Thank You, George!

Dear George

    At the moment when it's good form to criticize you - unfortunately, even within these columns - allow me, instead, to inform you of my admiration. And to deplore your situation. How, in goodness name, did the most powerful man on the planet come to be misunderstood to this extent? I know: believer that you are, you despise the glory of this base world. Nor am I unaware that - following the example of many great men - you have long had a premonition that you would only be understood after some fifty or so years. Your voice will have fallen silent, but your oeuvre will continue to speak for you.

    As for me, I have no doubt: History will do you more justice than do your despicable contemporaries. So while certain intellectuals (oh, those "neocons" you have so masterfully taken for a ride) thought, in their day, to play the wise guys by prognosticating the end of History: they didn't see that the first great revolutionary of the 21st Century occupied the Oval Office at the White House.

    Mister President, I make this bet: in a few years, if there's any sense to History, you will have replaced Che Guevara on the other-worldists' T-shirts. After all: what a record you've got!

    By what criteria does one recognize a great leader? By his ability to organize his succession, of course. Now who can deny that without the policy you've conducted over the last eight years, Barack Obama would never have been elected? This brilliant young man's veritable Pygmalion is you, of course. I imagine that it was hardly always easy. I'm thinking in particular about one of your master strokes: the war in Iraq. To manipulate your Secretary of State, the righteous general, Colin Powell, to the point of pushing him to lie before the UN about Saddam Hussein's suppositious weapons of mass destruction; then, once the deception was realized, forcing him to resign so that he ended up joining Barack Obama. Nice one!