A hard act to follow
As the United States prepares for a transition to a new administration, the reviews are coming in on the eight-year performance of George W. Bush. They are pretty scathing, writes CONOR O'CLERY
In fact the 43rd US president is leaving such a mess that both candidates in the presidential election are campaigning on the promise of "change". His handling of events has made him so unpopular with his own base that Republicans were relieved he did not turn up at their party convention.
Not all the reviews are bad. To many red state Americans, George W. Bush is the president who kept them safe after 9/11 by fighting what he called a "war on terror". These are the true believers who accepted at face value his often-stated contention that it was better "to defeat the terrorists in Iraq so we do not have to face them in our own country". And there have been no terrorist attacks in the United States since that day in September 2001 which shaped his presidency.
To many Americans, and to a majority of Europeans, George Bush is however the duplicitous neo-conservative who deceived his people to justify an invasion of Iraq, which had not attacked America and did not threaten the US with weapons of mass destruction as the White House claimed, when he should have been focussing more on Afghanistan, the sanctuary of Osama bin Laden, rather than making the country less safe by overstretching the armed services.
One way to measure the legacy of an American president is by numbers, such as the more than four thousand Americans who have died and 30,000 injured in foreign wars initiated by Mr Bush, mostly in Iraq, or the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Afghans who have been killed and maimed. One might add other statistics, such as 140,000 American troops tied down in Iraq or 300 men detained for years without trial at Guantanamo Bay.
Or, to define the Bush years, one could point to the 45 million Americans without access to health care, the 15 million living below the poverty line, and the $407 billion deficit proposed in his last budget which would reduce spending on social programmes and increase the Pentagon's budget by 7.5 per cent.
The criticism of Bush welled up in his first term. He was savaged in the media for his mistakes and misstatements over Iraq. I recall the audience in Manhattan's Lincoln Center applauding loudly when the actor Nathan Lane, playing an ancient Greek in the musical Frogs, delivered the lines, "We are still at war, a war we may not be able to win, a war we shouldn't even be in."
To appreciate fully the legacy of the Bush presidency it is necessary to understand why his countrymen and women put him back in office in 2004, by a convincing majority, and why families who are hurting economically voted twice for a president who gave tax breaks to the rich and opposed raising the minimum wage.
It was partly because of a desire not to change a commander-in-chief during a war, and because a climate of fear, whipped up by the Bush administration. This reached outlandish proportions. I heard Dick Cheney claim in 2004 that electing John Kerry would mean another terrorist attack on America.
But George W. Bush's victory in 2004 had just as much to do with the culture wars, in which Democrats were portrayed as "elitist", intent on promoting such issues as abortion and gay marriage and Republicans the champions of conservative Judeo-Christian values.
As Thomas Frank pointed out in his 2004 book What's the Matter with Kansas? , old-fashioned anger at social injustice in the US had long since given way in the bible belt to a reactionary movement against the cultural changes of the 1960s and 1970s, leading working-class Americans to support a party whose economic and social policies are wreaking havoc on their communities.
George W. Bush, a scion of one of America's most elite families, successfully portrayed himself as a true red-neck and exploited class resentments against the "liberal elite", the "sushi-eating, latte-drinking, New York Times -reading" blue state voters as a Republican TV ad put it in 2004. He was so successful in encouraging nativism among America's voters that in the presidential election campaign that year, Democrat John Kerry tried to hide the fact that he could speak French. This mindset is a political legacy that future office holders will have to contend with.
By Bush's own standards he has not succeeded as president. Many times when covering American politics from 2001-2005 I heard him claim that he would achieve victory over the terrorists and over the insurgents in Iraq. He doesn't use the word "victory" now, but hopes for "success" instead. He promised to "root out terror" wherever it existed. That is still a faraway goal. Osama bin Laden remains alive and al-Qaeda has morphed into something bigger. He also vowed to bring a solution to the Middle East conflict but his influence on that situation has shrunk over time.
Bush also promised to improve the economy. He is leaving the country in recession, drowning in debt, its financial markets in meltdown, with house prices plummeting, petrol prices vastly inflated and a worsening crisis in education and health care. A majority of Americans would unhesitatingly have to reply "no" to the question, are you better off after eight years of George W. Bush?
The era of George W. Bush began with America as the undisputed world superpower, able to speak loudly and carry a big stick. It is ending with the United States overstretched and almost bankrupt, still speaking loudly but carrying a smaller stick. Russia knows that it can bully and invade Georgia, an American protégé, without any fear of military retaliation by Washington. Iran continues with its nuclear programme convinced that the US is too heavily engaged in Iraq to risk an attack, even using Israel as a surrogate. It is getting bogged down in Afghanistan where the Taliban is resurgent.
George Bush's presidency was marked by his resistance to any propositions that challenged his assumptions, but tellingly, when he spoke to Bob Woodward recently, he worried that it all might end in failure. The Washington insider concluded after several interviews with Bush and his military commanders that the next president will have to fix a dysfunctional relationship between the White House and the Pentagon. Much of the military and federal government has been hived-off to profit-driven private contractors. The new incumbent will inherit a government system that has largely been outsourced to the highest bidder.
Approval of Bush among Europeans dropped in the last six years from 38 to 19 per cent. In the worlds of the New York Times, he "has torn up international treaties, bullied and alienated old friends and enabled old and new enemies". The successful presidential candidate will have to cope with a negative world perception of the United States, and with the problems arising from the way Americans themselves look at the world.
One of the greatest challenges facing the next administration is preventing greater world instability. The next president will have to seek cooperation with Europe and emerging world powers like Russia and China on crucial international issues such as the financial markets, nuclear proliferation, genocide in Africa, terrorism, globalisation of trade, immigration, global warming, and the most critical of all, energy, and America's reliance on increasingly-scarce fossil fuels.
George W. Bush liked to call himself a unifier, but he has become the most divisive president since Richard Nixon. Enoch Powell once said that all political careers end in failure. George W. Bush proves his point, on practically every score.
Former Irish Times Foreign Correspondent CONOR O'CLERY is a journalist and author. His latest book is May You Live In Interesting Times: The Journals Of An Accidental Correspondent
