History will show that George W Bush was right

Daily Telegraph by Andrew Roberts | Jan. 15, 2009 (Opinion)

The American lady who called to see if I would appear on her radio programme was specific. "We're setting up a debate," she said sweetly, "and we want to know from your perspective as a historian whether George W Bush was the worst president of the 20th century, or might he be the worst president in American history?"

In the avalanche of abuse and ridicule that we are witnessing in the media assessments of President Bush's legacy, there are factors that need to be borne in mind if we are to come to a judgment that is not warped by the kind of partisan hysteria that has characterised this issue on both sides of the Atlantic. Full Story »

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by James Canning - Jan. 15, 2009

Andrew Roberts, the well-known British historian (and well-known as being exceptionally favorable in his assessments of George W. Bush, offers a defense of Bush. Roberts claims that Saddam was widely believed to have WMD and that there was no reason to think he had destroyed them. This position is directly contrary to well-established facts, including the salient one, that the Iraqi foreign minister was on the payroll of the CIA and he reported Iraq had no WMD and posed no threat to the US.

I like Andrew Roberts but he is dead wrong on the facts regarding what British and American intelligence knew about Saddam's weapons. In fact, the CIA had extensive corroboration from members of the families of Iraqi scientists that had worked on various WMD programs, and all of them confirmed the WMD had been destroyed in the 1990s. The catastrophic war in Iraq was wholly unnecessary, and it came about due to the astonishing ignorance and arrogance of George W. Bush.