Looking Objectively at George W.

Sun, 2009-01-11 07:17

By Dr. Richard L. Benkin

Dr. Richard L. BenkinUS President George W. Bush soon will turn over the reigns of office to Barak Obama. Perhaps only two other times in the last half century did such a transition promise to usher in an era so different from the previous one: 1961 when Dwight Eisenhower passed the baton to John F. Kennedy; and 1981 when Jimmie Carter gave way to Ronald Reagan. Doing justice to one’s readers in assessing an entire presidency is a monumental task and must go beyond the standard narratives generally set by people with a political agenda, many with little insight into the United States or its policies.

Right now, many would like to see something on the order of ‘good riddance to Bush’ and ‘we love Obama.’ Comforting to some but not accurate. The election was not a resounding American rejection of Bush and those who think it was should recall that Obama’s popular vote victory was solid but no landslide; and it took nothing less than an epic collapse of the US economy to move him ahead of his Republican opponent.

In an informal 2008 poll, 107 of 109 historians rated Bush the “worst President” ever. Said one, "When future historians look back to identify the moment at which the United States began to lose its position of world leadership, they will point—rightly—to the Bush presidency. Thanks to his policies, it is now easy to see America losing out to its competitors in any number of areas: China is rapidly becoming the manufacturing powerhouse of the next century, India the high tech and services leader, and Europe the region with the best quality of life." A little research, however, would have shown that historian that colleagues in 1960 were united in prediction that the Soviet Union’s economy would surpass America’s by 1984.

History also tells us that President Harry Truman was considered a failure, too, when he left office in 1953. With the perspective of time, Truman is now almost universally seen as one of the best presidents in US history. And perspective is the key—for all of us. The problem with the 107 historians and those who adjudged Truman a failure is that they focused on surface issues and were swept up in the political narratives of their times. Judging leaders while they are in office tends to be short-sighted as well, since it is impossible to know the ultimate effects of their actions. Time has a way of sifting through posturing and propaganda to reveal information that contemporaries lacked.

A productive retrospective of the Bush years would avoid falling into popular traps of dismissing him “the worst ever” or blindly praising them as “the best ever”? This retrospective focuses on the Bush legacy in foreign affairs.

Another of those historians summarized the standard foreign policy narrative. "In the wake of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, the United States enjoyed enormous support around the world. President Bush squandered that goodwill by taking the country into an unnecessary war of choice and misleading the American people to gain support for that war. And he failed utterly to have a plan to deal with Iraq after the invasion. He further undermined the international reputation of the United States by justifying torture." But the area of foreign policy probably requires the most perspective to judge correctly.

Bush knew that on September 12, 2001, when he told the American people that they were about to embark on a new kind of war against a new kind of enemy. "I think that this is a long term battle--war…After all, our mission is not just Osama bin Laden and the Al Qaeda organization. Our mission is to battle terrorism, and to join with freedom-loving people." Later that day, he told the National Security Council, "The United States of America will use all our resources to conquer this enemy…We will be patient, we will be focused, and we will be steadfast in our determination...This battle will take time and resolve. But make no mistake about it: we will win." As that war is not over, we cannot ascribe success or failure; but there are facts that can be cited.

Any evidence that we did not enjoy such support?

The War on Radical Islam and Terrorism

Bush was president for just eight months on 9/11. While there is ample evidence of failures by the new administration to act on warnings that might—or might not—have stopped the attack; even Bush’s most virulent detractors would agree that 9/11 was set in motion well before he took office that January. In 1993, Islamists bombed the World Trade Center in New York, killing six and injuring 1,042. In a 1996 fatwa, Osama bin Laden declared war on the US. Islamists bombed Saudi Arabia’s Khobar Towers in 1996, killing 19 Americans who were there to support efforts to contain Iraq’s Saddam Hussein. (Still think there was no connection?) Bin Laden-supported Islamists bombed US embassies in Tanzania and Kenya in 1998; and in 2000, they bombed the USS Cole in Yemen. That is, the war was in high gear before Bush took office—at least in high gear by one side; the US was not doing anything to stop Islamic radicalism and its continued terrorist attacks on Americans and US interests. At the very least, Bush must be credited for changing that; for identifying an enemy that was becoming bolder and stronger and for committing resources of both the United States and other countries to fight it. Before him, there was no "war on terror," no attempt to address a pernicious enemy of the United States and almost all other nations.

While that enemy is not yet defeated, its operational ability has been seriously compromised. Multiple Al Qaeda operatives captured after 9/11 said that the terrorist organization had several follow up actions planned but were unable to carry them out because of the US response to 9/11. Yet, there has been no attack on US soil in the seven years and four months since 9/11, and the Bush administration deserves credit for that accomplishment. Does anyone seriously think Bin Laden and his pals simply decided to give up the idea of terrorism in America? People who believe they are being objective in refusing that credit to Bush should ask themselves this question. If there is a terrorist attack on the US in the first eight months of the Obama administration, will they blame Obama or place the onus on, whom else, George W. Bush?

