An analogy too far

H.D.S. Greenway:

ON AN Autumn night 300 years ago, Admiral Sir Clowdisley Shovell, hero of the British Navy, was approached on his quarterdeck by a sailor with a warning. According to the sailor's calculations, the fleet was headed straight for disaster. But Sir Clowdisley was a bold leader unburdened by doubt. He was dead certain he was headed in the right direction.

"Such subversive navigation by an inferior was forbidden in the Royal Navy," according to Dava Sobel in her brilliant book "Longitude," and so "Admiral Shovell had the man hanged for mutiny on the spot."

The 57-year-old Sir Clowdisley stayed the course, oblivious in his ignorance and upright in his optimism, until, one by one, his ships wrecked in the Scilly Isles with great loss of life, including his own.

Sir Clowdisley kept coming to mind as I was reading Robert Draper's "Dead Certain, the presidency of George W. Bush." Dissenters were not hanged in the Bush White House, but their exclusion from the quarterdeck was the bureaucratic equivalent of the long drop. At least Admiral Shovell had a man in uniform willing to bring him bad news.

In the Bush White House, no one said: "Let's slow down and rethink this," Draper writes.

"I made the decision to lead," Bush told Draper. "And therefore there'll be times when you make those decisions; one, it makes you unpopular; two, it makes people accuse you of unilateral arrogance. And that may be true. But the fundamental question is: Is the world better off as a result of your leadership?"

Sir Clowdisley might have made the same statement and asked the same question. For an essential part of leadership is not just dead certainty, but finding the right course, and being flexible enough to change it when the circumstances warrant.

Iraq may be more stable now, but it was an unnecessary war in the first place and there is no end in sight. It is destined to drag on long after Bush has left the stage, perhaps longer than the Vietnam War, radicalizing another generation of Muslims, and immeasurably empowering Iran. And under Bush's leadership, the war in Afghanistan may be lost too. It will be hard to argue that Bush has left the world in better shape than when he found it.

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The same analogy may apply to Greenway and the unreasoned opposition to what we have accomplished in Iraq. Instead of radicalizing a new generation we have created a reaction to the radical Muslims that is tunning in its turn around of the war and the fortunes of al Qaeda. Greenway is just among those liberals who are too off course to recognize it. If he actually read what is happening in Iraq in places like Anbar and elsewhere, he would see how important the rejection of al Qaeda and radical Islam has been to the stabilization of Iraq. The problem with liberals like Greenway is that they are just as dead certain in their beliefs as conservatives and even more stubborn when it comes to admitting that they have been wrong about Iraq all along.

His analogy does remind me of an event in the Civil War when Union troops were sent to destroy a mill in Tallassee, Alabama that manufactured cloth for Confederate uniforms as well as another that made rifles for the Confederate soldiers. They hired a runaway slave to guide them to the mill, which was on the banks of the Tallapoosa River, but when he tried to lead them across the river at a point where it could be forded they believed their maps instead of his local knowledge, and killed him for trying to mislead them.

It turned out he was right and the mill was on the opposite side of the river from where their map said, so they never got to it. The mill was relatively undefended too, since most of the local fighting age men were in Virginia with an artillery unit. Will liberals ever recognize that they have been reading the wrong map when it comes to Iraq? Probably not.