “get the job done or embrace defeat.” He wants to box the Democrats into this corner and they don’t want to be there.</p>
<p>Regarding Bush Jr., as a former aide to Bush Sr. Jim Pinkerton pointed out, his Iraq policy now amounts to avoiding being president when the war ends.</p>
<p>Oh, and Bush Sr., ironically, would have to be considered a pretty good president all things considered on the international and domestic fronts, I think, but that’s another topic.</p>
<p>good posts bedhead & washdad – feel free to keep 'em coming.</p>
<p>In fairness to Carter, you almost have to give him an “INCOMPLETE”.</p>
<p>External events (the Arab oil embargo) fueled inflation like an out of control brushfire that pretty much doomed his presidency. It is very difficult to look good with double digit inflation.</p>
<p>In a way, you kind of have to view Ford and Carter as a matched set of relatively inconsequential Presidents. It’s not like either made a monumental historic blunder like unilaterally going to war on false pretenses with absolutely no end-game strategy.</p>
<p>The one similarity that may be reasonable between Carter and Bush is that both became preoccupied with demonization of an attacker (the Alloyatollah and Al Queda, respectively) to a degree that probably gave more legitimacy to the enemy than warranted.</p>
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<p>They don’t have the votes to do anything. The only option they have would be to zero out the military budget. As long as there is a dollar in the kitty, Bush will spend it in Iraq and bleed the preparedness of the military dry to do it.</p>
<p>Remember, they are dealing with a President who refused the life preserver thrown to him by the bipartisan Iraq Study Group. </p>
<p>As long as the Republicans in Congress are willing to go down with the good ship Bushie, the policy will continue.</p>
<p>And the Democrats have already split on the war resolution, with the majority claiming they will continue financial support.</p>
<p>Bush has a blank check. He will continue to waste our blood and treasure into the foreseeable future.</p>
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<p>That’s like my wife and I splitting on what color our new Bentley convertible will be when both of us know there isn’t a snowball’s chance of actually buying a new Bentley convertible.</p>
<p>The Democrats don’t have the votes to change the Iraq policy. They’ve only got 49 votes in the Senate. They need 60 to stop a filibuster and 67 to override a Presidential veto.</p>
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Right. Until we make a mess of things and then ask for their help to bail us out. What much of the world regrets is America’s decline of from moral leader to the role of unilateral bully. And citing Pakistan is folly: we’re one coup away from disaster. </p>
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Do not confuse “terrorism,” in which even the much-maligned French are effective partners, with the war in Iraq or the jingoistic saber rattling versus Iran.</p>
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<p>Agreed. But they could zero out the military budget, or at least put the option as a serious one on the table and make strong efforts to rally people to it. But the fact is, IMO, as I said above: they don’t want to own this war. Zeroing out the military budget would put them firmly in charge of war policy and hang the millstone of the bloody aftermath that’s bound to occur whether we leave now or ten years from now (unless the current level of civil war succeeds in eradicating the Sunnis before this time so that there is no war left to fight in ten years).</p>
<p>While I think zeroing out the budget would be the most honest step to take, there is actually something to be said for more of our soldiers dying on the altar of our president’s failed policies and stubborness in this war. </p>
<p>I have a good Republican friend who thinks that Vietnam was merely a failure of will on our parts. And this has been brought up again and again as a piece of revisionism recently particularly in the right-wing punditocracy. I saw Glenn Beck on CNN say something to the effect that the Democrats are pushing us in the same direction of the mistakes we made in Vietnam, as if implying that if we had just held on longer and used more force, we would have won that war. </p>
<p>People absolutely do not want to or cannot understand a) that there are limits to our policies and our power and b) that, as stated by Rescorla in the video I posted two posts ago, military power is often secondary in the long-term to national will and the desire of peoples and nations to determine their own destiny. [I mean that’s what our Revolutionary War was all about, no?] </p>
<p>It may be that hanging on until defeat is more obvious in Iraq than it is now would, in the long run, make it less likely that we engage in such a fool’s errand again soon. And thereby, perhaps in the long run fewer of our soldiers would die because our populace would really have digested the fact that this war was a really bad idea to begin with, and also poorly fought. Maybe it would make us less likely to jump into another war like this.</p>
<p>But I am probably being way too optimistic on this score. And anyway, tell that to the mother of a soldier who is asked to be one of the last to die for a failed policy.</p>
<p>“And citing Pakistan is folly: we’re one coup away from disaster.”
