Bush's last swing of the bat?

US POLITICS: Decision PointsBy George W Bush, Virgin, 497pp. £14.99

BY THE TIME George W Bush left office his unpopularity rivalled Richard Nixon’s and a poll of more than 200 presidential historians ranked him as one of the worst presidents in US history. Within eight years he had transformed a hefty budget surplus into an enormous deficit, adding trillions of dollars to the national debt through tax cuts and spending on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

His administration’s mishandling of Hurricane Katrina had became a byword for federal incompetence; the use of torture and other human-rights abuses had turbocharged anti-American feeling abroad; and the war against Iraq had driven a wedge between Washington DC and some of its closest allies.

Travelling across the US to report on the 2008 presidential election, I met countless victims of the president’s economic mismanagement: the middle classes who were drowning in debt, threatened with the loss of their jobs and homes and facing the prospect of working well into their 70s because they could not afford to retire.

As the years went by the casualties of war became a more prominent feature of the Washington landscape, young men returning from Iraq and Afghanistan without arms or legs and a new generation of homeless veterans wandering the city’s streets. When one of my closest friends in Washington, a young military veteran who had served two tours in Iraq, shot himself in Rock Creek Park last May, one of his former comrades told me he was the 12th man he had served with since 2003 to have taken his own life.

Two years after taking office, Barack Obama is smarting from his party’s worst midterm election defeat in decades, and with an approval rating below 50 per cent the president’s hopes of winning a second term in 2012 are in doubt.

Meanwhile, Bush is back in the news, riding a wave of nostalgia – or amnesia – as he promotes his memoir, Decision Points, with polls showing him almost as popular as his successor.

Appropriately for a man who called himself the Decider, Bush’s book focuses on 14 decisions that shaped his presidency, starting with his decision to give up drinking after a 40th-birthday binge. Bush says that, although alcohol interfered with his life, the fact that he could quit without treatment suggests he may not have been addicted. He does, however, share with many addicts a tendency towards “euphoric recall”, remembering the positive side of his destructive behaviour more clearly than its consequences.

Bush describes a childhood infused with unconditional love from his parents despite a rebellious streak that saw him crash two cars at the age of 14. He was especially close to his formidable mother, Barbara, who asked her teenage son to drive her to hospital after she suffered a miscarriage. As he drove, Bush noticed that his mother was holding a glass jar carrying the remains of the foetus. “I remember thinking: There was a human life, a little brother or sister,” he writes.

After a chequered career in business and a successful tenure as governor of Texas, Bush started to consider a run for the presidency, but when he describes his personal motivation for seeking the office it sounds almost frivolous. “I felt a drive to do more with my life,” he writes. “I had watched Dad climb into the biggest arena and succeed. I wanted to find out if I had what it took to join him.” Bush had little to say about foreign policy during the campaign, and domestic issues dominated his presidency until the events of September 11th, 2001, changed everything. “The story of that week is the key to understanding my presidency,” he writes.

Bush was reading to a class of children in Florida when he heard the news about the attacks on the Twin Towers and he carried on reading The Pet Goatfor seven minutes after an aide whispered to him about the events in New York. His mind was racing, however, and he decided almost immediately that the proper response was war.

Within days Bush was not only making plans to attack Afghanistan but had authorised a set of practices including the systematic use of torture, secret renditions of suspected terrorists, the suspension of habeas corpus, targeted assassinations and the indefinite detention without trial of “enemy combatants” at Guantánamo Bay.

When Bush was asked if he would approve the use of waterboarding, a form of controlled drowning that had long been regarded as torture, on the 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, he replied, “Damn right”. He claims, however, to have been shocked by the graphic images of prisoner abuse that emerged from Abu Ghraib.

Bush says he still has “a sickening feeling” when he thinks about the failure to discover weapons of mass destruction in Iraq but insists that the removal of Saddam Hussein has made the US safer and the world a better place. Abu Ghraib and the intelligence failure over WMD are among a number of issues that blindsided Bush, but his administration’s multitude of failures did nothing to shake his confidence in his leadership skills.

For a man who affects to be indifferent to criticism, Bush emerges from this memoir as unusually thin-skinned and more than a little timid. When he wants to fire one of his lieutenants, for example, he often asks someone else to deliver the news – or waits for the victim to offer his or her resignation. The worst moment of his presidency was not, as one might expect, the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, the sight of dead and wounded soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan or even the attacks of September 11th. It was the hip-hop artist Kanye West declaring in the aftermath of Katrina that Bush “doesn’t care about black people”.

Towards the end of his book Bush laments the decline of decency in US politics and the country’s increasing polarisation, ignoring his own role in generating that culture. He finishes with a word about his quiet life in Texas, walking his terrier Barney and picking up after the dog as he “takes care of business”. Obama must know how he feels.

Denis Staunton is Foreign Editor of The Irish Times. He was the paper's Washington correspondent from 2005 to 2009