IN MANY WAYS, the year 2005 ends as it began: with millions of Iraqis defying the terrorists to cast ballots; with President Bush hailing the election as a milestone; with nit-pickers fretting about the sulky Sunnis; with the White House coming under fire for its homeland-security efforts; and with Democrats flying their George McGovern-Frank Church freak flag ever more ostentatiously.
Who were the Big Winners of 2005? It sounds terribly earnest and formulaic to say “the Iraqi people”–so let’s include them among the broader class of “new democrats.” Indeed, the past year saw historic elections not just in Iraq, but also in Palestine, Lebanon, Afghanistan, and Egypt. The reformist germ even touched Saudi Arabia, which allowed municipal elections, and Kuwait, which granted women the right to vote and run for public office. According to Freedom House, the “modest but notable” advance of liberty in the Arab Middle East was “the most significant development” cited by its annual survey of world freedom in 2005. The top news, of course, came out of Iraq, where the number of Iraqis braving bombs and bullets to make it to the polls climbed from 8.5 million in January, to 9.8 million in October, to some 11 million in December.
None of this is irreversible. We must still crush the insurgency. And until Iraq’s nascent democracy clears a series of sectarian hurdles, the specter of chaos will hover. To be sure, the momentum of the “Arab Spring” could still be turned back. The Mubarak regime just locked up Ayman Nour, Egypt’s leading secular liberal, on trumped-up charges, and disrupted a parliamentary poll. Syria remains a terror-sponsoring thugocracy with extra-territorial ambitions in Lebanon. And should Iran go nuclear–on the watch of a messianic lunatic who not only wants to wipe Israel “off the map” but also believes in a coming apocalypse–it could unravel much of our progress in Iraq. The 1848 European revolution offers but one example of a “springtime of peoples” that was quickly squelched.
But if the coming decades do in fact witness a democratic reformation in Middle Eastern politics, historians will likely trace its roots back to the events of 2005–namely, to the purple fingers of Iraqi voters. Just listen to what longtime Egyptian democracy activist Saad Eddin Ibrahim told columnist Jim Hoagland a few weeks ago in Washington. Ibrahim, who initially opposed the Iraq War, now believes U.S. intervention “has unfrozen the Middle East, just as Napoleon’s 1798 expedition did.” The Iraqi elections, he said, compelled “the theocrats and autocrats to put democracy on the agenda, even if only to fight against us. Look, neither Napoleon nor President Bush could impregnate the region with political change. But they were able to be the midwives.”
Any mention of Big Winners in the Middle East must include the U.S. military forces stationed in and around Iraq and Afghanistan. Without them, the Taliban would still be calling the shots in Kabul; al Qaeda would still be using Afghanistan as a fountainhead for global terrorism; Saddam Hussein would still be gathering strength for his inevitable clash with the United States; Iraqis wouldn’t have voted in three free elections this year; and, more than four years after 9/11, the dictators and jihadists would be emboldened.
For their courage, for their sacrifice, for their unflinching patriotism, U.S. servicemen deserve the thanks and prayers of all civilized peoples. They were the Biggest Winners of 2005–as they are every year–not just for their combat duty, but also for their humanitarian relief work in tsunami-scarred Southeast Asia and earthquake-rattled Pakistan.
In U.S. politics, a Big Winner of 2005 was John McCain, who spent the past year mending fences with GOP conservatives while staying in the good graces of his always dependable boosters in the Washington press corps. Sen. McCain won plaudits from just about everyone for his drive to trim pork-stuffed spending bills and maintain fiscal sanity after Hurricane Katrina. He took on the White House over a blanket “torture” ban–and got his way–but also struck a Churchillian pose on Iraq, rigidly supporting the war and rebuking its critics. He initially caught flack from the Right for being the chief broker of last May’s “Gang of 14” deal on judicial nominees. But once it sunk in that the agreement was actually a boon to Bush and the GOP Senate, the anti-McCain chatter quieted.
The swift riposte to McCain-for-president talk has always been, “He’ll never make it out of a primary–too many Republicans distrust or dislike him.” Well, thanks to two big issues in particular–federal spending and Iraq–2005 was the year many conservatives began giving the Arizona senator another look.
Chief Justice John Roberts was also a Big Winner in 2005, wowing senators with his encyclopedic grasp of constitutional law and staking a claim as one of the most impressive Supreme Court nominees in modern history. Roberts, who turns 51 on January 27th, could serve on the High Court for 30 years or more. His elevation marked a triumph for sound jurisprudence–and a rare domestic triumph for President Bush.