Iraq and Afghanistan

People often call Afghanistan the "good war" and Iraq the "bad war." The major reason given is that there was a clear tie between the Afghan Taliban and 9/11, which gave the US a right to go to war, but none between 9/11 and Saddam Hussein. A secondary reason is given is that the rationale for war in Iraq—weapons of mass destruction (WMD)—was false and misled the American people into supporting a war that Bush and his cronies wanted to engage in all along. For some, the biggest argument is the administration's tactical failures and mistake in declaring victory with the enemy still in place. There is no question that the Bush administration made some grave errors in the Iraq war, but considering Iraq critical to radical Islam was not one of them. In 2006, Bin Laden himself said, "I now address… the whole… Islamic nation… The most… serious issue today for the whole world is this Third World War…raging in [Iraq]." He calls it "a war of destiny between infidelity and Islam" and previously declared Baghdad to be "the capital of the Caliphate." Iraq is central to Islamist goals.

Moreover, as The Weekly Standard reported in 2006, captured documents and photographs proved that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq “trained thousands of radical Islamic terrorists from the region at camps in Iraq over the four years immediately preceding the U.S. invasion…The secret training took place primarily at three camps--in Samarra, Ramadi, and Salman Pak--and was directed by elite Iraqi military units. Interviews by U.S. government interrogators with Iraqi regime officials and military leaders corroborate the documentary evidence. Many of the fighters were drawn from terrorist groups in northern Africa with close ties to al Qaeda."

While at this time, there has been no definitive statement about Iraqi WMDs, Saddam Hussein’s behavior leading up to the war suggested otherwise, not only to Bush but also to many who are now among his greatest detractors. He continually misled UN inspectors and periodically threw them out of the country. He crowed day and night that he had those weapons and even used them in the notorious poison gas attack on innocent Iraqi Kurds in 1988—the crime for which he eventually was executed. There is also a great deal of intelligence that purports to show many WMDs en route out of Iraq to Syria on the eve of the US invasion. Only time will be able to provide evidence that overturns the current verdict on the WMDs.

But did Bush deliberately lie to drag an unwilling US into a misbegotten war? No. Congressional Democrats saw same intelligence Bush saw and drew the same conclusions. In the months and year leading up to the war, Hussein defied multiple UN resolutions from 1991 through 2000, tried to assassinate the elder President Bush, and fired thousands of times at US and coalition forces charged by the international community with enforcing UN resolutions. He also was a horrible tyrant who brutally tortured and murdered hundreds of thousands of his own people.

From a purely American point of view, the Iraq war has become a success. Even the Washington Post, which has been one of Bush’s and the war’s most consistent critics had to admit so. It wrote several editorials about that success and in 2008, it sharply criticized Obama for refusing to recognize that success. Moreover, war’s success confounded critics by completely removing it as an issue in the 2008 presidential election; something remarked upon by numerous commentators. In many respects, life really is returning to normal in Iraq; and while terrorism is not dead there, it is severely reduced. The fact that it is being perpetrated almost exclusively now on Iraqi Muslims only serves to alienate the Islamists from the people there. At the end of 2008, the US and Iraq signed an agreement that will end the US presence there and give full security and political control to the new Iraqi government. While the loss of every life is dear, Americans recognized that less of their youth perished under Bush than under Bill Clinton. While many Iraqis and Afghans were killed, too, had the US not overthrown the Baathists and Taliban respectively, more Muslim deaths would have occurred.

But how successful was the Iraq war in a wider sense as part of the war on radical Islam? Critics assert that the US invasion and occupation of Iraq galvanized anti-American sentiment in the Arab world and has been a bonanza for recruiting new Islamic radicals.

Even America's own National Intelligence Estimate agreed in 2006. "We assess that the Iraq Jihad is shaping a new generation of terrorist leaders and operatives," and that it "is spreading and adapting to counterterrorism efforts." One the other hand the NIE said that the terrorists "perceived success" would encourage others to continue that same fight elsewhere; but in the past year that perception has been severely eroded as the anti-jihad forces have become ascendant in Iraq. The war also accomplished another stated goal of the Bush administration to take the battle to the terrorists in their own countries. As Bush noted in 2006, "If we give up the fight in the streets of Baghdad, we will face the terrorists in the streets of our own cities." Despite enormous political pressure to do just that, Bush steadfastly refused to retreat from Iraq and now has a successful outcome to show for it.

