To the Editor:

William Kristol is exactly right. The surge in Iraq is working and the Democrats are loath to admit it. Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton is scrambling to say that her “disbelief” remark last fall about the potential success of the military surge referred only to her disbelief that the Iraqi government would achieve political gains in the wake of a successful surge. Hogwash. She and other Democrats believed that the surge itself would not work. Some of them even said it would make the military situation worse.

Now the tide in Iraq is turning. Say what you will about President Bush, he has been a leader. Under the most adverse conditions, at home and on the battlefield, he has stuck to his guns. Iraq may yet achieve lasting peace and representative government. If so, Mr. Bush may well be regarded in future years like Harry S. Truman—vilified and unpopular while in office, widely praised later.

The Democrats have been calling this Bush’s war and Bush’s loss for years. They will never call it Bush’s victory, but history might.

Mark R. Godburn
North Canaan, Conn., Jan. 14, 2008

Note from KBJ: I like this letter. I’ve posted many of Godburn’s letters over the years. Has anyone noticed the progressive tack of saying that President Bush is the worst president in United States history? First, it’s not up to President Bush’s contemporaries to make such an assessment. It will be up to future generations. Second, even if it were up to President Bush’s contemporaries to make such an assessment, it can’t be done, at least not properly. It takes time for documents to come to light and for the consequences of decisions to unfold. (Maybe we shouldn’t evaluate decisions in light of their actual consequences, but we do.) I suspect President Bush knows things that won’t be known by the public for decades, by which time many of us will be dead. Only now are we beginning to be able to assess the presidencies of Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. It’s still too early to assess the presidencies of Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, and George H. W. Bush. So what’s driving this progressive silliness? I think it’s just the latest manifestation of Bush Derangement Syndrome. Progressives know that President Bush cares about his legacy (who doesn’t?), so they attack it prospectively, as if their little voices matter in the end.