But if I may make a suggestion to my friends on the Left, do yourselves a favour and chuck the moron gags. It's insufficient to your needs. In case you still haven't noticed, Bush always winds up getting at least 90 per cent of everything he wants, and it can't all be dumb luck. A year ago the President told Trevor McDonald, "I made up my mind that Saddam needs to go". Well, Saddam has gone. In between came a lot of entertaining diplomatic dances in national costume, but, like the third act of The Nutcracker, they didn't impact on the plot: in the end, the nut got cracked.
Some of his allies - the Prime Minister of Britain - have overcome their squeamishness to regime change. Some of his opponents - the Prime Minister of Canada - were still objecting to regime change even after the regime had changed. But it was Bush's position that counted: one of his strengths is that he won't sacrifice the objective to the process. By contrast, it wasn't always apparent that his predecessor had objectives: what exactly was the desired end when Mr Clinton bombed that aspirin factory in the Sudan? In foreign policy, Clinton had tactics, not strategy: his inability to reach what the special prosecutor Ken Starr called "completion" extended far beyond Monica's gullet. On his tax cuts, on missile defence, on Saddam, Bush is completion-focused.
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Because he doesn't operate on Media Time, whereby 14 months is a precipitous "rush to war" but a 14-day war is a Vietnam-style quagmire, Bush doesn't get thrown off-course. He is a personally modest man with no particular desire to be on television all day long, which is why he's happy to let Tony Blair take as much of the limelight as he wants and why he was willing to fly to Belfast to emphasise the non-poodle nature of the Prime Minister's relationship: this business of who accords whom the honour of visiting whose village is an obsession of Arab mukhtars, not Texans.
In a sense, Mr Bush's view of Iraq is merely an extension of his view of Mr Blair: his buddy Tone may be somewhat weird and intense and unnaturally hung up on outmoded multilateral institutions, but in the end their common humanity overrides all that. Likewise, Bush doesn't see why children in Mosul are so different from those in Crawford: why shouldn't they have the same freedoms? You can mock this if you wish. It seems very odd that the Left, which routinely bemoans the injustice of Barbara Bush's son having greater opportunities than the son of a crack whore in the inner city merely because of an accident of birth, then turns around and tells 20 million Iraqis that they have to accept their lot and live in a prison state forever. Julian Barnes, Iowa's Democratic Senator Tom Harkin and a zillion others continue to feel this way - even after Saddam's fall.
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