Bush and Iraq: the optimist's way

President Harry Truman's approval rating was 28 percent in 1951 when he decided to oust the popular General Douglas MacArthur from military service. The immediate result was a further decline in support for Truman and a call to depose the president. The long-term result, however, was overarching support for Truman because of the courageous decision, which ultimately redefined the superiority of the government echelon over the military echelon. In any case, in order to understand President George W. Bush it is necessary to remember Truman.

The speech he is expected to deliver today, in which the president will announce his decision to send more troops to Iraq - in total contradiction to expectations developed over the past year - testifies to this president's determination. Neither those who see this as a courageous move nor those who believe it is exceedingly stupid can deny his steadfastness.

Last Friday, the right-wing American Enterprise Institute held a brief conference called, "Iraq: A Turning Point." Two senior senators, John McCain (Rep., Arizona) and Joseph Lieberman (Dem., Connecticut) attracted the most attention and provided an impressive political umbrella for its content. However, at its center was the program of a round-faced and bespectacled individual, a military historian named Frederick W. Kagan, the researcher who more than any other has influenced the new path on which America is embarking today.

Kagan lays out the theory in a slim, 47-page brochure entitled, "Choosing Victory: A Plan for Success in Iraq". This is the plan he presented to those in attendance, the same plan that sits at the core of the updated White House policy. Though a true victory in Iraq may be far off in the distance, it is possible in the meantime to chalk up a small, temporary victory for the ideological school of thought deemed obsolete: Kagan, after all, can be considered a neo-conservative. The adoption of his plan is proof that Bush has not changed his position, even in light of the obstacles that have made it increasingly difficult to justify his policy.

Kagan's plan is detailed and comprehensive, but its basic assumption is far from being widely accepted: "The war is not lost," he writes. This, in fact, is the crux of the disagreement between the president and his critics. Bush is an incurable optimist - yet another link in the long and glorious chain of optimistic and sometimes baseless presidential thinking. By contrast, Bush's realistic - or shall we say pessimistic - critics are looking at the events engulfing Iraq and looking for an elegant way out. "Even a pessimist can still look at this place [Iraq] and believe it isn't beyond hope," writes Reuel Marc Gerecht, another researcher at the same institute. But then again, only an optimist would assume that the pessimist could also see Iraq this way.

A more down-to-earth assessment was provided by Jeffrey White of the Washington Institute, who states: "The will of the policymaking community in Washington matters. But the will of this community also appears in decline." Like another statesman whom he admires, Winston Churchill, Bush is choosing not to be infected by the bleak atmosphere. "The optimist sees opportunity in every danger; the pessimist sees danger in every opportunity," said Churchill.

And indeed, there is no place more dangerous than Iraq and no decision that depicts it more as an opportunity than the one Bush will announce today. He has exactly two years before he makes way for his successor, and he is making yet another attempt, though not necessarily his last, to glue together the fragments of what once was Iraq. Two years is a long time, say Bush's people, even in this matter, and the president refuses to buckle in the face of the premature and exaggerated eulogies showered on him after the Republican defeat in the midterm elections.

Excessive optimism? Possibly, but here, too, there is no lack of precedents. In 1987, battered and bruised politically, the most optimistic president in the history of the United States addressed the American people and explained: "I have a great deal that I want to accomplish with you and for you over the next two years. And, the Lord willing, that's exactly what I intend to do." Six years later, in Ronald Reagan's last letter to the nation, the one in which he announced that he had Alzheimer's disease, he wrote: "When the Lord calls me home, whenever that may be, I will leave with the greatest love for this country of ours and eternal optimism for its future."