Bush leaves legacy of falsehood and destruction

(Op-ed) Patrick Michael - Khaleej Times Sunday 18th January, 2009

At the start of the 1990s, the world was typically chaotic.

For a USA that still believed it was and behaved like a superpower, its relations with both China and Russia were turning sour.

Chinese leaders justifiably believed the USA to be hostile to their country’s rising power. Only recently, the Chinese embassy in Belgrade had accidentally been bombed by US air force pilots during a war in Kosovo, which most of the civilised world called illegal. That year, the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland joined NATO, mightily upsetting Russia. It wasn’t wise to upset Russia, because Russian President Boris Yeltsin had just made Vladimir Putin prime minister. Putin promptly invaded Chechnya and was soon leading Russia down a nationalist and aggressive road.

That’s the patchy, scrappy and risky world scenario that George W. Bush looked at when he wrested the presidency of the USA for the first time, by means more foul than fair. Even before he took office, cartoonists were drawing him as a Texas cowboy with six-shooters and swinging a lasso. The Europeans didn’t like him to start with and a French politician named Jack Lang called him a “serial assassin”. How right Monsieur Lang would be.

With that sort of foreign affairs welcome, it looked like Bush the Younger would fulfill one of his promises made during campaigning: to pare down US global pretensions. Indeed, during the pre-election debates with Democratic nominee Al Gore, Bush is on record as saying that the United States should not “go around the world and say this is the way it’s got to be” and that this was “one way for us to end up being viewed as the ugly American”.

It was an early lie in a long list of lies that is in fact the lasting legacy of President Number 43.

As soon as they had robbed power through a scandalous election endgame, the Bushies — as the rightwing, war-minded and moneyed cabal he assembled was called — set about unplugging his administration from any notions of responsibility. Not national responsibility and certainly not international.

George W inducted into his inner circle people like Condoleezza Rice. Her view, delivered with a fine disregard for American domestic conditions and the state of international relations in the 1990s, was that humanitarian interest was useless, airy talk. She crudely but firmly pushed the idea that US foreign policy had to be rooted in the “firm ground of the national interest” and definitely not in the “interests of an illusory international community”. Such hardline posturing did not prevent George W from using the same “international community” as an excuse for declaring unilateral war.

Why did this president of the USA descend into such an appalling trough of falsehood and destruction, so quickly and so determinedly?

He was hardly advised against such a course by those whose duty it was to have at least raised cautionary signals, if not block such intent. The George W era is the time of the rise of the neoconservatives, which happened because of huge, sweeping changes to the world’s political economy. In the George W regime this group — and their collaborators in the USA, in Europe, in the OECD countries, and wherever in the world the ‘free market’ logic had taken hold — found a powerful and committed vehicle.

His was the era when America thought dangerously about its place in the world, when its elites welcomed the rise of nutcase think-tanks like the Project for a New American Century, which sounded like a conclave of James Bond film villains. Drunk with maddening visions of their reach and power, unfettered by any mechanism of democracy or law, George W and his crackpot council ran riot. They had already rigged elections and whipped up fascist sentiment. Then they launched ‘pre-emptive wars’ and justified what George W’s deranged advisers called the “unitary executive”, which meant simply a presidency that was not accountable at home and which must override the rule of law everywhere else.

Amongst these people, this Bushie wolfpack on nitro steroids, were Dick Cheney and Karl Rove, Donald Rumsfeld and John Bolton. Cheney was portrayed within the USA as a man of firm conservative principles whose devotion to executive power was complete and entirely reliable.

But Cheney it was who gave the Bush administration its motto: pay any price (you, the people, are to pay the price) to get what we want.

Rove it was who advocated a presidential management style that “emphasises leadership and decision-making to the exclusion of administration and management”. From these catastrophic mission statements came the logic of the “war” on terrorism, the wars (the Bushies and their myriads of toadies called them “fronts”) in Iraq and Afghanistan, the shock-and-awe “crusade” launched in the name of US “safety” and “national security”.

Eight years later, when George W can no longer rig elections, kill and maim in the name of the USA, these remain the twisted ideals, which the American right clings to.

What will the George W legacy look like a generation from now? Ugly, perhaps as the ugliest eight years ever in the USA after the Second World War.

The Iraq war, the failed “freedom agenda,” and the White House’s response to the September 11, 2001, attacks will compose the central contributions of the George W presidency, one defined primarily by disaster and violence. It will be seen as designed by a large, well-connected and powerful group of neoconservatives who saw themselves as being vindicated by the West’s ‘victory’ in the Cold War. None of them would recognise, or even see, that their war creed could not be applied to other problems and places. That is why ambitious Bush ‘initiatives’ like the creation of the Department of Homeland Security and the restructuring of the intelligence community are monuments to retrograde management thinking.

