Newsweek: Bush's Truman Show

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16960414/site/newsweek/

Bush's Truman Show

By Holly Bailey, Richard Wolffe and Evan Thomas
Newsweek

snip//

On Dec. 13, Bush met directly with the Joint Chiefs of Staff in their Pentagon meeting room, the Tank. After four years of war, it was the first time Bush had directly quizzed the top brass in their own lair. The recently resigned Rumsfeld was still in the room, but for once he was not an overbearing presence. The chiefs were grim. The Coalition forces were not winning in Iraq, said Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Peter Pace, which meant they were losing because time was not on their side. (Pace's staff declined to comment.) The generals warned that a significant escalation—along the lines proposed by Keane—ran the risk of "breaking" the Army, which was already badly worn.

The outcome of these dire warnings was a compromise. The clamor in Congress for a pullback seems to have only stiffened Bush's resolve to show that he could make the hard choices of a lonely war leader. But he could not create troops out of thin air. Bush decided to surge in Iraq, but to request essentially half a loaf—some 21,000 combat troops. Not a few military commanders have privately complained that those reinforcements are too few to really take control of Baghdad and Anbar province, which is ridden with Sunni insurgents.

Bush seemed once again to be counting on sheer will power to bring success. His apparent plan: to buy time while still hoping that Maliki can create a viable government that won't allow the country to collapse into sectarian slaughter. The strategy may indeed produce a lull in the fighting. Press reports suggest that Shiite militiamen have been told to put away their guns and lie low—until the Americans leave. But counting on Maliki to countenance raids on militias that keep him in power may be a forlorn hope. Even Bush's own national-security adviser, Steve Hadley, questioned Maliki's reliability and competence for the long haul in a secret memo that was leaked to the press, possibly by the military.

The cynical view is that Bush is also buying time for himself—so he can dump the problem on the next president without having to admit defeat. But two years is a long time, and Bush is no cynic. He is a true believer, and he is willing to wait to be vindicated by history. Though he has visibly aged on the job and can appear weary or miffed when speaking to reporters or in front of a camera, he is generally optimistic in private, say his friends and confidants. His routines are unvarying: he gets plenty of rest and exercise and reads voraciously. (After an election hiatus, he has recently resumed a competition with political adviser Karl Rove to see who can read the most books.) But when Bush reads, does he learn? At Henry Kissinger's recommendation, he recently read "A Savage War of Peace," an account of the failed French attempt to suppress the rebellion of its Algerian colony in the late 1950s. American military officers in Iraq regard the book, by British war historian Alistair Horne, as required reading. Bush found the book interesting, says one of the aides, but regards the French experience in Algiers as fundamentally different from the American experience in Iraq. Bush focused on the problems of the French bureaucracy—as if to say the French failed because they were, well, French.

In his history reading, Bush likes to identify with Truman because the former Missouri haberdasher was also mocked by the chattering classes for being inarticulate and unsophisticated. Bush and Truman share a kind of flinty self-reliance: just as Bush likes to call himself "the decider," Truman liked to say "The buck stops here." There is a crucial difference between the approaches of the two men, however. Truman early and often sought out the advice of establishment foreign-policy experts like Gen. George C. Marshall and Dean Acheson, the two men most responsible for postwar European recovery and the Western Alliance. And then he actually listened, with close attention to detail, to what they had to say.

With John Barry
© 2007 Newsweek, Inc. | Subscribe to Newsweek

He can't even read a Telepromptr.

.

but thought it interesting. And I admit to a weakness for Richard Wolffe; he does seem like he tries to be fair, almost too fair at times.

if he's "reading," he sure ain't learning anything.

during breakfast.

Voracious Cheerios reader.

God, what a joke. No way is he a reader . . . .

:D

;)

:spray:

As Played by Jim Carrey....:rofl:

:shrug:

...to err is Truman.


(a toast in an old M*A*S*H episode).

.

Hawkeye...I loved that show :toast:

The fool has never lead America in the right direction. The Democrats in congress will, in the end regret not doing their duty of impeaching him.

Utterly ridiculous. Truman was an intelligent man of few words, and I appreciate some of what I've seen of him, but not the senseless use of the Atomic Bomb, that was as ruthless as it comes, and was unneccessary.

When he once entered a room, I watched the film of him being badgered by reporters, and he stood stoically, then said, "Somebody wanna get me a chair?"

That just killed me, worked on so many levels.

There's a HELL of a Difference between, "I'm the Decider" (uh, grammer please, recalcitrant, rotten trashy brattish speech, moronic). and "The Bush Stops Here." (In other words, *I* am RESPONSIBLE for these actions.)

Voracious Reader? What, skimming books to win a BET? The only curiousity this manchild has involves whether things (like people, or frogs) have GUTS INSIDE that can be made to show on the OUTSIDE.

Why is it that Jim Henson (creator of the Muppets, and a Billionaire) was taken down in DAYS be a simple bacterial infection, and someone like Bush ISN'T? Brain Cancer would be nice, ass cancer even better.

In all of my life I've never wished ANYONE would just get SICK and DIE. (As a disclaimer, I have no means of creating a Tumor in a president, and while I pray for one, from a different God, one that believes in Justice, I have no power to effect any damage to this Sorry Excuse for a Faux pResident, just letting you know Mr Gonzales that I am no danger and am not threatening Bush. Unless God listens to prayers that will save his Other children, by taking one home with a terminal disease.)

his entire life had been staged and documented, without his knowledge, his whole world was one big prop --

By the way, Gonzalez called to let you know the SWAT team is on the way. Suggest you call your lawyer now. :o)

i guess Newsweek is legacy building for ole *shy boy eh????????

fly

http://www.abebooks.com/docs/Community/Featured/george-bush-reading.shtml?nsa=1

Now, here's an interesting note. Most of the selected books are pulp, lightweight, later day quickies with almost no historical signifigance. Basically they are expanded crib notes. The one exception, The Stranger, is a read of subline existentialism, but given Bush's education, Andover, Yale, Harvard, he should have read this in, um, the ninth grade. Also, his psychotic, competitive nature to get there ahead of Rove is indicative of how he actually "read" these tomes, skipping pages and focusing on volume instead of immersing himself in the literature of the moment.

Let him take on The Wealth of Nations (1264 pages of the most difficult reading I never finished) and I might be impressed.