Having spent years supporting the Bush administration’s largest foreign policy disaster (Iraq), and it’s largest hoped-for domestic policy disaster (dismantling Social Security), the Washington Post opinion section has been running a lot of articles lately on the question of exactly how bad a president Bush is in historical terms. Eric Foner says Bush is the worst ever, but also in some ways comparable to James K. Polk who “should be remembered primarily for launching that unprovoked attack on Mexico and seizing one-third of its territory for the United States.” Michael Lind, by contrast, sees four presidents worse than Bush — James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, Richard Nixon and dark-horse candidate James Madison. Polk isn’t in the conversation.

Douglas Brinkley marks Bush down as the worst ever and observes of Polk that his war “was a success, even if the pretext was immoral. On virtually every presidential rating poll, Polk is deemed a ‘near great’ president.” Similarly, “History chalks up Mr. McKinley’s War as a U.S. win, and he also polls favorably as a ‘near great’ president.” Robert Farley likewise agrees that “at least James K. Polk’s deceptive and unprovoked war was successful.” They Might Be Giants, famously, are Polk fans:

In four short years he met his every goal
He seized the whole southwest from Mexico
Made sure the tarriffs fell
And made the English sell the Oregon territory
He built an independent treasury
Having done all this he sought no second term

At the end of the day, Polk’s hard to evaluate just because it’s so hard to imagine a world in which the United States doesn’t extend from sea to shining sea.

The London Times reports that “the Saudi Arabian government is emerging as a key player in talks to broker a comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace agreement” and that “Olmert is believed to be considering a Saudi initiative, endorsed by the Arab League four years ago, as the basis for a peace settlement.” This via Andrew Stuttaford who remarks “Good for the Saudis, good for Ehud Olmert.”

I agree. My only question: Why isn’t this in the American press? Seems like an important development. If Olmert’s really “considering” this, the US government should encourage him to move forward.

Jon Chait’s smart take on Paul Tough’s education article from last week observes that the schools that have been most successful with poor inner-city kids “attract a small cadre of extremely bright and dedicated teachers, often willing to work 16-hour days.” This is good for those schools and the kids who attend them, “but you can’t find enough [people like that] to staff every school in the nation, or even just the poorest ones.” In the past, “teaching was able to attract a lot of highly skilled women because they were excluded from most professions on the basis of their gender.” These days, that gender segregation externality no longer operates on the teaching labor market, so “if you want highly skilled teachers who work investment banker hours, we have to pay them like — well, if not quite like investment bankers, then a lot more generously than we pay them now.”

In short, on a small scale you can find eccentric individuals willing to engage in Stakhanovite efforts to make things work. But such endeavors are not a systematic solution to anything. If you want to replicate these results on a wide scale, it would take, among other things, a very large sum of money.

I went to see Fast Food Nation last night and before the film there was a long ad for for the Army National Guard, detailing not only the sort of benefits you can obtain through volunteering, but also the sort of exciting missions the Guard undertakes. Except, of course, they didn’t mention anything about Iraq where tens of thousands of Guard soldiers are deployed. There was, instead, a vague mention of “overseas deployment.” Nothing unusual about this, of course. If you watch a lot of male-oriented television programming you’ll see lots of military recruitment ads of various sorts and they never mention that the modal outcome for a member of the US military these days is to be sent to fight in Iraq.

It is however, unusual in historical terms. If you look at recruting posters from World War I or World War II the situation was quite different.

It’s not merely that these posters didn’t obscure the fact that a war was going on. Rather, the fact of the war was the key selling point of the recruitment drives. Which makes sense. Leaving your home and family to go do an arduous job isn’t an obviously appealing thing to do. You get money, to be sure, but patriotic appeals are a key part of getting people to volunteer. The war, in these terms, is a reason to sign up — your country needs you to fight its enemies.

We have to assume that the Army’s marketing people know what they’re doing these days. And there professional judgment is that the Iraq War isn’t like that. Their view is that “the war in Iraq is a vital and necessary cause that you should do your part for” won’t be compelling to people. The best way to get them to sign up isn’t quite to try and dupe them (everyone knows there’s a war on) but certainly is to try and keep the war hidden and downplayed.

What’s more, everyone takes this for granted. Nobody expects the Army to run ads saying “sign up and fight the Islamofascists in Iraq.” I don’t, however, think we’ve really thought the implications of this through. Lots of people are still opposed to a rapid withdrawal from Iraq. But does anyone think Iraq is a cause worth dying for at this point? Does anyone deny that a straightforward recruiting pitch wouldn’t work? But staying in Iraq, obviously, means having people die for this mission. For a mission nobody really believes in anymore.