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George W. Bush is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I’ve ever known in my life.
Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, Paul Wolfowitz, virtually the entire media, intellectuals, and most members of the U.S. congress
*****
In late 2006 I wrote a piece for History News Network that was titled and asked “Is George Bush ‘The Manchurian Candidate?’” and said, “like a ’sleeper’ agent, or Laurence Harvey’s famed character, Sgt. Raymond Shaw, in The Manchurian Candidate, George W. Bush, the ultimate insider, is doing more to damage America than Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, Hassan Nasrallah, the Syrians, the Iranians, or any other enemy du jour, ever could.” [ http://hnn.us/articles/32618.html . ]
Well, now that our most recent and longest national nightmare has ended, I’d like to follow up and suggest immodestly [guffaw] that I had a point, and we’ve just seen the end of the Manchurian Presidency. After eight years of the Bush-Cheney junta, the U.S. is in its worst position globally and economically in generations, a position simply unimaginable in the aftermath of the “victory” in the cold war and certainly after the outpouring of support and sympathy after 9/11/01. The People’s Republic of China is ascendant; Bush has sent over 4000 Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis to their deaths with his criminal invasion of Iraq; the U.S. economy is a trainwreck, due not just to deregulation and tax cuts for the ruling class but also because of the brutal costs of Iraq and uncontrolled militarization; terrorism has not subsided; Afghanistan and Pakistan are more dangerous; and the U.S. image in the world has, to put it indelicately, fallen into the toilet.
It’s hard to imagine any enemy of the U.S. doing such damage and, if it were not for Bush’s idiocy and ideology [kind of a Clouseau on steroids] it would be hard to imagine that he did all of this without the intention of crushing American interests.
Just a brief travelogue of where this “conservative” president who claimed the patriotic and moral high ground and attacked his enemies as virtual traitors took us . . .
Iraq, despite the post hoc ergo propter hoc claims after the surge, remains indefensible and declarations of success there are as specious as when first uttered. Although the number of American soldiers killed decreased in the past 18 months, that was due in main to political arrangements made by U.S. officials, i.e. paying off and arming about 30,000 Sunni militants who had just before that been the target of American attacks. But politically, which is after all the final way to judge a war, the U.S. has alienated the Iraqis and emboldened enemies.
Not only to the American people think Iraq “wasn’t worth it” in polling data by huge margins [at least 60 percent disapproval in every poll for the past two years] but the Iraqis themselves want the U.S. out. Inside Iraq, in a late 2007 poll, over 70 percent of the Iraqis believed that the surge had failed and security had deteriorated. By spring 2008, as Hillary Clinton and John McCain were trying to show who was more hawkish and attacking the idea of a “timeline” for withdrawal, the Iraqi government asked for, you got it, a timeline for withdrawal from Iraq. Just yesterday, after President Obama met with military commanders to charge them with preparing a withdrawal plan, an Iraqi military spokesman endorsed the U.S. departure, saying “if the US pullout comes early, our Iraqi forces have prepared for this.” (I don’t recall Nguyen Van Thieu every saying anything like that).
Another situation for which Iraq is prepared is better relations with Iran, which is, once more, unimaginable given that the two countries fought one of the bloodier wars in recent times in the 1980s and were sworn enemies, and, in the equation of Bush himself, poses a grave threat to U.S. security. Indeed, the fact that Iraq and Iran are now essentially allies is staggering evidence of Bush’s failure.
Many Shiite from Iraq were exiled to Iran during the Saddam Hussein years and developed strong ties to the leadership in Tehran; in fact, Iraq’s leading religious figure, Grand Ayotollah Ali as-Sistani, is a native Iranian.
Just two weeks ago, Iraq’s Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki visited Iran [for the fourth time], met with America’s arch-enemy President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and spoke warmly of relations between Baghdad and Iran. “Our Islamic and humane duty requires that we always stand by the Iraqi nation,” Ahmadinejad said. Iran and Iraq agreed to increase trade by about five billion dollars and Maliki sought even greater Iranian investment to help Iraq rebuild after the American invasion and destruction. In a statement that must surely have made officials at Halliburton shudder, Maliki said “after elevating security and freeing Iraq from sectarian fighting, it is time to work hard to reconstruct the country and there is a need for companies from neighbouring nations to take on reconstruction projects.” I’d call this an Iran faint.
At the same time, the “global war on terror” has surely not eradicated terrorism, and in fact incidents of terror have risen since March 2003. The war in Iraq accelerated the number of attacks by 25 percent in 2006, and a study by Paul Cruickshank, a fellow at the Center on Law and Security at the New York University School of Law, found a 600 percent rise in terrorism between the invasion of Iraq and 2007. Perhaps even worse, the forces unleashed by U.S. actions in the post-9/11 Middle East have intensified anti-U.S. actions elsewhere, most notably in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and have arguably spilled over into incidents like the recent Mumbai attacks.
