Revisionist History of Bush Democracy Agenda Doesn't Hold Up

By Joel Brinkley,
Tribune Media Services,
Posted 02/15/2011

As the saying goes, success has many fathers. George W. Bush is not one of them.

The former president's aides and other neocons are mounting a furious effort right now to make the case that Bush's pro-democracy campaign during his second term led inexorably to the uprising that drove Hosni Mubarak out of office last week.

Nothing could be further from the truth. It's a canard. I know. I was there. In fact, Bush did far more harm than good.

Elliott Abrams, who was a Bush aide, started this little campaign last month with a Washington Post op-ed that said "the revolt in Tunisia, the gigantic wave of demonstrations in Egypt and the more recent marches in Yemen all make clear that Bush had it right -- and that the Obama administration's abandonment of this mind-set is nothing short of a tragedy."

(Original here.)