Newsweek: D-Day's Real Lessons (What * should learn)

[RamboLiberal]

Good historical article on FDR and Churchill and *'s shortcomings compared to these great leaders.

http://msnbc.msn.com/id/5040844/

<snip>
...So the president has a learning curve to master, and he should start with the Great Men of the Greatest Generation—or else he may face Churchill's political fate, defeat at the polls in the wake of a war. Bush has read the right books, from Martin Gilbert and William Manchester on Churchill to Michael Beschloss, James MacGregor Burns and Arthur Schlesinger Jr. on Roosevelt. Whether he has absorbed the lessons of such works is another question.

Bush eschews complexity; FDR and Churchill embraced it. Bush prefers to decide, not go into details or revisit issues; FDR and Churchill were constantly examining their own assumptions and immersing themselves in postwar planning. Bush is largely incurious about the world; FDR and Churchill wanted to know everything. It is not too late, however, for the president to reach back into their lives for guidance—they are not inaccessible figures. Steely and subtle, hawkish and gentle, fierce and forgiving, they were men before they were monuments. And in the debate over D-Day (or Overlord, as the cross-channel invasion was called), all of their gifts and quirks, genius and weaknesses, came into sharpest focus.

<snip>

Bush demonstrated a detailed interest in the military planning for Afghanistan and Iraq, but he does not like the creative chaos Roosevelt encouraged. According to Bob Woodward's "Plan of Attack," Bush never held a meeting of his war council to debate whether invading Iraq would help or hurt the larger war on Al Qaeda, nor did he think out what a postwar Iraq would look like. In deciding to attack and staying on top of early combat, it seems, Bush believed his work was largely done. "The more he's been president, the more he's talked and the less he's listened," says a former Bush administration official. "The president gets impatient with debate; he doesn't play around with ideas." That is also apparently true even in private, at the summit: sources close to Blair say that the prime minister and Bush tend to shy away from frank exchanges on issues that divide them, for fear of damaging their genuine friendship. In contrast, Roosevelt and Churchill could disagree sharply as they tried to settle on the right course. "Lovers' quarrels," Churchill told Roosevelt after one such dust-up about the march to Berlin, "always go with true love."

[charlyvi]

1. You forget....

* doesn't read newspapers, probably does not read news magazines. He just listens to God.....or Rumsfeld/Wolfowitz/Feith etc.

[indepat]

2. And his mind is already made up on everything and he is always right,

extremely far right.

[Larkspur]

3. And neither FDR nor Churchill got their orders directly from god

Only Bush, The Omen Incarnate, does.

[opihimoimoi]

4. Really, the Bush talks to the Man and that that.

But who is fooling who? Bush does not read, much less History. So whu do these people keep saying the answers lies in this direction or that... they point out the solutions. All require reading, Bwahahahaha, an like I jus mentioned, the dude don read. Its like talking to a brick wall.

[depakid]

5. But he does read...

Doesn't he?