Today is one I shall remember.
Excerpt:
The odour of appeasement that permeates the Western world has apparently driven President George W Bush to seek strength by studying the career of Winston Churchill.
Depressed by the warnings of his father's old friends against taking action against Iraq, he is looking for support in the life story of the supreme anti-appeaser. Churchill's refusal to be silenced by the peacemongers during Hitler's rise to power, a refusal all too painfully proved right when war came, sets an example President Bush finds reassuring.
If Churchill was right about Hitler, he seems to be asking, how can America be wrong about Saddam Hussein, a dictator who is on the brink of acquiring nuclear weapons, a power Hitler never possessed?
The parallel is compelling, particularly to Americans, among whom Churchill, son of an American mother, continues to be venerated as perhaps he never was in his father's country.
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At the present time, President Bush must feel himself surrounded by men who think of everything - of how much America is disliked in the world, of how fragile is the hold it has on its so-called allies, of how unstable is the Middle East, of how unpredictable are the consequences of military action.
He is bombarded by advice from the conventionally wise who see danger on every hand. Some of them are military men who, as so often military men do and Churchill found, doubt the usefulness of force and counsel prudence or inaction altogether.