http://www.msnbc.com/news/889365.asp?0cv=KB20#BODY
Quote:
NEWSWEEK: How would you describe Bush as a wartime president?
Historian Arthur Schlesinger
Arthur Shlesinger: Well I think he?s made a fatal mistake. I think we?ve made a fatal mis-turn in our foreign policy by abandoning the doctrine of containment-plus-deterrence (which won the Cold War peacefully), and adopting as the basis of our foreign policy preventive war. Preventive war, anticipatory self-defense, was the doctrine with which the Japanese justified Pearl Harbor. FDR, an earlier American president, said that it was a date that will live in infamy. And now the Bush doctrine is a doctrine of preventive war, which makes America the self-appointed world?s judge, jury and executioner. However benign the motives, it?s bound to have a corrupting effect on our leadership. I think the whole notion of America as the world?s judge, jury and executioner is a tragically mistaken notion.
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And it goes on....
Now, who is this man:
?The bane of ideology,? wrote Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. in his 1986 book ?The Cycles of American History,? ?is that it exalts abstractions over human beings. It impoverishes our sense of reality, and it impoverishes our imagination, too.? Schlesinger knows a few things about ideology and its role in history: In 1962 the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and advisor to President John F. Kennedy witnessed first-hand the tense unfolding and peaceful resolution of the Cuban missile crisis. Today he is witnessing ?with deep gloom? what he calls a dangerous shift in American foreign policy towards the ideological.