Are you ready for this?

Fred Barnes writes in the Weekly Standard: (selected quotes, emphasis added)

• WHEN PRESIDENT BUSH set aside the Pentagon's strategy for war with Iraq and ordered an attack on Saddam Hussein and his inner circle ... the president behaved, without much ado, as a commander in chief who intends to make the major war decisions himself and not reflexively defer to the expertise of military brass.
  
  
• Bush relied on his own judgment and instincts ...
  
  
• Bush has wisely read and imbibed the advice of military strategist Eliot Cohen in "Supreme Command," a study of successful wartime leaders from Lincoln to Churchill. The common thread among those leaders was their insistence on taking charge, personally and aggressively, and not leaving decisions to the military.
  
  
• The president should be as active in making decisions on postwar Iraq as he has been in the war itself. No doubt the State Department, the United Nations, the European Union, and God knows who else will want to impose their thinking. Rather than defer, Bush should again trust his own judgment.

posted by Quiddity at 3/28/2003 08:43:00 PM