On Monday, George W Bush visits Belfast, the scene of one of his few foreign policy successes. Meanwhile, an impeachment resolution in congress shows just how far his Texan star is falling
WHEN GEORGE W Bush visits Belfast on Monday at the end of a week-long European tour, he will survey one of the few undisputed accomplishments of his presidency. Bush didn't play the pivotal role in the North of his predecessor Bill Clinton, but he has maintained a consistent commitment to the peace process, appointing three special envoys and intervening personally at key moments.
The US president's visit to Europe has drawn fewer, smaller protests than before, reflecting the popular indifference that most leaders face as they enter their final months in office. At home, Bush is more unpopular than ever, with an approval rating of 28 per cent, but as Americans focus on the gripping race to succeed him, fewer seem to notice what their president is actually up to.
Before he left for Europe, the president told a French television interviewer that he expected future generations to judge him generously.
"I think that people will say he's a decisive person who took action when necessary to protect his country and to address the problems of the world," he said.
"I think people will say that he was tough when he needed to be tough, and compassionate when he needed to be compassionate, because our agenda was not only dealing with terror, but freeing people is a compassionate act, freeing people not only from forms of tyranny, but from diseases like HIV/Aids or malaria or hunger, and the United States is proudly in the lead on these issues."
While the president has been in Europe, however, his broader legacy has come under brutal scrutiny in Washington, starting this week with a resolution in congress to impeach him.
Proposed by Ohio congressman and former Democratic presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich, the resolution has little chance of success, not least because the Democratic leadership wants to avoid a bitter, partisan battle over a president who will be back on his Texas estate within seven months.
Kucinich spent four-and-a-half hours reading the resolution into the congressional record on Monday and the 35 articles of impeachment amount to a comprehensive charge sheet against Bush.
Article I accuses the president of "Creating a secret propaganda campaign to manufacture a false case for war against Iraq" and much of Kucinich's case centres on the conduct of that war. Article II blames Bush for "Falsely, systematically, and with criminal intent conflating the attacks of September 11th, 2001, with misrepresentation of Iraq as a security threat as part of fraudulent justification for a war of aggression" and Article III accuses him of "Misleading the American people and members of congress to believe Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, to manufacture a false case for war".
Kucinich also accuses the president of failing to equip American troops properly, illegally detaining US citizens and "foreign captives" without charge, and using signing statements to change the meaning of bills passed by Congress. "If we do not establish that the rule of law must apply to the president of the US now, what we are doing is, through our inaction, creating a precedent that would let the next president know that he could go ahead and wage war without congressional approval," Kucinich said.
The impeachment move follows a two-week publicity blitz for former White House press secretary Scott McClellan's remorseful memoir If Only, which accuses the president of using propaganda to sell the Iraq war.
Bush's broader approach to the "war on terror" received a more significant blow last Thursday when the US supreme court ruled that detainees in Guantanamo Bay have a constitutional right to challenge their detention through civilian courts. Bush had argued that, because Guantanamo is outside the territory of the US, the detainees have no constitutional rights at all.
In his majority opinion, justice Anthony Kennedy said the president couldn't simply "contract away" the constitution by moving the detention centre offshore. "The constitution grants congress and the president the power to acquire, dispose of, and govern territory, not the power to decide when and where its terms apply," he said. "To hold that the political branches may switch the constitution on or off at will would lead to a regime in which they, not this court, say 'what the law is'."
BUSH'S REPUTATION is so badly tarnished that presumptive Republican presidential nominee John McCain has gone to extraordinary lengths to avoid being seen in public with him.
When Bush appeared at a fund-raiser for McCain in Arizona last month, reporters and photographers were kept out and the two men only appeared together before the cameras for a few seconds at a nearby airport.
An NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll this week found that Americans don't just disapprove of Bush - they dislike him personally. Six out of 10 said they have a negative view of him, compared to just 30 per cent who view the president positively. Only one in three believes the president is handling the war in Iraq well, and just 21 per cent approve of his stewardship of the economy.
David Frum, a former speechwriter for Bush and now resident fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, says that, despite the near-consensus about Bush's irrelevance, the president could still achieve much in his final months in the White House.
"The political cycle and the media cycle don't always work in tandem," he says. "I think a lot of it is that the press is so caught up in the excitement of the political horse race and the last year or year-and-a-half of a presidency offer maximum policy and minimum politics."
Frum argues that Bush's visit to Europe is part of an effort to "lock in place one set of events and prepare the way for the next" on issues such as climate change.
"President Bush began his presidency by saying that he would not sign Kyoto but wanted to find some other solution to the climate issue," he says. "Even if you get a Democratic president, Kyoto is not going to be a starter in the United States. And yet something is going to be done on that. The nominees of both parties have similar views, if not on the remedy, at least on the problem. So what Bush is doing in Europe is turning the page on Kyoto and opening the way for the next stage on climate."
Few in Washington currently expect the president to launch a military strike against Iran, partly because improved security in Iraq has removed a pretext for such an attack but also because of strong opposition from within the Pentagon. Frum agrees that "unfortunately, the Iran issue is going to be left unresolved at the time he leaves office", but he believes Bush is working with European allies on new security arrangements for the Gulf after Iraq.
Frum says it is too soon to assess the Bush presidency, pointing out that Ronald Reagan's presidency was partly defined by the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, after he left office.
Domestically, he believes Bush's departure will trigger an enormous debate within conservatism, with hardliners calling for a firmer embrace of ideology, as moderates such as McCain adopt a more flexible approach.
In foreign policy, Frum maintains that Bush has received too little credit for showing restraint towards Venezuela's Hugo Chávez and for negotiating a nuclear weapons deal with India, but he acknowledges at least two serious foreign-policy blunders.
"The first bad choice was not to have done the Iraq war in a broader way, not to have worked harder to win political support inside congress and not to have worked harder to win global support," he says.
"The second bad choice was to have threatened Iran without following through. If you're not going to follow through, don't make the threat."