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COMMENTARY
June 12, 2004
Ends tied
Attending a funeral yesterday -- not Reagan's but the coincidental funeral of a dear friend's father -- I found myself puzzling over the fiasco of human judgement. It takes some distance from people and events for most of us to get anything like a clear or complete view of them. It is however given to some to grasp realities whole and instinctively. Reagan and Baroness Thatcher whose magnificent eulogy for him should be read by all were among the rare politicians with this gift. It is the one common quality among truly great men and women (famous as opposed to infamous): a form of knowledge that has little to do with conventional intellection. A like quality is in the poets -- what has been called "the experiencing nature" -- applied to such as Dante and Shakespeare and Goethe. These certainly no saints in themselves were nevertheless men endowed with the ability to mirror large moral truths; who could see large and read large from out of their own narrow experience of life. Many others may have this but without the talent to give it expression. In politics Thatcher and Reagan both were among the very few capable of articulating "what's what" for themselves without the help of "experts" and speechwriters. Or to adapt a phrase they had the peculiar grace "to speak truth through power". President Bush has to my mind some of this quality though it is still much too early in our historical era to judge him success or failure. He has the same "simplisme" of which the others were accused; he is hated in exactly the way Reagan and Thatcher were hated in their time. Lincoln took the same sort of heat as did Churchill. No great man ever went unhated just as no great man ever failed to swim against the tide of conventional opinion. (By contrast Hitler and Stalin in their day never wanted for fashionable admirers.) Until the actual fall of the Berlin Wall it had been generally accepted among the pundit class that Reagan had been a foreign-policy disaster. Some still refuse to grasp the cause-and-effect relation between his approach to the "evil empire" and its subsequent collapse. There is much mischievous fun to be had today in rereading the foolish columns and speeches of Reagan's contemporary opponents. Take for just one example this assessment of the Reagan years from May 1988 by that wonderfully smug liberal historian Arthur J. Schlesinger Jr. (which I lifted from Andrew Sullivan's website): "A few years from now I believe Reaganism will seem a weird and improbable memory a strange interlude of national hallucination rather as the McCarthyism of the early 1950s and the youth rebellion of the late 1960s appear to us today." This has been a week of tying loose ends together starting with the interment of Ronald Wilson Reagan after many years of his cruel illness. That has dominated the U.S. media as our election campaign has rightly commanded attention here. But quietly in the background there were several more events from which it would be hard not to draw historical parallels. Mr. Bush has naturally without the acknowledgement of his political enemies prevailed in the huge risky enterprise of Iraq. At the Sea Island Summit of the G-8 and at the United Nations' Security Council his victory was sealed this week. The leaders of the West including Jacques Chirac and Gerhard Schroeder have returned to the same page of the hymn book from which Mr. Bush was singing all along. They and other erstwhile opponents have endorsed the new American-created order in Iraq -- and by projection throughout the Middle East. And by a unanimous vote of the Security Council universal diplomatic approval was conferred upon that new order. The new government of Iraq by its very standing in the Middle East becomes the beacon for an alternative future that Mr. Bush sought to create. (While no national election can yet be called local elections have taken place across the country and the sovereign government is already more representative of its people than that of any in the Arab world.) Horrendous conflict lies ahead in the region but most likely not in or over Iraq. Security problems remain there and not all domestic power struggles have been resolved. Yet it can now be argued that the disorder in Iraq has been rendered superficial. Much deeper disorder is instead becoming apparent in neighbouring Saudi Arabia and in Iran. Their regimes now emerge as the unstable ones. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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