Bush=Hitler, or Bush=Reagan?

Claus Christian Malzahn in Der Spiegel asks a question: Could Bush Be Right?

It was difficult not to cringe during Reagan's speech in 1987. He didn't leave a single Berlin cliché out of his script. At the end of it, most experts agreed that his demand for the removal of the Wall was inopportune, utopian and crazy.

Yet three years later, East Germany had disappeared from the map...

Bush's idea of a Middle Eastern democracy imported at the tip of a bayonet is, for Schroeder's Social Democratic Party and his coalition partner the Green Party, the hysterical offspring off the American neo-cons. Even German conservatives find the idea that Arabic countries could transform themselves into enlightened democracies somewhat absurd...

In Mainz today, the stagnant Europeans came face to face with the dynamic Americans. We Europeans always want to have the world from yesterday, whereas the Americans strive for the world of tomorrow. Click here: Bush in Germany: Could George W. Bush Be Right? - International - SPIEGEL ONLINE

Margaret Thatcher and Mikhail Gorbachev contributed to the collapse of the Soviet Union: both credited Ronald Reagan as the architect and prime mover. Yet after his death a usually thoughtful person I know commented that she couldn't understand why anybody thinks he was important.

He pumped up military spending until the Soviets bankrupted themselves trying to keep up, and his invasions of little places like Grenada convinced them that he was nutty enuf to make good on his warnings, so they had to keep up.

Bush shocked the Islamists silly when he invaded Afghanistan, and shocked the secular Arab fascists when he invaded Iraq, pulled Saddam out of a filthy hole in the ground, and held elections. He scared Khaddafi into giving up his weapons of mass destruction.

Thinking of the Berlin Wall, David Ignatius has a column in the Washington Post about some of the Lebanese who are calling for the end of the Syrian occupation and for elections.

"It is the beginning of a new Arab revolution," argues Samir Franjieh, one of the organizers of the opposition. "It's the first time a whole Arab society is seeking change -- Christians and Muslims, men and women, rich and poor."

The leader of this Lebanese intifada is Walid Jumblatt, the patriarch of the Druze Muslim community and, until recently, a man who accommodated Syria's occupation. But something snapped for Jumblatt last year, when the Syrians overruled the Lebanese constitution and forced the reelection of their front man in Lebanon, President Emile Lahoud...

"It's strange for me to say it, but this process of change has started because of the American invasion of Iraq," explains Jumblatt. "I was cynical about Iraq. But when I saw the Iraqi people voting three weeks ago, 8 million of them, it was the start of a new Arab world." Jumblatt says this spark of democratic revolt is spreading. "The Syrian people, the Egyptian people, all say that something is changing. The Berlin Wall has fallen. We can see it."

Click here: Beirut's Berlin Wall (washingtonpost.com)

For half a century we emphasized stability around the world because the alternative was seen to be Soviet control. Virtually any miserable government was believed better for us than that. Now, without the specter of the Soviets, the options are different. Perhaps this gigantic gamble will pay off well for the Arabs and the rest of the world, including the US. If it does, it won't really matter much if after Bush's eventual death some don't understand why he was important.