Framing Our Future: Bush Confronts the Ghosts of Truman and Carter, and Public Outreach in the War in Iraq

Did you know that when Harry S Truman left the Oval Office his approval rating was just 23%-- lower than Jimmy Carter (28%), and lower even than Richard Nixon (24%), who left the White House disgraced and barely ahead of his impeachment notice? In fact, so unpopular was Truman that in 1952, he actually lost the New Hampshire primary to Senator Estes Kefauver of Tennessee, thereby prompting his March 29th decision not to run for re-election.

Today, of course, Truman is most remembered for a more positive legacy: the Marshall Plan and the Truman Doctrine, the Berlin Airlift, the integration of the armed forces, and driving the pro-Soviet Left out of the Democratic Party, a decision that made the Democrats anti-communist competitors with the Republicans, rather than the sympathizers that the likes of Henry Wallace would have preferred (it is interesting to note, however, that in his book, Where I Was Wrong, Wallace acknowledges the evil of Stalin's regime and admits that he had been too trusting with the Soviets). Thus, during a time of turmoil, Truman's popularity reflected such unstable times; his legacy would later redeem his record, and he is generally considered to have been a pretty good President.

That's a little different than what we saw with the previously mentioned Jimmy Carter. Ushered into office in the wake of Watergate, Carter became President at a time when the Liberal Consensus was collapsing, American will was believed to be faltering (Reagan would later prove that confidence can be restored), and Angola had demonstrated the limits upon which detente could constrain Soviet-supported expansion. Those were enormous challenges to overcome, but Carter's initial approach was that a conciliation could be reached with the Warsaw Pact, that East-West conflicts had largely been replaced by North-South conflicts, and that America's strategic commitments under Containment doctrine could now be reduced-- our forces could be withdrawn from the Korean Peninsula, and we could withdraw our support for dictators like Anastacio Somoza in Nicaragua while supporting revolutionaries such as Robert Mugabe in what was Rhodesia. Perhaps it was not the worst possible course that could have been charted for American foreign policy, but it was hardly much better. His emphasis on human rights was admirable, but failed to appreciate the brutality of the Third World and the simple fact that human rights under the successor regimes was unlikely to be any better (and, in fact, turned out to be far worse). Almost immediately, the hits started coming: 30,000 Cuban soldiers used Angola as a launch pad into Ethiopia and Somalia, Afghan communists seized power in Kabul in 1978 (Soviet troops would follow shortly), Nicaragua fell to the Sandinistas and the Shah's regime was toppled by Iranian revolutionaries in 1979. And yet, like Wallace before him, Carter came to see the error of his ways: he maintained our strategic commitment to the Republic of Korea; after initially cutting the defense budget, he approved large increases to restore what had become known as the "hollow" Army, and he implemented covert financing of the Afghan mujahideen to fight against the Soviets. But by then, it was too late. Campaigning on a platform of American renewal, Reagan was able to outflank Carter (then, too, double-digit inflation rates, high interest rates, the energy crisis, and high unemployment rates had combined on the domestic front to delegitimize Carter's Presidency). Today, Carter is generally regarded as a man with good intentions, but a terrible Presidency-- historians rank him among the bottom quintile of American Presidents, a mirror of his abysmal approval ratings.

You probably think I'm going to draw a parallel to the current President, don't you? Actually, I'm not. Well, not really. I'll leave it for the reader to determine whether you think George W. Bush is going to become Harry Truman or Jimmy Carter-- redeemed or reviled by the future course of history. At this point, they key word is "think." No one really knows what's going to happen next, and anyone that says otherwise is probably selling something... Or an ideologue. Not that there's anything wrong with them, but you can't have a rational dialogue with them since they have a preconceived notion of how things work, what things are, and how they will turn out-- and they'll be damned if larger reality is going to intrude upon their private reality.

But the Truman/Carter dichotomy is interesting, because-- for better or for worse-- President Bush's legacy is going to be tied up in the struggle between casual Muslims and Islamist jihadists that we (perhaps inaccurately) call the Global War on Terror. Notice I didn't say the War in Iraq, and that's because future historians are going to view Iraq (and Afghanistan and the Horn of Africa and the Philippines, et. al.) as a sub-war of the larger struggle in the Islamic world, much as historians judge-- for example-- the Bay of Pigs as only one episode in the larger fabric of John F. Kennedy's legacy and, indeed, the much-larger Cold War. Americans think in the present-- this urgent, immediate, all-important time that matters more than ever-- and we often fail to recognize that the present is only a small part of what those in the future will later call the past. It will contextualized. Whether we win or lose in Iraq, the greater struggle-- the struggle within Islam that often manifests itself against the West-- will continue.

That said, CNN recently noted that President Bush's approval ratings (42%) are overshadowed by his disapproval ratings (57%), but more importantly that public support for the War in Iraq (35%) is dwarfed by public opposition to the War (61%). The numbers seem to indicate a coming end to the war effort, especially if it encourages Democratic contendors to exploit public opposition and seek a timetable-driven withdrawal, instead of the conditions-based strategy that would better secure our interests. I'm not sure if that's going to happen-- Senator Hillary Clinton, for example, is no Ned Lamont, and she seems to understand that the immediate withdrawal demanded by the Left (under the guide of Jack Murtha and other ex-military Democrats) would be a disaster for American foreign policy. Of course, democracy means the people rule, and if there's a large constituency for "cut and run," we're going to get it-- I don't have to remind the reader, however, that what is popular is not always what is in our best interests, and that it requires true leadership to sell what we need instead of what we merely want.

Some seem to get that. Senator John McCain recently admonished members of the Administration for selling the War in Iraq as a "day at the beach," instead of the generational challenge that so many of us knew it would be. In so doing, McCain notes, the Administration contributed to the frustration that so many Americans feel about Iraq-- and that may ultimately derail our strategy. That's sort of the point we need to get at here: it isn't enough for a President to implement the right strategy, he or she has to sell it to the American people. Without such an approach, any strategy-- right or wrong, good or bad-- that runs into obstacles, that encounters significant challenges (expected or unexpected), that forces the American people to accept that blood and treasure are being expended, that strategy will eventually fail because the American people will cease to support it. And in the absence of that leadership, they will turn to the Nancy Pelosis and Harry Reid who argue that doing something really bad-- the immediate withdrawal from Iraq-- will brook no consequences for the American people, primarily because they themselves are convinced that the larger threat is not out there. Their strategy might be bad, they might be wrong on Iraq (very wrong on Iraq, I would add), but they may still win because they engage the American people better than the Administration.

I've argued before that the President needs to engage the American people on the War in Iraq and the larger struggle we face. And, at times, he does; his commencement address at West Point's graduation this year did an exceptional job of framing the struggle in the same terms that Truman confronted with the beginning of the Cold War. But it isn't enough. It needs more. Failure to do that will allow the opponents to frame the debate. And that could be disastrous for all of us.