Eight years later, the USA is left with an over-centralised bureaucracy stifled by many layers, saddling US national security with new liabilities. The Bush administration holds before it the feeble excuse of having misread fundamentally the end of the Cold War. Contrary to the usual assumptions of the American political class, the end of the Cold War did not enhance America’s relative power but instead reduced it.

Also contrary to the Bush administration’s assumptions, 9/11 did not “change everything” — which was the semaphore code for sanctioning every new military adventure abroad, taking away a host of civil liberties at home. George W’s overwrought and hysterical reaction to 9/11 combined with his administration’s inclination to frame policies based on its self-image of omnipotence. It was this set of misreadings — some of them deliberate — that made America weaker still.

The man at the centre of this enormous enterprise, that was at once bloated and fragile, has often looked like a theatrical stand-in for the sort of chief executive the USA actually needed.

Readings of the life and times of George W have pointed to his struggle to be like his father, George Senior, until he was about 40 years of age. In his book, ‘The Bush Tragedy’, Jacob Weisberg writes of a George W who: “revered his father but failed repeatedly to attain his level of achievement in academics, sports, or character. This drove George W to a life of dissipation and led his parents to favour his younger brother Jeb as the heir to the family’s political destiny. That, in turn, drove a resentful George W to remake himself into a success on his own terms.” How did a man with still-adolescent reactions to deep questions come to occupy this position?

The Bush administration from the first was distinguished by a bellicose group of neoconservatives. Whatever their battle anthem, the truth is that in pursuing their belligerent ends they found solid backing within the circles of power. Strong support was extended both by the Democratic and Republican parties, the US Congress, the judiciary, the media, and the corporations generally. There was little or no discussion about whether a permanent war effort was necessary. Instead, disagreements were largely about troop levels, the amount of force to be applied, relations with allies, and distribution of forces between the major “fronts”.

Remember that America’s next president, Barack Obama, had talked about bombing Pakistan a year ago. More fundamental questions, even the use of torture, were avoided. Major dissent and an understanding of the patterns of power have mainly come from the bottom of American society. Today in the USA, fundamental dissent toward the existence of the military-imperial system, no matter how thoughtful or well-informed, is off-limits.

George W’s successor inherits executive power in a country beset by rampant economic stagnation, deep and critical financial crisis, declining hegemony, impending environmental collapse, and new populist insurgencies. Even so, George W Bush was not the first to urge Americans to ‘sacrifice’ by spending money and visiting Disney World. That was the story of the dissolute 1990s. The subprime mortgage, the McMansion in the distant suburb with the 50-mile commute to work, the SUV, the wallet full of credit cards — and the constant state of individual and collective denial had been carefully engineered into place much earlier.

It is only now, when gawping at the shambles of criminal Wall Street empire builders, that rank-and-file Americans are realising that all these years, they had burnt oil faster than anyone else and spent money that didn’t belong to them. Meanwhile, ‘globalisation’ had found its hungry way into the impoverished backlands of Afghanistan and Iraq, into the reckless wastes of Yemen and the shanties of the Gaza Strip.

Some of that responsibility lies with an earlier administration, that of president Eisenhower. In the 1950s it seemed natural for Charles Wilson, president of General Electric, to become secretary of defence in the Eisenhower administration, just as retiring generals and admirals found it natural to move into the employ of corporations they had only recently given contracts to on the government’s behalf.

That is how Washington was transformed into a planetary military headquarters. It was Wilson who first spoke of a “programme of industrial preparedness” for war that would be “permanent and continuing”. George W was certainly advised to borrow 
that idea from America’s past and upgrade it.

He did, more malignantly than anyone on earth thought possible. That he and his scurvy crew have escaped impeachment and indictment for doing so is astonishing. They have ignored the American Constitution and the Bill of Rights, devised and institutionalised torture, committed war crimes around the globe as ‘policy’, ignored the Geneva Convention and the UN Charter, they have ridiculed science and evolution and global warming, they have turned the USA into the largest debtor country by far, and they have massacred more than 1.2 million Iraqis. Will what Americans did in polling stations in November 2008 bring about any restitution for this catalogue of horrors?

No it will not. The age of tumult is already into its first act. Having set the stage, the terror-master walks unscathed away.

Patrick Michael is a Senior Khaleej Times Editor