The Watchman
The administration was sterile. Its pool of ideas had run shallow, and the office of the President was besought by bitter scandals. A recession plagued the economy, ruining a period of uninterrupted growth. All legislation of note came from Congress rather than the White House. The President had exhausted his political influence. While his party base backed his natural successor for the nomination, the rest of America was worried. They did not want another term of the same dry ideas. They wanted change.
Across the party fence, a man promised it. Youthful and charming, he promised to fix America’s Social Security, save America’s schools, and bring an end to foreign military adventurism. He promised a more compassionate government that would reach across the party fence to care for all its citizens.
That man was not Barrack Obama. In 2000, that man was George W. Bush. Eight years later he left office, with barely 20% popular support. A President had not left office this reviled since Truman. There are few in the world that sympathize with Bush, though, and most are glad to see him leave office, seeing his Presidency as a colossal failure. But does he deserve to be the effigy of all hatred? One needs to look past the polemical overstatements to assess his Presidency. Here, then, this writer offers up an attempt at the same assessment, with the hope that the reader will gaze deeper than the usual cabal of accusations to look at the 43rd President’s decisions. As he set himself up as the 9/11 President, the leader of a nation responding to the worst attack on America since Pearl Harbour, we shall examine him in those terms, leaving aside domestic policy to ask the fundamental question about Bush’s foreign policy, the question that any national leader must ask himself about his country’s foreign policy: did it serve the interests of his country and make his country safer?
The greatest boast for Bush’s legacy is not based upon any particular event; victory in the long war on terrorism could never be brought about by American soldiers hoisting a flag on a hilltop. It is, instead, the non-event that one must draw their attention to: after the smoke from Manhattan vanished American soil was never struck again. Leading up to 2001, the United States and its allies had been struck by increasingly more aggressive and innovative attacks. The list is frightening: the hijacking of TWA Flight 847 in 1985 and the Berlin disco bombing in 1986, the Buenos Aires bombings in 1992 and 1994. There was shocking World Trade Center bombing in 1993, a warning what America’s enemies were capable of that went unheeded. Paris’ subways were bombed. There were plots to attack New York monuments and jetliners in 1995. As the 21st century came nearer, it became more and more clear that while America was sleeping, her enemies were awake. The Khobar Towers bombing in 1996. The East Africa embassy bombings in 1998. The USS Cole in 2000. Then, 9/11.
Like his predecessor had once said, “Never Again” became the maxim governing Bush’s actions. He proceeded to oversee the largest government reorganisation in American history, creating the Department of Homeland Security by incorporating and creating security agencies on a scale not seen since 1947, when the Department of Defence, National Security Council and Central Intelligence Agency were born. That achievement, its screening procedures and its security measures have achieved their purpose. They have allowed for the largest economy in the world to continue to import, export and prosper while undertaking massive security regulations. While some bemoan the restrictions on civil liberties undertaken, these restrictions are not a product of neoconservative fervour—they have been sweepingly adopted by other liberal democracies, and in many places with even more restrictions than in the United States. Citizens were not imprisoned for treason, unlike the First World War. Thousands of citizens were not detained indefinitely, unlike the Second World War. Citizens were not deported, nor denied passports nor blacklisted, as they were during the 1950s. Domestic security was maintained without disrupting domestic life. That success has continued every minute that Bush has been gone from office. Unlike his predecessor, then, when Bush said “Never Again,” he was able to keep that promise.
Abroad, Bush assumed the port of Mars. In Afghanistan, the United States brought the regime that had sponsored 9/11 to its knees, while Americans cheered their President. Bush’s approval ratings shot to 90%, an astronomically high level. America had woken from her slumber, and the people begged the President to lead them in order to make themselves and the world safer. And Bush answered. He declared terrorism to be the enemy of civilisation, and denounced those regimes that sponsored it as part of an “axis of evil.” This was the defining moment of his Presidency, for it said that America’s values were worth fighting for. There would be no equivocation of terrorism with freedom-fighting. There would be no attempt to justify the intentional slaughter of civilians. Instead, America was to provide the moral leadership for the world. The American charter assured the rule of law and the rights of man to that people, and Bush was convinced its ideals still lit the world. Other men have agreed with him. He would not apologize for our way of life, nor waver in its defence; to terrorism he said that our spirit was stronger and could not be broken: that it could not outlast us, and that we would defeat it.