Among foreign leaders, the Big Winner was Japanese prime minister Junichiro Koizumi, who boldly called a snap election after his cherished scheme to privatize the postal service stalled in parliament. He went on to win a landslide victory–and shortly thereafter his postal-privatization bill sailed through. Next to Britain’s Tony Blair and Australia’s John Howard, Koizumi has been America’s closest ally since 9/11. He’s also deftly managed Japan’s economic recovery after more than a decade of stagnation. Thanks to his sweeping reforms and overhaul of Tokyo’s security strategy, Koizumi may go down as Japan’s most transformative postwar premier since Shigeru Yoshida (Japan’s Konrad Adenauer).
Finally, we must mention Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, who ascended to the papacy following the death of John Paul II. “Even 10 years ago,” notes Peggy Noonan, Ratzinger “was considered too old, too conservative, and too German to be pope.” Funny world. Catholic traditionalists were generally pleased with the new pope, who only a day before being chosen had delivered his fiery (and now famous) “dictatorship of relativism” address inside St. Peter’s Basilica.
WHAT ABOUT the Big Losers of the year? The first one is easy: Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the terrorist leader of al Qaeda in Mesopotamia. Zarqawi’s propensity for slaughtering Muslims earned him a sharp reprimand from Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden’s deputy, who in a recently intercepted message warned against conducting attacks that “the masses do not understand or approve.” Then came Zarqawi’s hotel bombings in Amman, Jordan, which killed dozens, rather abruptly ended a Jordanian-Palestinian wedding, and brought more than 200,000 Jordanians into the streets howling in protest. It’s not every day you see crowds of Arabs publicly yelling “Burn in hell, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi!” and calling the jihadist kingpin a “coward”–but those were the scenes from what was perhaps the Middle East’s largest ever anti-terrorism rally.
Zarqawi’s clumsy hearts-and-minds campaign fared no better in Iraq. As more and more Sunnis–even elements of the insurgency–joined the political process, his “bitter war against democracy” increasingly drove a wedge between the Baathist diehards and the foreign jihadists. It didn’t help that Zarqawi ramped up his efforts to murder Sunni “collaborators,” including the grand imam of Falluja. Such brutality, writes Harvard law professor William Stuntz, has taught Iraqis and other Arabs a valuable “lesson,” one that “will have very useful consequences for the long-term health of the region.”
Big Loser Number Two? The United Nations–Kofi Annan’s United Nations. Both the U.N.-appointed Volcker Committee and a separate Senate probe led by Minnesota Republican Norm Coleman turned up massive fraud in the now-defunct Iraqi Oil-for-Food program, implicating foreign businessmen, European politicians, and scads of U.N. officials, among others. Yet Annan continued to fiddle as the world body burned, refusing to acknowledge the widespread corruption and saying “Hell, no” to demands for his resignation.
Looking abroad, Europe’s political elites were also Big Losers. The vaunted EU constitution died at French and Dutch hands. The London bus bombings and Paris riots each highlighted, in their own way, Western Europe’s Islam problem. And the Continental European economic model produced yet another year of anemic growth.
The most striking domestic images of 2005 came from hurricane-battered New Orleans, where catastrophic weather killed hundreds, displaced thousands, and exposed endemic urban blight. Long revered as one of America’s funkiest, most culturally eccentric cities, the Big Easy was definitely a Big Loser.
We might say New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin and Louisiana governor Kathleen Blanco were also Big Losers–except that, for reasons still inexplicable, they both kept their jobs amidst the post-Katrina hubbub. That Nagin and Blanco weren’t forced to resign shows just how nastily partisan the whole mess became: and how thoroughly Democrats internalized the notion that President Bush–or the federal government–deserved the lion’s share of the blame. Sure, FEMA acquitted itself miserably in New Orleans and the Gulf. But only the fiercest partisan could zing FEMA’s missteps without also noting the ghastly incompetence of state and local officials.
Speaking of partisanship, neither major party fared well in 2005. The principal legislative feats of the Republican Congress were a bacon-packed highway bill and a useless energy bill. Capitol Hill Republicans proved utterly timid on Social Security reform, Bush’s signature agenda item. They were less timid in their post-Katrina spending splurge.
Meanwhile, Tom DeLay had to step down–albeit under spurious auspices–as House majority leader, and the Jack Abramoff scandal metastasized, embarrassing lawmakers on both sides of the aisle and threatening to engulf a raft of current or former GOP staffers–and perhaps several congressmen–in 2006. Beyond the Beltway, the Republicans lost governor’s races in New Jersey and Virginia, while Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s pro-reform ballot initiatives took a drubbing in California.
