From NRO Corner 8/14.  VDH is the best.



It’ ain’t over, till it’s over... [Victor Davis Hanson]



With all the news about Rove leaving and the president down to his last year and a half, with his approval polls not much above 30 percent, and the same old media chorus about the lamest of the lame ducks, etc, we forget that 17 months is an entire era in politics and the world often changes as we speak.

For all the mistakes-run-away federal spending that discredited the efficacy of tax cuts, the lack of a veto in the first term, too many uninspired but highly visible appointments, the disastrous immigration policies of the last six years, the equivocal occupation in Iraq (from the pullback from 1st Fallujah to the reprieve given Sadr to cumbersome efforts to make the perfect water, sewer, or electrical systems when ad hoc local ones were needed, et al)—we forget that all of this is still reversible and that in fact many things are in flux still.

There has been no repeat of 9/11, and for all the hysteria, al Qaeda really is scattered, and its rhetoric is wearing thin on the Middle East street.

Afghanistan is doing better than the media lets on. Korea could still disarm, and internal opposition in Iran is growing and its foreign friends shrinking.

Europe is slowly changing, and more worried about Americans leaving than staying, or not leading than preempting. The strong-arm rise of Russia and the endemic criminalities of China have sobered anti-American European diplomats, and much of the world at large. The economy is still good, and, at last, the border is starting slowly to close (I say this after listening to complaints of employers in the
Central Valley).

If Iraq can be stabilized, then the enormity of that achievement will eventually be appreciated and dwarf all else (taking out the worst regime in the Middle East and fostering a consensual society in its place, while defeating on its home ground the worst radical Islam has to offer). The Democrats seem to have ceased blaming each other for voting for Iraq, and demanding time lines of immediate withdrawal, but now are shifting in order to have a fallback position of “Well, they finally listened to me in Iraq and so things settled down” should Gen. Petraeus’ report convince even some of them of real progress.

The responsibility of governance is not the same thing as easy op-ed criticism, and the nation is learning just that as it listens to our would-be future presidents—whether Obama’s apparent Pakistan invasion option, or Hillary’s pandering with pseudo-accent to African-Americans, or the obsessions of Mrs. Edwards with Obama, or her husband’s continual embarrassment of living high in one nation, while lecturing others about the needs of the other.

I say all this remembering that friends used to tell me that in March 1991 George Bush would win by a landslide in 1992, and in 1987 Ronald Reagan would either be impeached or resign, or that after 9/11 and the despicable pardons, Bill Clinton would be ranked among our very worst presidents.

The point is that few know exactly how the country and the world will look by November 2008, but it may very well be that the U.S. will enjoy a position of strength and respect abroad and security at home — and someone still in office in late 2008 will get a great deal of credit for that.


08/14 12:07 PM