Bush as a new Truman(转）

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Bush as a new Truman

By Elisabeth Bumiller The New York Times
SUNDAY, MAY 28, 2006

President George W. Bush implicitly compared himself to Harry Truman in a commencement address at the U.S. Military Academy, saying that Truman had acted boldly against the "fanatic faith" of Cold War communism in the same way that Bush's administration has responded to the threat of terrorism since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

"By the actions he took, the institutions he built, the alliances he forged and the doctrines he set down, President Truman laid the foundations for America's victory in the Cold War," Bush told the West Point class of 2006.

Bush has compared the struggle against communism to the current war against Islamic radicalism in previous speeches, but his address Saturday was his most developed on the theme. He left it unsaid that Truman was deeply unpopular at the end of his nearly eight years in office, and that it took two or three decades before his achievements were fully appreciated.


"Like the Cold War, we are fighting the followers of a murderous ideology that despises freedom, questions all dissent, has territorial ambitions and pursues totalitarian aims," Bush said. He added that "like Americans in Truman's day, we are laying the foundations for victory."

The president made a passing but pointed reference to the present standoff with Iran over its nuclear ambitions. "The message has spread from Damascus to Tehran that the future belongs to freedom, and we will not rest until the promise of liberty reaches every people in every nation," Bush said.

Unlike his commencement address at West Point four years ago, which set forth the argument of pre-emption that was the basis of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, Bush offered no new policy in his 30-minute address to the graduates of the nation's oldest military academy.

Instead, he repeated the themes of his major war addresses from the past five years.

He told graduates - the first class to enter West Point after the Sept. 11 attacks - that "today you'll become proud officers of the greatest army in the history of the world."

He reiterated that there was only one response to terrorism. "We will never back down, we will never give in and we will never accept anything other than complete victory," he said.