Heretical thoughts and heresy-hunters

Joanathan Freedland, not noted for being a fan of George W. Bush, poses a heretical question:

For a left liberal like me, it is not easy to commit heresy. After all, we are meant to be open-minded free thinkers, unshackled by taboos. Nevertheless there is one thought so heretical, merely to utter it would ensure instant excommunication. I hesitate even to pose it as a question. But here goes. What if George W Bush was to prove to be one of the great American presidents?

You can read the case he goes on to construct here. I pass over the domestic part of it and excerpt at length the section on Bush and Iraq:

Of course, any claim to greatness will depend on Iraq, a word as sure to be engraved on the heart of Bush as Calais was on Mary Tudor's. Today's conventional wisdom, taking in every foreign ministry in the world – including most of the US State Department – holds that Operation Enduring Iraqi Freedom has been a tragedy of errors. Based on faulty premises, disingenuously sold and incompetently planned, the mission of 2003 is widely regarded as an abject failure.

But the future may not see it that way. The war removed one of the most hated tyrants of modern times, shifting Saddam Hussein from a palace to a prison cell. Couple that with the toppling of the Taliban, a regime of cruelty and brutal philistinism, and Bush's defenders have a powerful opening argument.

Next, they can point further afield. For didn't the war in Iraq, admittedly prosecuted at a high and bloody price, not set in train a wider series of events. [The sense here indicates that the 'not' is accidental and redundant - NG.] Note Libya's rapid decision to come clean about, and abandon, its attempt to build weapons of mass destruction. Iran is a more complex case – rendered more complicated by the arrival of President Ahmadinejad – but it is clear that a faction, at least, within Iran's bifurcated government wishes to follow Libya's lead. The 2003 war established, through shock and awe, that any effort to go nuclear can bring terrible consequences.

There has been a chain reaction of a different kind, too. Lebanon is the clearest example, with its Cedar Revolution leading to an outburst of people power on the streets of Beirut – and the ejection of the Syrian occupier. Tentative moves toward electoral democracy have followed in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Kuwait and Bahrain. Even Syria seems, grudgingly, to understand that it lives in a changed region and that it too will have to adapt.

None of these advances should be exaggerated; they do not on their own amount to the flowering of "freedom and democracy" imagined so floridly in Bush's set-piece speeches. Those set out the belief that US interests are no longer served by propping up vile (if US-friendly) tyrants, but are best aided by the establishment of democracy. Yes, there are contradictions and hypocrisies, but that shift represents a break from at least 60 years of US foreign policy – and in the right direction. If Washington was to honour this ideal, articulated well by Bush, then the world would be a better place.

Of course, these recent changes in Lebanon and the like may come to nothing. But the opposite is at least possible. These shifts may deepen and spread. If the Iraqis do, despite everything, inch towards constitutional self-rule, the momentum may be hard to stop. People across the Muslim and Arab world will see that reform and democracy is real – and they will want some of it for themselves.

These are all big ifs. For every step forward Bush has inspired, there have been steps back: Abu Ghraib and Camp X-Ray have discredited the cause of US-led democracy more than Bush's warm words have promoted it. But change will eventually come to the Middle East, just as it came, eventually, to Eastern Europe. And, when it does, it is at least conceivable that the man future generations will credit as the pioneer will be none other than George W Bush.

My purpose in posting this passage is not to offer any judgement of my own on the future reputation of the Bush presidency. There's a long way to go on that. But Jonathan Freedland's reflections - the reflections, it should be emphasized, of someone who has opposed the Iraq war consistently - bring out an important distinction there has been from the beginning within the anti-war camp. That is the distinction between people who opposed the war as if there was just nothing that could reasonably have motivated liberals and leftists to support it, and those who acknowledged the weight of the 'other' considerations, as set out above, even if they weren't finally persuaded by them. This distinction maps roughly, though only roughly, on to the difference between those in the anti-war camp who accepted that there could be a pro-war left in good faith and those who haven't.