If we are to believe incoming President Barack Obama, Afghanistan will re-emerge as the US focus. During the campaign, Obama and his supporters asserted that focus on Iraq took resources away from what they saw as a more critical war in Afghanistan. With Iraq winding down, they intend to increase US assets in Afghanistan. US Congressman Mark Steven Kirk from suburban Chicago is the only member of Congress still and active reservist. He just returned from a stint in Afghanistan and remarked on the tremendous involvement of NATO troops there, which again highlights the international support for continuing the war there. Additionally, while Bush was correct in noting Iraq’s centrality in the Islamist movement, it did relegate jihad in South Asia to a lower priority, where the overall Islamist war seems to have shifted.

The Israeli-Arab Conflict

It should surprise no one that this is the area where Bush, like so many other presidents, has been the most inconsistent in his approach and where clear successes have been so elusive. Bush really began his Middle East adventure as a pragmatist. He tentatively supported Yassir Arafat as a peace partner to Israel until he was faces irrefutable revelations that Arafat was not only lying to him and others about his commitment to an ultimate peaces with Israel but even more damning with his denials of involvement in terror. In 2002, Israeli’s captured a Palestinian Authority ship, the Karine A, loaded with massive amounts of Iranian and Russian weapons for escalating terror attacks against Israel. Bush was especially incensed that Arafat purchased the ship and weapons only a month after his post-9/11 pledge to fight terror. He also blamed Arafat for the terrorist attack that killed American diplomats on a humanitarian mission in Gaza, and he was outraged by a mountain of evidence that tied the PLO chairman to the ongoing terror attacks in the Middle East. It was George Bush who declared that despite Arafat’s solemn vows and attempts to re-define himself to a gullible public, he was committed to terrorism and no partner for peace. The PA Chairman never recovered after that and ended his days as a virtual prisoner in his headquarters. As a result, Bush did not object when Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon launched “Operation Defensive Shield” in 2002 after a deadly terrorist attack on a Jewish family at its Passover Seder (a very solemn religious rite). That operation devastated terror activities on the West Bank essentially ending them as an effective tool. There, too, Bush deserves credit for not opposing Israel’s action.

Bush won high marks from Israel’s supporters for his steadfastness in supporting Israel, something that he largely maintained throughout his presidency. But Bush also launched two disastrous grand attempts at forcing a peace in the region. One was the Roadmap, which called on both Israel and the Arabs to take very specific actions to move the process along. They never happened. Moreover, one of the most critical steps was eliminating of demands in the PLO’s charter for Israel’s eradication. It’s pretty hard to negotiate a peace when one party calls for the other’s destruction. That never happened, either, and the Roadmap went nowhere. It remained on life support for years with no real impact; and there was an attempt to resuscitate it with Bush’s second grand peace gambit: the Annapolis Conference. That also failed. Towards the end of his presidency, the Bush administration had been pushing hard with outgoing Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert for a negotiated peace even if it meant Israel ceding on several key points. That cost Bush a lot of the goodwill he had with Israel’s supporters until those efforts, too, passed into the dustbin of history and Bush led a resounding international verdict against Hamas for the Israeli operation in Gaza that began in December 2008. (Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Fatah, and other Arabs, by the way, joined in that verdict.)

As Bush is about to leave office, the Israel-Arab conflict seems no closer to a resolution than it was when he entered office. It should be noted, however, that Bush was the first American president to recognize the goal of a Palestinian Arab state.

George Bush and the rest of the World

Bush can be credited with convincing Pakistan to support US efforts against Osama bin Laden and the Taliban and to allow us insight into the status of its nuclear weapons. He also solidified relations with the region’s other nuclear power, India, and signed a critical nuclear cooperation deal with the South Asian giant. With the assistance of allies, Bush surprised the world when he convinced Libya to cease its pursuit of nuclear weapons. His diplomacy with China, Japan and South Korea led to a breakthrough with North Korea, getting it to dismantle its plutonium creating sites.

We close almost where we began by addressing the criticism that Bush "lost" America’s international support after September 11, 2001. Elsewhere, I have written that the charge is inaccurate and essentially Euro-centric. When people speak of alienating "allies," they are speaking about west European allies. Now, the fact is that this parting of the ways had been set in motion by events that pre-dated George Bush’s presidency. The first was the end of the Cold War and Europe’s dependence on the American nuclear umbrella. Several nations asked that US troops long stationed on their soil leave. The formation of the European Union (EU) was another event more critical than Bush that forever created competing economic centers in Europe and America. With that and the now-established European-Arab Dialogue, which by 2000 had resulted in a changed European demographic, the interests of the US and the EU were forever diverging. The other area where the US was said to alienate supporters was the Arab world; but any support there was at best surface. Let us remember that Muslims (not just Arabs) worldwide celebrated the murder of 3000 Americans on 9/11, and that was when Bush was said to have all that international goodwill.

Do I purport that the foregoing is comprehensive in its review of the Bush presidency with regard to foreign policy? No; but it is a sober and objective antidote to what has been and will continue to be a torrent of gleeful anti-Bush screeds. And readers are entitled to more than that.

- Asian Tribune -