So, he brought us into Iraq, a regime that sponsored terrorism (if not Al Qaeda) and was believed by every major intelligence agency in the world to have WMDs. In his bid to go to war, he was overwhelmingly supported by Congress and the American people. They supported the idea of a democracy in the Middle East, imposed by American might—because it was a new era of responsibility — a recognition, on the part of every American, that they had duties to themselves, their nation, and the world, duties that they would not grudgingly accept but rather seize gladly. Even when it became clear the democracy would not emerge from the rubble, the people still believed that terrorism would be beaten. So, against a lack-lustre Democratic candidate who seemed uncertain about America’s direction, they re-elected him, as their noble Brutus, the principled commander-in-chief who did all things for his country. In the wake of Abu Ghraib, he would not play a Valentino to d’Orco and fire his companion Rumsfeld, the architect of the disastrous post-Iraq order. He would not betray any member of his administration as a meal for the raving dogs at the door of the White House, even as they grew louder and louder. That course would seem too bloody, and Bush was an honourable man.
The polls fell, and the death toll in Iraq rose. Terrorism seemed not beaten, but stronger than ever. Iraq looked to be on the verge of civil war. The centrist Democrats, once supporters of the war, became its harshest critiques. Republicans in Congress walked away from the war and the Oval Office. The country said to run from Baghdad and that fight, having lost all hope. America, in this new Valley Forge, seemed beaten. But in that Oval Office, there was one man whose heart was in the trim. While the majority wanted to leave Iraq to an undoubted chaos and massacres, Bush authorized a radical revision in American strategy, and used his last ounce of political capital into passing it through Congress. In one year, the surge succeeded beyond anyone’s wildest dreams. Violence in Iraq plummeted. Militias disarmed and put their faith in the democratic process. On Jan. 31st, millions of Iraqis went to the ballot for the first time since 2005, in a well-ordered and secure fashion. Between the Tigris and Euphrates, there is a democracy. Terrorism is waning across the Middle East, and Al Qaeda is no longer a force capable of striking internationally, nearly bankrupt. Libya, seeing the fate of Hussein, opened itself up for the first time, abandoning its support of terrorism and its uncomfortably well-advanced nuclear program. Statesmanship brought that there, even when the course seemed dark.
But Bush has lasted long enough to see himself become the villain. Bouts of tactlessness and first-term administrative mishaps have given him the appearance of failure. Like his predecessor, he never fixed Social Security or health care or the need for more careful financial regulation or America’s international reputation with her allies. The fact that he had satisfied America’s wish of vengeance and stretched American power, as the people wanted, only made Americans uncomfortable. So the man who gave them their wish for security, who has responded when the people asked more of their country, was not honoured. Their faith was in a total victory. A single oversight, a plan not accomplished, became a national disaster, a conviction that the country was on the wrong track. So as power shifted, Bush’s successors set out to condemn him. But that’s what needed to happen. For how can Americans hope for anything less than total victory? How can they settle for less than someone who promises to fix all their problems, a shining knight who promises a new era? How else can a nation’s values have the quiet force of progress throughout its history, if someone is not willing to reach further and dream further than what is probable or possible? Sometimes the truth isn’t good enough. Sometimes people deserve more. Sometimes people deserve to have their faith rewarded.
Six years ago, they would have given him a statue with his ancestors; now, they call him a traitor and would pelt him in the street. But far away from those who cheer that he is gone, democratic countries are rising in Afghanistan and Iraq, while America remains fortified from terrorism. As he promised to do on the ashes of Ground Zero, Bush made America safer, and even when thousands said spreading democracy in the Middle East was an impossible venture, he has offered millions of people in Iraq and Afghanistan the real hope of a free society for their children and grandchildren. That is change they can believe in, and they owe it to the watchful guard of America’s 43rd President.