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A tragedy of errors
By Edward Luce
Published: January 18 2009 20:05 | Last updated: January 18 2009 20:05
In his farewell address last week, George W. Bush, America’s 43rd president, quoted America’s third, Thomas Jefferson, who said: “I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past.” Put there to highlight Mr Bush’s very American sense of optimism, it could just as well serve as an unintentional epitaph on his presidency.
Not generally a noted fan of scholarship, the outgoing president has developed a habit of plundering episodes from the past in defence of his eight years in office. Among his unknowing allies, Mr Bush has enlisted Theodore Roosevelt (a strong sense of nationalistic purpose), Winston Churchill (unwavering resolve in the face of evil), Ronald Reagan (ditto) and, most of all, Harry S. Truman.
Although a Democrat, the last has proved most helpful. As the statesman who presided over the beginning of the cold war, Mr Truman stood for freedom against tyranny. In spite of his leaving office with what was then a record low voter approval – dragged down by US involvement in the Korean war – history has elevated the plain-spoken and unintellectual Mr Truman into one of America’s most respected presidents.
The analogy has proved irresistible to Mr Bush, who departs with the thanks of fewer than one in four Americans. So far it does not have too many takers. “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.”
He adds: “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. Will future historians bear it out? Defenders of Mr Bush say his legacy will hinge substantially on whether democracy takes root in Iraq and thereby helps spread stability to the rest of the Middle East. This is an updated version of one of the many original justifications for the invasion: “The road to Jerusalem runs through Baghdad,” neo-conservative proponents used to say of the war.
So far, however – and in spite of the undoubted gains of the 20-month-long US troop surge in Iraq – Jerusalem does not seem to have noticed. 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. In the words of Stephen Hadley, his outgoing national security adviser: “If you had told us on 12 September 2001, when we were coming off the 11 September attacks and going into the anthrax attacks and when we were getting a lot of intelligence that told us that 9/11 could be the first in a series – if you told us then, ‘Don’t worry, you’ll be sitting with the FT in January 2009 and you’ll be able to tell them that America was not [subsequently] attacked’, we would have said it sounds too good to be true.”
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.”
John Ashcroft, who as Mr Bush’s first attorney-general helped frame the legal rationale for the administration’s “global war on terror”, disagrees. “At every stage we acted within the constitution,” says Mr Ashcroft. “[Franklin Delano] Roosevelt interned thousands of Japanese-Americans in the second world war. [Woodrow] Wilson suspended civil liberties in the first world war, as did [Abraham] Lincoln during the civil war. We never resorted to such measures. We never went beyond what the constitution empowers the president to do in defence of liberty.”
In spite of having a 5-4 conservative majority, the US Supreme Court has rebuffed Mr Ashcroft’s interpretation of the constitution in a series of landmark rulings that have restored many of the rights that had been denied to terrorist suspects. Barack Obama, who will on Tuesday ride with Mr Bush from the White House to Capitol Hill for his swearing-in ceremony, has pledged to put an end to much of what America’s highest court has yet to address, including Guantánamo.
But the debate over the methods Mr Bush deployed in the “war on terror” – and on whether he should have declared the struggle against terrorists to be a “war” in the first place – has given way to a more subtle but perhaps more lasting critique of his presidency. 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.”
Neo-conservative former supporters accuse Mr Bush of having sold out on the principles of his first term, for example by engaging with North Korea and offering to engage with Iran – the other two points on his “axis of evil”. Liberal critics concede that Mr Bush embarked on a reluctant “course correction” in his second term but complain that he has done so ineffectually.
Neither group can any longer provide a clear definition of the “Bush doctrine”. Early on in Mr Bush’s presidency it meant acting pre-emptively – with military force if necessary – to forestall threats to America even before they were “fully formed”. After Condoleezza Rice moved to the State department in the second term, the Bush doctrine morphed into “transformational diplomacy”. By the end of Mr Bush’s term, all that is left of the president’s doctrine is his familiar homily about light and darkness. “I have spoken to you often about good and evil and this has made some people uncomfortable,” Mr Bush said in his farewell address. “But good and evil are present in this world and between the two of them there can be no compromise.”
Observers have traced much of Mr Bush’s alleged incompetence to his dislike of what he calls “process decisions” – conclusions reached through the normal Washington inter-agency process. Following his father’s defeat by Bill Clinton in 1992, the future president was quoted as having dismissed George Bush senior’s tendency to synthesise widely sought advice. In contrast, the younger Bush saw himself as “The Decider” – someone who acted on principle and never lost sleep over the consequences.
Many admired his gut instincts. But as his presidency wore on, they dwindled in number. 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. “I lost count of the number of times that we learnt of decisions that had already been taken – we were never invited to the meetings,” says Mr Armitage. “Then we would get back on the gerbil wheel [the normal calendar of meetings] even though we often didn’t know about decisions that had already been taken.”
Naturally, Mr 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.”
In his defence, almost nobody anticipated the depth or scale of the crisis. The outgoing president has also won grudging plaudits for having forgone his free-market instincts last October in favour of a $700bn market intervention. Mr Bush’s lieutenants have since been heavily criticised for alleged mismanagement of the emergency bail-out funds. Many conservatives now accuse Mr Bush of being a “socialist”.
That is a bit of a stretch. But Mr Bush can be accused of having been asleep on the watch. “I tried in 2005 to persuade the administration that mortgage lending was way too lax and that we should tighten up the terms and conditions,” says Larry Lindsey, who was Mr Bush’s chief economic adviser. “I was ignored. They said: ‘Oh Larry’s always too pessimistic. Now he thinks there’s a housing bubble.’ But I would not put the blame for this mess chiefly on the Bush administration. When there’s a bubble there’s always plenty of blame to go around.”
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.
Skipping wordlessly over his father, Mr Bush often cites Reagan as his chief inspiration. The father of modern American conservatism came to office proclaiming government was the “problem, not the solution”. Almost 30 years later, that line appears to have run its course.
On Tuesday Mr Bush will hand over to a man who won a thumping victory by rekindling a dormant American enthusiasm for public service. Mr Obama could not have done it without Mr Bush. Among the epitaphs available, Prof Lindsay’s from his home state of Texas might prove the most enduring. “I can summarise Bush’s legacy in two words,” he says. “Barack Obama.”
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