So, so, so true. I think it’s a matter of when, not if.</p>
<p>"People absolutely do not want to or cannot understand a) that there are limits to our policies and our power "</p>
<p>I am a republican and I agree with that statement wholeheartedly. I also believe that Vietman did reflect a significant failure of will and the consequences were ghastly. As a child of a military officer and brilliant tactician, I was always taught that if you’re not prepared to win, then you shouldn’t engage. I have, sadly, come to believe that President Bush wasn’t prepared to win.</p>
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<p>My uncle ran a CIA interrogation unit in Saigon in the relatively early days of the war. He said that what we failed to understand is that the Viet Cong just wanted it more. [By the way, he says that our torture policies in this war have been absurd for the very simple reason that you cannot believe anything people tell you under the duress of torture, putting away any moral argument.] And we, as outsiders, weren’t fighting for our own lands, we were always going to be a temporary intervening force. No amount of will on our part, short of that expressed by bombing Vietnam to total non-existence, was going to overcome this national will on their part. Remember: the Vietnamese had had hundreds of years fighting off the interference of the Chinese. We were on the wrong side of this fight in the 50’s. We should have supported the Vietnamese against the French; this was a fight for self-sovereignty.</p>
<p>For me, another sadness is in the career of Colin Powell, someone who knew from his experience like your father (or maybe mother) the lesson you just stated. But he couldn’t get out of his role as cautious, dutiful soldier-turned-politician to stick by his convictions which had leaked out periodically in the run-up to this war. He had the potential to be a great man, as viewed by history.</p>
<p>"He said that what we failed to understand is that the Viet Cong just wanted it more. "</p>
<p>Believe it or not, we’re not disagreeing on that. If it wasn’t so profoundly important to our national interests and national will that we would do whatever was required to win, then another path should have been chosen.</p>
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<p>I think the Democrats are doing everything they can in the face of a President who is committed to pursuing a policy no matter what. I mean…if the November elections didn’t get his attention, then I don’t think Democratic Congressional votes are going make any difference.</p>
<p>The American people aren’t stupid. They see whose war this is and they know which Congressmen and Senators are voting in lockstep with the President’s policy. They will get another opportunity to express the people’s will in November 2008.</p>
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<p>He should have resigned instead of giving that speech to the UN.</p>
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<p>And it won’t come soon enough, assuming you are right.</p>
<p>I think the Democrats are doing all they can within the real constraints they face both substantially and politically. But they have been more reserved at least in their statements than some on the left hope for, and I think this has been for good reason.</p>
<p>I am a republican and I agree with that statement wholeheartedly. I also believe that Vietman did reflect a significant failure of will and the consequences were ghastly. As a child of a military officer and brilliant tactician, I was always taught that if you’re not prepared to win, then you shouldn’t engage. I have, sadly, come to believe that President Bush wasn’t prepared to win.</p>
<p>The “failure of will” and the Viet Cong “just wanting it more” has to do with us misunderstanding what the Viet Cong were fighting for.</p>
<p>We thought that the Viet Cong were just another expanding cog of the Communist movement, while the Viet Cong saw the war as a fight for nationalism/independence from foreign interlopers/colonial powers (sound familiar?).</p>
<p>The irony is that Ho Chi Minh was a great admirer of our Founding Fathers and came to us a no. of times for help (he finally turned to the PRC and the Soviet Union after both Wilson and Truman rejected his overtures).</p>
<p>Winning the Vietnam War was near impossible. The Viet Cong were willing to die for what they saw as nationalism and independence and despite our efforts to kill as many of them as possible, we hardy made a dent in their determination (there is an argument that we may have “won” the war if the military’s hands weren’t tied up from undergoing an all-out bombing campaign of NV, basically, reducing it to a moonscape - but is that really victory?).</p>
<p>As for the war in Iraq - one of the major tenents of military “no-nos” is don’t invade and occupy a Middle Eastern country (btw, what happened to all the conservative rationale for not being engaged in “nation-building”?) - which Cheney/Bush and their cohorts, seemingly, had no problem overriding.</p>
<p>However, since Cheney/Bush/Rummy were insistent on this invasion, at , they could’ve, at the very least, given this “adventure” as much chance of a success (how little that may have been) by better preparing for the invasion/occupation.</p>
<p>Instead of rebuking/denigrating Gen. Shinseki, they should have started building up US troop strength. </p>
<p>If this war in Iraq is as vital as Bush repeatedly states to our national security interests - then why don’t we have as many troops as Gen. Petraeus initially recommended for a surge (btw, this should have been done 4-5 years ago)? 20,000 additional troops is only a fraction of what Gen. Petraeus originally recommended.</p>
<p>Our Army/Marine Corps/Reserves are so stretched that the “surge” can only be sustained maybe until the end of summer (the “end of summer” talk has everything to do with the capabilities of our military and little to do with the what is actually dictated by events on the ground).</p>
<p>If Bush was really intent on winning this thing (or at least, giving it the best shot), he should have implemented a draft years ago.</p>
<p>Yup. Collective sacrifice is the only way…unfortunately for Bush, he has not an iota of political capital left, so unless he calls martial law (which is absolutely possible), I don’t see a draft on the horizon.</p>