Unqualified Offerings

Jim Lobe’s deconstruction of the latest George W. Bush: Prophet Without Honor twaddle from Michael B. Oren and Mark Gerson is largely correct, I think – the authors have an audience of one in mind, George W. Bush, and a goal of flattering him that much closer to bombing Iran. A secondary purpose is simply to buck up the domestic, political troops – the only troops that genuinely matter to hawkery’s honchos.

But what strikes me is the unremarked bias – prophecy for Oren and Gerson is always threaded in the direction of war, even though war was not the point of Jonah’s own mission in Ninevah. Churchill and Truman are the touchstones now, and Carter, Reagan and Clinton the object lessons – the leaders who failed at prophecy by not being warlike enough. Their method, though, is entirely arbitrary:

“Winston Churchill, for example, prophetically warned of the Nazi threat in the 1930s, but if he had convinced his countrymen to strike Germany pre-emptively, would he have been hailed for preventing World War II or condemned for initiating an unnecessary conflict? As president in 1945, Harry Truman predicted that Japan would never surrender and that a quarter of a million GIs would be killed invading it. And so he obliterated Hiroshima and Nagasaki, only to be vilified by many future historians. But what if the atomic bombs were never dropped and the Battle for Japan claimed countless casualties — would history have judged Truman more leniently?

On the other side!

“Jimmy Carter failed to retaliate for the takeover (sic) the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, Ronald Reagan pulled the U.S. Marines out of Beirut in 1983 after Islamist bombers destroyed their headquarters, and Bill Clinton remained passive in the face of successive al Qaeda attacks. And yet, had these presidents gone to war, would Americans today credit them with averting a 9/11-type attack or would they have been denounced for overreacting? If American leaders had stood firmly earlier in Iran, Lebanon or Afghanistan, would U.S. troops today be battling in Iraq?”

Catch the trick? If you urge or practice war, Oren and Gerson compare what you did to a worse alternate history. If you do something remotely peaceable, Oren and Gerson compare what you did to a better one.
There’s no organic reason to do this. We can easily imagine very bad consequences to Carter, Reagan and Clinton taking more aggressive action in each case. Oren and Gerson’s refusal to do so has nothing to do with the “dilemma” of the prophet and everything to do with their bias toward war.