Our World: Bush's historical parallels
Caroline Glick , THE JERUSALEM POST Jan. 7, 2008
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During his tenure as President George W. Bush's defense secretary, Donald
Rumsfeld often likened the administration's foreign policy decisions to
those of the Truman administration during the first years of the Cold War.
As President George W. Bush makes his way to Israel, the Palestinian
Authority, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states with a stated agenda of
advancing the goal of Palestinian statehood, it is worth examining president
Truman's achievements and comparing them with those of President Bush.

...The Defense Department's decision last week to sack Stephen Coughlin, the
only expert on Islamic law in the Pentagon's joint staff, because his
documented report on American Muslim institutional support for jihad angered
pro-Muslim forces in the Pentagon, is another indication that the foreign
policy bureaucracy is successfully scuttling the president's agenda.

Most important, though, is the fact that the new centerpiece of Bush's
foreign policy agenda is to establish a Palestinian state. Bush's support
for Palestinian statehood, stated first just two months after 9/11, has
always been difficult to square with his recognition of the global jihad and
its radical Islamic ideology as the central challenges of our age.

After all, when America was attacked the Palestinians were entering the
second year of their jihad against Israel. The Palestinians greeted those
attacks with open delight. And now, after the Palestinian people popularly
elected Hamas to lead them and transformed Gaza into an operating base for
global terrorists; while Fatah leaders like Mahmoud Abbas refuse to accept
Israel as a Jewish state and official Fatah security forces wantonly murder
Israeli civilians, Bush's main foreign policy goal in his last year in
office is to establish a Palestinian state.

WHILE BUSH argues that the Palestinians have to be shown what they can
achieve if they eschew terror and accept Israel, he never mentions what
price they must pay for their continued, open support for Israel's
destruction and support for and involvement in the global jihad. In his
treatment, then, of the Palestinian war against Israel and its central role
in the global jihad, Bush has done more to undermine the coherence of his
recognition of the challenges of the 21st century and his own legacy in
shaping the free world's war against the forces of terror and jihad than
anyone else.

Truman is today considered one of the great American presidents because his
forthright clarity and consistent policies in office set the US on a steady
course
for victory against Soviet communism even as specific actions - like the
Korean War - were deeply unpopular.

In his last year in office, Bush's central challenge is to clarify what he
himself has allowed to become muddled about the nature of the current
generational struggle. Unfortunately, though his commitment to Palestinian
statehood, and his refusal to assert his own foreign policy against the
wishes of a hostile bureaucracy, he calls to mind not Truman, but another
American president who led his country at the cusp of another formative
crisis. Like Bush, James Buchanan - the last president to serve before the
Civil War - understood the nature of the gathering storm; yet rather than
confront the dangers, he was overwhelmed by them.