From: "Mark Hessey" 


"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/

--- BBBS/NT v4.01 Flag-5