PBS has been airing a series on George W. Bush’s presidency. I couldn’t bring myself to watch it but I can see from the trailers that it is respectful and seems to regard Bush as a man of noble qualities with some big mistakes. Not so different from the Peter Baker New York Times article in which Bush calls for a bipartisan response to coronavirus. Bush the statesman.
It is plain that the mainstream is trying to, if not entirely resuscitate Bush’s reputation, make a sharp distinction between his presidency and the Reckless Authoritarian Narcissistic presidency of the man who leaves us all so rattled. Bush wasn’t that bad.
But he was.
Bush made the greatest executive mistake I’ve seen in my lifetime, the decision to invade Iraq in 2003. It was based on lies and a weakminded strategy about bringing democracy by gunpoint to the Middle East, and its wrongness was obvious at the time to among many others the millions who demonstrated against it. The tragic human rights consequences have spilled over for years since, throughout several countries. Hundreds of thousands of people died directly as a result of Bush’s decision. Millions of lives were disrupted, damaged, or shadowed by this grievous mistake. The strategy was inane, and helped rubbish America’s reputation.
There’s no point in deflecting the responsibility to Cheney or Rumsfeld or the neocons or the liberal interventionist press. Yes they all played crucial roles. This was Bush’s decision in the end. He was the Decider.
The damage far outstrips Trump’s damage, and I am including the Middle East bombings, the Muslim ban, the incitement of racism, the destruction of the Iran deal, and now the COVID-19 missteps.
No doubt Trump’s performance throughout the pandemic has been disgraceful and horrifying and deeply unsettling to any sense of order. But how many lives has he cost? That number is very hard to pin down; and he has competition from other world leaders who were blindsided and/or in denial. After all, the COVID matter is a forced error. Iraq was an unforced error.
As for the depression that seems to await us – again, this is a global phenomenon. And Bush had the great recession of 2007-09 to his credit; he surely missed a lot of signs. As he mishandled the public health crisis of hurricane Katrina in ’05.
Which brings us back to the Bush nostalgia we are seeing today. The Iraq war never really counts for all that much– because so much of the establishment was for it. And despite all the pain and suffering that it caused, there has been rather limited accountability for the many armchair-colonels of that decision in Washington and New York. Bill Kristol and Joe Biden are both unscathed. All the useful idiots Tony Judt once lined up are still hard at work in the media telling us how to think.
The pandemic is a terrible thing, but the people of Iraq and Syria and Gaza say that war is worse. When it comes to rehabilitating Bush’s reputation– a boyish clueless smirking jerk who was in way over his head with disastrous consequences– those victims are the ones we should be hearing from now.
The ongoing tragedy in Iraq further confirms that George Bush Sr. was correct when he chose not to occupy Baghdad and depose Sadaam Hussein in 1991. It also brings to mind the long since forgotten words of then Vice President Dick Cheney as quoted by the New York Times on 13 April 1991, when he was secretary of defense: “Once you’ve got Baghdad, it’s not clear what you will do with it. It’s not clear what kind of government you would put in place of the one that’s currently there now. Is it going to be a Shia regime, a Sunni regime or a Kurdish regime? Or one that tilts toward the Ba’athists, or one that tilts toward the Islamic fundamentalists. How much credibility is that government going to have if it’s set up by the United States military when it’s there? How long does the United States military have to stay to protect the people that sign on for the government, and what happens to it once we leave?”
If memory serves, about 1,500,000 Iraqis died as a result of America and its allies’ invasion of Iraq in 2003 and subsequent occupation. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis were turned into refugees and their country’s infrastructure was destroyed. Blood thirsty George Bush Jr. and his obedient buddy, Britain’s P.M. at the time, Tony Blair (aka, Toady Bliar) and several others are undeniably war criminals.
Yes, I do think Philip Weiss is correct.
We forget the ignorant horrors of Bush, who killed more than a million people.
However, the fact is that it is not possible to see good and admirable leadership from the United States anymore.
Bush, Obama, Trump – all monsters in their own ways, with other monsters in competition for the job, monsters like Hillary Clinton.
To categorize the bush decision as a mistake is a terrible mistatement. A mistakes is an ooops. This was no ooops.
Yet while the blame rests at gw
s feet its difficult to assign all blame to him. Sure he was the decider but frankly he was a clueless idiot. He was supported and promoted as the president to be because he was malleable and controllable. No Im no talking about deep state but about donors. Heres my money for your candidacy and heres what I want in return. It might be specific legislation, it might be support for future legislation. And it might be a promise to appoint certain individual, or from a list of individuals, to be key policy advisers in certain areas. Or combinations of that and other things.Look at the key people surrounding these presidents.
Bush is a doofus but a nicer guy than the orange orangutan who is just nasty in every way. Callous to the point of not even caring that 10s of thousands of US citizens have died under his watch due to his inaction.
So I
d pick bush if the choice was between the two. But hes still a doofus and war criminal.cheney was the decider in the scheme to make bush president (chosen for his compliance) and everything foreign policy, including the decision to invade iraq planned meticulously in the months prior to 9/11 with the weekly private meetings toiling over oil maps of iraq.
yes, bush was worse that trump, but make no mistake, he was not the decider. why i always call it the cheney administration, cheney had the final word. read seymour hersh’s stovepiping, among others.
I agree that Bush’s presidency was worse. It brought us the recession (2007/2008) and he invaded Iraq and Afghanistan, causing lots of deaths. Trump’s presidency is more like a mild malaise compared to that. He hasn’t invaded countries, other than continuing the US involvement in Syria and causing disturbance against Venezuela’s government. One of the biggest downsides of Trump’s presidency has been the bigotry and ignorance that it has encouraged, sadly, in his followers and supporters. Understandably, there was disillusionment with both Obama’s presidency and the Establishment, and Trump’s campaign capitalized on that by presenting himself as an anti-Establishment candidate, which is only partly true. Namely, the establishment didn’t prefer him, but he was still in the good ol’ boys’ club as for instance his cabinet picks reflect.
And Trump has establishment backers that tried to get his image to appeal to disillusioned people. So for instance, the right wing pro-Israeli camp supported Trump (as in “Make Israel Great Again”), and they created the outwardly “alt-right news blog” Breitbart to present this image to the public. The creators of Breitbart have explicitly stated that they created their website to counter the mainstream media’s (in their view) anti-Israel bias. But in practice, their articles generally don’t discuss Israel, the articles are more about building up a base among the population that is conducive to right wing pro-Israeli politics.