“Be very glad we don’t have a Republican president,” Walter Russell Mead advises, for “if we did, we would be treated to a merciless media pounding … on the series of strategic failures, mistakes, and false starts that have characterized America’s war strategy in Afghanistan since 2009.” We would be treated to “constant reminders of how the president, who repeatedly said that this was a just war that America had to win … hasn’t managed to win it, or even end it,” and how the whole Middle East, relatively calm when Obama took over, is mired in chaos and blood.
He knows whence he speaks, as between 2001 and 2009 we did have a Republican president, whose mistakes in Iraq between 2004-2006 were lustily derided but whose successes between 2007-2008 were systematically ignored by the media. Once it became clear that the expected outcome — a colossal defeat, like Vietnam, only bigger — wasn’t about to occur, the media lost interest.
But if Obama was “permitted to fail in Afghanistan quietly and off center stage,” it was George W. Bush’s success in Iraq that went unrecorded. That is, at least until 2010, when Joe Biden called it “one of the great achievements of OUR administration.” Barack Obama said a year or so later that Iraq was “sovereign, self-reliant, and democratic,” and our troops were leaving (prematurely, as would be evident later) “with honor, and their heads held high.”
One of Bush’s press secretaries between 2005 and 2009 was Dana Perino, who in her memoir, And the Good News Is…, is remarkably restrained in regard to these transgressions by the press.
She does slap Harry Reid, (whom the Almighty seems to have seen fit to punish), and Scott McLellan, her dud of a predecessor, who took his replacement by the late Tony Snow so badly that he launched a book-length grenade at the president. McClellan had been a friend of Perino’s, and Bush told her to forgive him, saying she shouldn’t “live bitterly.” She tried, but remained somewhat ambivalent. “During the onslaught … I [was] proud to have worked for a leader who didn’t respond in kind,” she writes. “He regularly turned the other cheek, and instructed us to do the same. He led by example, even in private. Though there was a time when holding back all of the retaliation started physically to wear on my face.”
Critics today rip his “stupid” wars, but those who fought in them seem to feel otherwise. She “sure was mad at me,” Bush said of the mother of one of the wounded at Walter Reed Hospital. “I don’t blame her a bit.”
But most of the others greeted him warmly, especially the parents of one young Marine who opened his eyes for the first and last time as he heard the president say to his five year old son that he had been given the Purple Heart for his service because he was a “very brave man” who loved him and his country. There were raucous ovations at Bagram Air Base in Iraq and at Norfolk, Virginia, where he paid a surprise visit to the Navy Seals days before he left office.
“For President Bush, these were the true celebrities,” she writes. “He felt a responsibility for and a kinship to them. They understood the global war on terror and were in sync with him as their leader. He asked for their sacrifices, and they were eager to fulfill their pledge and commitment to their country. They would miss each other.”
And it seems they still do.
Noemie Emery, a Washington Examiner columnist, is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and author of “Great Expectations: The Troubled Lives of Political Families.”
