From: Gene McAloon 

Bush went to the UN before the war because he was convinced he could get a
second resolution that would justify his war.  He failed. He though he
could get
a majority of votes on the Security Council and then blame the French,
Russians or Chinese blocking him with a veto. In fact, no vetoes were
necessary because he couldn't even get a majority vote for his second
resolution.

Yet, he needed that second resolution because without it he might well have been
declared a violator of human rights if he indulged in an illegal war of
aggression. Blair's advisors warned him on that very issue and the legality
of Blair's participation is still an issue in the UK.

Gaddis is of course a highly controversial historian. His claims about the
occupations of Germany and Japan after WWII are only half right. About
Germany, yes, that was bungled initially. Eisenhower made the mistake of
letting local military commanders take the lead. It wasn't until they were
displaced by civilians from Washington that the reconstruction began to
take shape.

Japan, however, was an entirely different story. MacArthur delegated nothing. He
ran the whole show, taking no guff from anyone, including Washington,
particularly when many in Washington demanded that the Emperor be removed.
MacArthur certainly can be faulted for some of his political decisions,
particularly setting up the electoral system in such a way that the
conservative
rural areas were guaranteed dominance of the Diet. Otherwise, the occupation and
reconstruction of Japan was a model of its kind.

Gaddis also repeats the nonsense about Bush being transformed by 9/11.
Utter bullshit. Bush reacted exactly the way one would expect a far-right
ideologue would react, a rush to war. The first of his wars, Afghanistan,
was and remains a failure and the rationale for the second built on lies
and incompetence. Gaddis only further tarnishes his own reputation by
making such extravagant claims about Bush. As an historian, Gaddis would
make a good . . . plumber?

On Sun, 8 Feb 2004 13:43:14 -0500, "Mark Hessey"
 wrote:

>
>"Gene McAloon"  wrote:
...gross incompetence
>> of the Bush administration in Iraq and even the period leading up to
>Bush's war.
>
>Yes, considering all the vitriol he's had to listen to anyway, he shouldn't
>have wasted all that time at the UN before the war. Then too, planning for
>post-war is not any more an exact science than intelligence gathering is. As
>John Lewis Gaddis, the Yale historian, says in a Boston Globe article today:
>"That's 'not surprising,' says Gaddis insouciantly. After all, he notes, the
>reconstruction efforts in Japan and Germany were badly planned as well."
>
>The article goes on to ask, "Who, then, have been the great grand
>strategists among American statesmen?" Mr. Gaddis replies,
"they are John
>Quincy Adams, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and George W. Bush."
>
>Of course, he knows that the left-wing elite will be chortling Cocoa
>Krispies out their noses on reading that, so he goes on to say, "Critics
>charge that President Bush is a lightweight, Gaddis laments, and they do so
>because the president is a generalist who prefers the big picture to its
>details. Over lunch at Mory's, Yale's tweedy private dining club, Gaddis
>suggests that academics underrate Bush because they overvalue specialized
>knowledge. In reality, as his new book asserts, after Sept. 11, 2001, Bush
>underwent "one of the most surprising transformations of an underrated
>national leader since Prince Hal became Henry V."
>http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2004/02/08/grand_old_policy/
>

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