Although I’m always reluctant to cite “experts,” a recent survey in Foreign Policy of terrorism specialists showed that 70 percent thought that the world was becoming more dangerous for the U.S. than it had been [which, to be fair, was down from 91 percent two years ago] and a similar 70 percent thought the U.S. was losing the war on terror. (That perhaps may be Obama’s greatest accomplishment- the elevation of an African-American with Third World roots may make it less likely for potential terrorists abroad to want to blow up buildings and people to protest the United States).
The so-called experts, at 81 percent, also argued that U.S. policy toward Iran had a negative effect on U.S. security goals, and over half of them believed that Pakistan was the next grave threat to American interests and safety. Indeed, just as U.S. actions helped broker a rapprochement between Iran and Iraq, they also have given energy to the most extreme groups in Pakistan [and helped reinvigorate the Taliban forces in Afghanistan]. Islamabad, with its madrassas, al-Qaeda operatives and supporters, and nuclear weapons, is arguably the most dangerous country in the world today. Yet it receives billions of dollars in U.S. aid as well as high-tech weapons and political support. Again, could an American enemy have created a more alarming situation?
As bad as all this is, perhaps the longest-lived and damaging consequences will be economic. Bill Clinton, despite his Goldman Sachs Globalization policies, did in fact create a budget surplus when he left office and, depending on which data is used, either helped foster an increase or smaller decreases in standards of living. Today, the national debt is about 10.7 trillion dollars. That means each citizen of the U.S. has a debt of about $35,000 and, with the national debt increasing by about $3.4 billion daily, that’s sure to grow to even more frightening proportions (in October, congress raised the debt ceiling to 11.3 trillion dollars). With the recent bailout of Wall Street, the national deficit could reach $1 trillion for the year and send the overall debt will surely exceed the new ceiling, the highest shortfalls since the end of World War II.
Foreign treasuries, especially in Asia, have been the main beneficiaries of the Bush borrowing orgy. China’s foreign exchange reserves now stand at 1.9 trillion dollars, an increase of 33 percent over last year. Though unlikely, these figures do raise the spectre of China’s “nuclear option” if it wants to stagger the U.S. economy by cashing in huge amounts of its dollars, especially as the U.S. could potentially be entering a deflationary period where investments will be negligible and commercial money is tighter than ever.
Of course, the biggest factor in this startling increase in deficits has been Iraq. The war costs about half a billion dollars daily, and Linda Bilmes and Joseph Stiglitz, two of the more reputable economists in the world, estimate, conservatively they say, that the war itself and the subsequent costs of rebuilding, caring for the wounded, paying benefits to vets, etc. will grow to over three trillion dollars. And those dollars are weaker than ever, with the Euro going for $1.30 [which, with the falling cost of oil, is an improvement over last year].
At the same time, U.S. spending on arms and other military equipment has soared, contributing both to global unrest and the debt. In September 2008, as congress members pontificated about the Wall Street bailout of $700 billion, the house and senate passed, with only passing debate and little dissent, a military budget of $612 billion. The U.S. military budget now exceeds the rest of the world combined and is more than ten times greater than the country with the next biggest military budget, the PRC.
Finally, and not insignificantly, America’s image in the world has taken a vast downturn, making it much harder for the U.S. to play a positive role in the world and contributing to anti-Americanism all over. Even among European allies, support of U.S. policies has dropped to below fifty percent, while in the Middle East it has plummeted to single digits and, according to a Zogby poll of “friendly” countries in that region-Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates-it was at 12 percent. Given America’s support of Israel during its recent brutal invasion of Gaza, one can’t expect those numbers to rise soon unless Obama has one hell of a rabbit under his hat.
To be redundant, Bush has, in eight years, created a geopolitical, economic, and public relations catastrophe of immense if not incalculable measure, and no enemy of the U.S. ever had the resources or wherewithal to do such damage.
Fidel Castro, now in his final years [though the Miami Cubans have been claiming that for a half century and he's on his 11 U.S. president] knows as much as anyone about being an enemy of the U.S., and despite the hysterical claims of his opponents, has never really had any capacity, other than public opinion and Third World solidarity, to damage U.S. interests, recently spoke out about the U.S. and his optimism that President Obama was a good man.
At the same time,the Cuban Lion in Winter understood the systemic limits of change in America and said of Obama: “What will he do soon, when the immense power that he has taken in his hands is absolutely useless to overcome the unsolvable, antagonistic contradictions of the (American) system?”
I don’t know the answer to that question, but I do know that the previous regime-the most lawless and destructive regime in U.S. history, an administration that makes one become nostalgic about Nixon and complacent about Reagan and Clinton-has made those contradictions more unsolvable and antagonistic than ever before.
It’s almost as if that was their plan all along . . . .
Farewell President Iselin, I mean President Bush. Hail to the Chief
Tags: economic deficits, George W. Bush, iran, iraq, Pakistan, Terrorism
Bob Buzzanco
Professor, Department of History, University of Houston; Ph.D. from The Ohio State University; Author and editor of numerous books and articles on U.S. foreign policy; recipient of Bernath Book Prize [1996] and Bernath Lecture Prize [1999]. buzz@uh.edu; http://vi.uh.edu/pages/buzzmat/buzzanco.htm
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