Will George W Bush be remembered as another Reagan?

There's a bear in the woods. For some people the bear is easy to see. Others don't see it at all. Some people say the bear is tame. Others say it's vicious and dangerous. Since no one can really be sure who's right, isn't it smart to be as strong as the bear - if there is a bear?

The second strand involved making America that “shining city on the hill”, recalling the image of the Vietnamese boat-person greeting the US sailor, “Hello, American sailor. Hello, Freedom man”.

The two strands are mutually supportive, the latter justifying the first.

While contestants of Big Brother might think Berlin is a country in Europe and that the Wall existed to divide the “rich communists” from the poor west, Reagan knew better. He sensed that the Communist system was flawed and doomed - a thought that seems so obvious in hindsight but was regarded as dangerous and heretical at the time.  It could be said of Reagan, without fear of hyperbole, that he helped free millions of people. Although some might dismiss that freedom with a suitable sneer, and say “Well at least they didn’t have MacDonald’s or Coke” but, to paraphrase Kipling, what do they know of freedom, who only freedom know?

Bush’s foreign-policy approach shares the simplicity of Reagan’s; if we replace the Soviet bear with Islamic terrorism they are almost identical. It is an approach that is “simple, but hard”, as Iraq reminds us. But hard isn’t impossible. Who would have thought in 1980 that in 1989 the Berlin Wall would fall; nuclear war seemed more probable. Supporters of the war in Iraq should take some comfort from this.

It’s not unreasonable to think that some years into the future, at the death of George W. Bush, people will fondly remember a folksy president, so polarising in his day, who somehow managed to bring democracy to a region where the experts said it would never take hold.

In the meantime, the likes of Bishop Frame should buck up. After all, life wasn’t meant to be easy.