Shorter Lynne Olson: I know Winston Churchill. And George W. Bush, you are no Winston Churchill.
In its full length, Olson's column is a very good, short treatment of an important historical parallel (or not so parallel) to the Iraq war. Take a minute or two to read the whole thing.
This paragraph jumped out at me:
The president no doubt has his own Churchill. "He was resolute," Bush has remarked. "He was tough. He knew what he believed." But Churchill would snort, I believe, at the administration's equation of "Islamofascism," an amorphous, ill-defined movement of killers forced to resort to terrorism by their lack of military might, to Nazi Germany, a global power that had already conquered several countries before Churchill took office in 1940. Still, key members of the Bush administration have compared critics of the wars on terrorism and in Iraq to the appeasers of the 1930s, thus implicitly equating their boss and themselves to Churchill and the "troublesome young men" who helped bring him to power. During bleak days in Iraq, the administration's hawks can be forgiven for hoping that history will show them to be as far-sighted about a gathering storm as Churchill was in the 1930s.To be fair, history is working at a significant handicap this time around, with a joker like Bush for president and "troublesome young men" of the likes of Jonah Goldberg, Glenn Reynolds and Tony Snow.
God forbid that the United States under Bush should have to fight an enemy with close to our own resources. Swiftboating isn't much of a military doctrine.
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