So the Republicans had a bad 12 months. But their plight looks rather enviable when compared with the Democrats’ current muddle. They are now the “No” party: the party of intractable opposition to George W. Bush. But while Democrats are brimming with antagonism for the president’s agenda, they are bereft of the intellectual munitions needed to formulate their own.
Then there is the party’s cleavage on matters of war and peace. “Defeating terrorism is the supreme military and moral mission of our time,” says the centrist Democratic Leadership Council. Try telling that to the anti-Bush Left, whose proxies now dictate and jaundice the tenor of intra-party debate. Indeed, while it was a good year for new democrats in Iraq, it was a dreadful year for “New Democrats” in America.
Take poor Joe Lieberman. Only five years ago he was a few hundred Florida votes away from being Al Gore’s veep. Today, Sen. Lieberman is perhaps the loneliest Democrat in Washington. The reason why is as basic as it is disheartening for party centrists: Iraq. Lieberman believes Bush has a plan for victory–and he believes that plan is working. For the MoveOn types, such comments would be heresy enough.
But Lieberman really set the cat amongst the pigeons when he questioned his party’s attacks on Bush. “History will judge us harshly if we do not stretch across the divide of distrust to join together to complete our mission successfully in Iraq,” he said in early December. “It’s time for Democrats who distrust President Bush to acknowledge that he will be the commander in chief for three more critical years, and that in matters of war, we undermine presidential credibility at our nation’s peril.”
The left-wing blogosphere erupted–as did prominent Democratic leaders. Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi each took a swipe, with Reid claiming Lieberman was “at a different place on Iraq” than most Americans and Pelosi saying she “completely” disagreed with him. Party chairman Howard Dean also reproached Lieberman, and threw his lot in with Congressman John Murtha’s call for a hasty withdrawal of U.S. troops. Liberal activists have even urged Lowell Weicker, whose Connecticut Senate seat Lieberman won in 1988, to challenge Lieberman in 2006 on an anti-war platform. That Lieberman’s Iraq stance has apparently made him such a pariah affirms, once again, that this really is George McGovern’s Democratic party.
Make that George McGovern and Frank Church’s Democratic party, as witness the recent scrap over extending the Patriot Act and using wiretaps to spy on al Qaeda. Liberals’ hostility to both reflects two impulses: their propensity, even in wartime, to make a fetish of ACLU-style civil libertarianism, and their desire to play “Gotcha!” games with the White House in hopes of derailing the Bush presidency.
Neither impulse is a responsible one. And each goes a long way toward explaining the public’s lingering wariness of Democrats on national security issues. As blogger and Daily Standard contributor Ross Douthat has keenly observed, the spat over wiretapping just reinforces the perception that Republicans will err on the side of doing too much to protect Americans, while Democrats will err on the side of doing too little.
SO WHAT ABOUT George W. Bush? In strictly partisan terms, Bush had a lousy year. He tried in vain to enact private Social Security accounts. He failed to cement his tax cuts. He bungled the feds’ initial response to the hurricanes. He endured the Harriet Miers debacle. He continued to pique conservatives on spending and immigration. And his administration was blemished by the Scooter Libby indictment.
Critics relish ticking off this litany of second-term setbacks. They tend to leave out the U.S. economy, for obvious reasons: It was, along with the installation of John Roberts as chief justice, Bush’s most tangible domestic success of 2005. “An incredible accomplishment”–that’s how former General Electric chairman Jack Welch recently described America’s post-9/11 job creation. Welch thinks Bush “ought to be standing on a soapbox” ticking off the salutary results of his tax cuts (low unemployment, robust growth).
No, Bush wasn’t a Big Winner in 2005, but neither was he a Big Loser. The Big Picture policies he implemented or promoted–keeping Social Security solvent through personal accounts; creating an “ownership society”; moving the federal courts in a rightward (or “constitutionalist”) direction; reducing the terrorist threat; safeguarding Iraq’s democracy from Zarqawi & Co.; and spreading liberty in the Muslim world–may not pay off or be realized until decades down the line.
Bush’s poll numbers thus tell us little about how history will judge him. During the Korean War, remember, Harry Truman scored the lowest presidential approval rating–23 percent–ever recorded by Gallup. Yet in a recent Federalist Society/Wall Street Journal survey, scholars ranked him as the 7th best president of all time, putting Truman in the “near great” category (one spot behind Ronald Reagan).
Whether George W. Bush’s stock will appreciate as Truman’s did depends chiefly on the outcome in Iraq–and on the success of Bush’s broader Mideast-democracy gambit. At the end of 2005, there is cause for guarded optimism on both fronts.
Duncan Currie is a reporter at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
