The Bush Era: A Tragedy of Errors
Edward Luce:
A tragedy of errors: “Harry Truman and George Bush both left office with rock-bottom approval ratings,” says Strobe Talbott, head of the Brookings Institution, America’s most venerable think-tank. “That is as far as the parallel goes.... Truman set up Nato, strengthened the United Nations and helped lay the groundwork for the European Union – all legacies that persist to this day. Bush leaves no architecture, no institutions, no treaties and no respect for the international rule of law. His unintended legacy may be for America to turn back to those institutions and try to revitalise them after the aberrations of the last eight years.” It is a damning but unexceptional commentary....
Mr Bush leaves at one of the worst times in Israeli-Palestinian relations, with more than 1,000 killed in the three-week assault on the Gaza Strip. “The Gaza conflict is a fitting end to the Bush presidency,” says Francis Fukuyama, author of The End of History and initially a supporter of regime change in Iraq. “Israel is applying the original Bush doctrine in Gaza, which says that politics can be changed on the ground through military means. Ironically, in Iraq, Mr Bush has learnt this lesson painfully and has adopted counter-insurgency tactics aimed at winning over the civilian population. But he cannot seem to apply it to Israel.”
Perhaps the most common argument mounted in defence of Mr Bush is that he has prevented any further terrorist attacks on the US mainland since the day that became known to all as 9/11.... Detractors argue that this came at the price of having widened and deepened the pool of support within the Islamic world for future such attacks on America and its allies. In addition to the invasion of Iraq, they cite the use of torture – or “enhanced interrogation techniques” in the words of its defenders – and the use of Guantánamo Bay as a dumping ground for suspects deprived of legal rights. “We kept America secure but at a high cost,” says Richard Armitage, Mr Bush’s former deputy secretary of state. “Much of it was unnecessary.”...
In spite of having a 5-4 conservative majority, the US Supreme Court has rebuffed Mr Ashcroft’s interpretation of the constitution....
Republican and Democratic critics tend to agree on one point: regardless of what is thought of Mr Bush’s policies, he stands accused of serial incompetence. Mr Fukuyama is blunt. “Governing is about setting goals and then executing them. George Bush couldn’t execute his way out of a bag.” The indictment sheet is lengthy. From Mr Bush’s inability to plan for the occupation of Iraq in 2003 to his slow response when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005, the outgoing president is accused both of failing to understand the consequences of his actions and of an inability to follow through on proclamations he has made. Even diehard supporters such as Michael Gerson, who was Mr Bush’s chief speechwriter for most of his presidency, concede some of the criticism. “Perhaps the most powerful message of the Bush presidency was his ‘freedom agenda’ [to spread democracy round the world],” says Mr Gerson. “But he leaves office without a clearly defined freedom agenda to speak of. It just kind of faded away.”...
Observers have traced much of Mr Bush’s alleged incompetence to his dislike of what he calls “process decisions”... the younger Bush saw himself as “The Decider” – someone who acted on principle and never lost sleep over the consequences.... Some suspected, often correctly, that Mr Bush’s impulses were supplied by Dick Cheney, his vice-president, whose skill at circumventing the usual channels of decision-making was second to none.... Bush’s most secretive decisions were not subjected to expert scrutiny. Sometimes, such as when the Iraqi army was disbanded shortly after the US invasion, the president was unaware of decisions carried out in his name. Particularly since Katrina, his style of decision-making grew into his chief badge of notoriety. For months after 9/11, Mr Bush enjoyed the highest ratings of any president in American history. He leaves office with the lowest. “That takes some doing,” says James Lindsay, a politics professor at Texas university. “After 9/11 Bush had most of the world and all of America on his side. He responded by dividing the world and spurning bipartisanship. The result was that he united rather than divided his enemies. Is that incompetence? You could say that Bush had aspirations but lacked strategy.”
The same charge has been levelled at Mr Bush’s economic policies. Inheriting a budget surplus from Mr Clinton of more than $200bn, Mr Bush bequeaths Mr Obama a record-shattering $1,200bn (€905bn, £815bn) projected deficit for 2009. Following the financial meltdown last autumn, Mr Bush summarised thus: “Wall Street got drunk and left us with the hangover.”... As with the key tenets of Mr Bush’s “war on terror”, Mr Obama has pledged to dismantle much of his predecessor’s economic legacy, most notably the large-scale tax cuts that went disproportionately to wealthy Americans in 2001 and 2003. Again, however, the most pointed criticisms directed at Mr Bush’s economic policies dwell on his alleged incompetence. Until Hank Paulson was recruited in 2006, Mr Bush’s Treasury secretaries were derided as unqualified and seen as peripheral. The same charge was levelled repeatedly at many other appointees, large numbers of whom had scant credentials for the jobs they took on. On the campaign trail, Mr Obama’s biggest applause line came when he promised to appoint “qualified people to government”. From Florida to Ohio, it had audiences on their feet...
