This last evening observes the final night of the administration of George W. Bush. As the clock has been ticking down towards a new beginning, his staunchest supporters have been publishing article after article, with a snarky tone, trying to tell people like me that – “See Bush was right all along.”
Even GWB has done it. In my humble opinion, his final statements have been desperate attempts to argue on the stage of history why he should be vindicated-rather than be remembered as a President in the same league with Harding or Buchanan. He will remind you at the drop of a hat how similar he is to Harry Truman.
Except he isn’t.
For one thing, Truman left the country in better shape than he found it. Second, Truman was a fiscal conservative -while at the same time an advocate for the working man. Third, and most importantly, Truman’s war came as a result of a clear-cut attack. Bush’s war(s) only get a 50% credit on that particular score.
Nonetheless, it’s wrong to say that Bush’s Presidency was a total failure. The fact that the Republic marches on attests to that. Americans are an unruly people, and someone has to corral the forces of their unruly government. As all Presidents do, Bush did that-not as well as others, but he did not pass on the attempt.
And as The Economist points out, he did achieve some results:
Mr. Bush’s presidency is not without its merits. He supported sensible immigration reform. He proposed tighter regulation of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the now-nationalized mortgage agencies. Congress stymied him on both points. He promoted more minorities than any previous president, and he also stood up to the Dixiecrat wing of his party, edging Trent Lott, a Mississippi senator, out of his job as majority leader for segregation-favouring remarks. He maintained good relations with India, Japan, and Africa, where he launched a $15 billion anti-AIDS programme.
Plus, I agree with many of those who make the point that Bush did not wake up each day, saying, “How can I screw up the country today?”. Nor did he believe that he was not doing his best in the decisions he made. As he himself pointed out in his farewell speech, he did not shy away from making decisions.
He just made poor ones based on good intentions.
His golden child though, Paul Wolfowitz, reminded us that just having good intentions is not enough:
“No U.S. president can justify a policy that fails to achieve its intended results by pointing to the purity and rectitude of his intentions,” – Paul Wolfowitz, “Statesmanship in the New Century,” in Kagan, R. and Kristol, W, eds. Present Dangers: Crisis and Opportunity in American Foreign and Defense Policy, San Francisco, 2000, p. 335.
In that regard, I would agree with those who believe that Bush’s greatest failure was not that he tried to do things -but that he failed to adjust or abandon them when they went hideously wrong. Consider Iraq, as Jack Colwell points out:
The president never told former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld: “Rummy, I want you to mess up the occupation of Iraq, lose as many troops as possible and keep that thing going badly.” His mistake was not removing the inept Rumsfeld long before he finally did. Bush was stubborn but not intent on evil.
He wanted to do well-but quite simply; he was not equipped intellectually, emotionally, or academically to achieve it.
In particular, Iraq became the single thing that overwhelmed his ability to do anything else. It made any attempt to reform Social Security, fix education, or even act on any of the rest of his domestic agenda dead on arrival.
Unlike so many, I don’t tear into him so much about Katrina. Because a lot of the blame for the immediate reaction lies with the government of the city itself. It was the President’s responsibility to kick-start the process when it was not working, though. But Ray Nagin deserves a public flogging more than Bush does. It is interesting how Nagin gets a pass, though.
But Iraq -surge or no surge- is an event that can be blamed solely on George W. Bush. 4, 455 dead Americans and over 30,000 wounded, hundreds of thousands of Iraqi dead, and millions of refugees who had to bear the price for his folly. In his press conference, Bush said that many of the results of the Iraq War were a disappointment.
No sir, Mr. President. As Ed Rollins pointed out, ” A disappointment is when you’re a football fan, and your team lost in the playoffs or the national championship game.”
Iraq is not just a disappointment-its a f**king tragedy. One that has lasted six years already and will go on for many more. We should be under no illusions that Iraq will be stable or peaceful or that its political divides have been overcome. There are some promising developments and hopes that the fragile security gains will hold and that the coming rounds of elections will produce a more stable Iraqi political order. But we should not count on all of that coming to pass. Fundamentally, Iraq’s interests are not allied with those of the United States. That divergence will grow, not shrink, as the years pass.
It will be Obama’s mess like Korea’s was Eisenhower’s to clean up. Even the problems with the economy pale in comparison with the tragedy of Iraq.
James Fallows had an e-mail that sums things up nicely:
I, too, thought the final Bush press conference was a remarkable performance; if an actor were to memorize and replicate it, it would seem like something out of Eugene O’Neill, staged in a barroom, and we might feel pity. The inept man without words realizes that he cannot say what he must say: an admission of failures across the board, a realization that his pipe dreams were deadly, an understanding that his nation and the world now hold him in low esteem and wish him gone. And not to be able to say these things is to remain their captive forever. But there is no expiation for Mr. Bush, and that is the objective tragedy. How can he live without awareness?
