Iraq

Bush leaves tomorrow. The economy is in terrible shape, and it went down on Bush’s watch. Bush is in danger of being remembered as 2008’s Herbert Hoover. Bush oversaw the federal relief effort after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and the feds, along with Louisiana and New Orleans officials, share responsibility for that mess. One can safely say Bush earns bad grades for both the economic downturn and Katrina’s problems.

Then there is Iraq. Democrats and the media fixated on Iraq from the beginning as Vietnam II. After Vietnam, we were supposed to be smart enough not to start a counterinsurgency. Yet Bush did. Sure Congress, including lots of Democrats, authorized the war. But Bush made the decision to go in, and it was so wrong. Or was it?

Now we know Iraq wasn’t Vietnam II. The U.S. made serious mistakes in Iraq in 2003-04, mistakes that led directly to 2006’s escalation of violence between Sunnis and Shiites. But as we did in World War II after failures in North Africa and Anzio, in Korea after misjudging Chinese intentions there, and in Vietnam after watching Westmorland’s “search and destroy” strategy fail, we adjusted in Iraq after 2006. Under David Petraeus, we turned defeat in Iraq into victory in about 18 months.

It makes a gigantic difference that we won in Iraq and al Qaeda and Muqtada al Sadr’s militia lost. Saddam Hussein is gone. Democracy may indeed stand a chance in the Arab world. The U.S. military has won again—Marines can add another line to their hymn. I don’t buy the stuff about how hard the victory was. You can’t say so publicly, but the total number of Americans killed in action is so much below that reached in previous tough wars, and our military gets better and better at reducing the number of civilian casualties they cause (as opposed to terrorist killings of civilians).

Bush took on al Qaeda after 9.11, defeated them in Afghanistan (though not yet in Pakistan’s Northwest frontier region), defeated al Qaeda and al Sadr’s militia in Iraq, and kept America free from the follow-on terrorist attack we all expected would come. Eventually, history will accord Bush credit for his most important work.