He Kept Us Safe

By Alan Caruba

I know any number of people who truly hate George W. Bush. The mainstream media are always telling us that John McCain will lose because the Democrats have hung “George Bush’s third term” around his neck and is counting on the rather widespread disaffection for the President, whether it be Democrat or Republican.

I am not convinced of that. Though when I read the environmental balderdash on McCain’s website these days, I just want to puke.

Sometimes, however, you need to look beyond our shores to know that some people “get it” when it comes to the most particular role that George W. Bush has played in the last nearly eight years in office.

Take, for example, a column in the Guardian, a very liberal British newspaper and one not known for being fond of the U.S. Imagine my surprise to read on June 17, “Bush made the world a safer place” by Oliver Kamm.

“The postwar history of our continent would be different and less benign if the United States had heeded that message (to go home). His office, and the system of collective security from which we benefit, would be justification enough to welcome President Bush’s visit to London last week. But there is an additional reason peculiar to the Bush presidency. For all Bush’s verbal infelicity, diplomatic brusqueness, negligence in planning for post-Saddam Iraq, and insouciance regarding standards of due process when prosecuting the war on terror, the world is a safer place for the influence he has exercised.”

Well, bravo! Well said!

At long last it has taken an Englishman to note that Bush decided to kill jihadists in their backyard instead of waiting for them to show up here again after 9/11. Given the courage, discipline, training, and superior firepower of our military, we have done a splendid job. This explains why Iraqis are beginning to show signs of figuring out how to run Iraq without the need for a war-mongering pathological sadist and his two sons.

Depending on who succeeds Bush, the U.S. will either pull out, laying waste to the sacrifices of our soldiers or we shall be there for McCain’s metaphorical hundred years. American military bases have been in England and Europe since 1945.

At this point, one can rather confidently conclude that Barack Hussein Obama has no stomach for a war with the Islamists who cut off the heads of those they take prisoner and thus can be said to share an “insouciance regarding standards of due process.”

I have had no end of complaint about George W. Bush over the years, but I will grant him that not one, single act of terrorism has occurred in the United States under his watch. No one in 2001 would have bet $2 that the U.S. would have enjoyed such remarkable security. Instead, the Islamists attacked London and Glasgow, Madrid and Bali.

Historians will judge Bush’s two terms in the light of hindsight, but Americans, always impatient, always reluctant to wage war or address the need to fix the things we broke in the process, worried about $4 a gallon gasoline and the rising price of avocadoes, need to keep in mind that the war in Afghanistan and Iraq has maintained the peace here at home.