One year and counting

In2theFray of the WordPress.com Political Blogger Alliance has invited several of us to comment on thoughts and feelings regarding the Bush administration as its last year comes. I have thought about a number of different ways to play this out, thought about pulling in opinions from various real-life friends and acquaintances, and then rejected every idea that I’d had, except one.

Sadly, that one was my first idea, so if I’d just gone with it in the first place, I’d probably be done already. Ah, well.

I want to look at what it is for which President Bush will be remembered in a few years.

It seems to me that President Bush will be most, and most justly, remembered for the character he brought to the office of the Presidency. Sadly, much of that character is undesirable. I think that the most profound and obvious character trait of the Bush administration is arrogance.

George W. Bush arrived in Washington promising a “new tone” in terms of bipartisanship and cooperation. Rather, we wound up with a President who is absolutely convinced of his own rightness, and of his right to do what he will. He is, in fact, the most powerful man in the world. What he seems to think is that he is all-powerful.

Arrogance is not always a bad thing, I need to note. I was raised in an Air Force family, and there is something to be for a fighter pilot’s ego. Of the students my father taught to fly, I hope that none ever flew an F-16 over Iraq thinking, “Gee, I hope I’m good and lucky today.”

There was no humility in Ronald Reagan’s voice when he demanded, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” (that link has the audio available, so it’s well worth your time).

President Bush has had some of these moments, and they were good. His best, probably, was his “I can hear you” speech in New York City. In an unplanned moment, President Bush simply came out and stated that the people who knocked down the buildings of the World Trade Center would be punished. There was no negotiation, there was no time spent considering the merits of al-Qaeda’s case against the US; there was the simple message: “They hit us hard. They’re going to pay.”

The problem is that President Bush never seems to get beyond the standoff and challenge. For George W. Bush, everything is centered on the same theme — in order to fight terrorism, he has to be free to do more or less whatever he wants.

This has brought us a number of conversations in this country that I thought we’d never have — Will the United States of America torture her prisoners? How much are we willing to parse the Constitution and our treaties in order to justify our actions? Just how powerful should the Executive Branch be?

Some of these questions are ones which will require our attention for years to come.

Issues surrounding “extraordinary rendition” and “enhanced interrogation techniques” will be with us for years and years to come. So will a place called Guantanamo Bay. Until the Bush administration, I’m not sure that anyone had ever imagined that the Constitution only restricted US government actions on US soil … the idea that we exempt our own government simply because we leave the country is certainly a new one to me.

I don’t want to go through all of the specifics of each of those arguments right now. But one must concede that the Bush administration is expanding its power.

Of course, there are the infamous quotes out of the Bush administration. George W. Bush reportedly referred to the Constitution as a “piece of paper,” if the anonymous sources are to be trusted. Then-White House counsel Alberto Gonzalez called the Constitution “outdated,” and even former Attorney General John Ashcroft has had his run-ins with the administration and its wiretapping programs.

Although critics of the administration are generally referred to as weak on fighting terrorism, it’s worth noting that some of these people are hardly Code Pink lefties. Tom Ridge, the nation’s first Homeland Security Secretary, has stated that waterboarding is torture. General Colin Powell, Bush’s first Secretary of State, has called for the closing of the Guantanamo Bay detention facility.

Part of the problem faced by the administration is that it had a story, and was sticking to it. There was little interest in other points of view or opinions. This shows itself especially in the “shock and awe” strategy in the early days of the Iraq invasion. Such a plan works well against national governments. It works badly in situations that might turn into smaller, militia-based conflicts. This led to the situation in which many retired admirals and generals came out calling for Donald Rumsfeld to resign as Defense Secretary, because he had his own opinion and wasn’t terribly interested in the opinions of others — even if they were the ones who knew military strategy and operations better than he. Keeping Rumsfeld in office as long as Bush did showed a clear failure to understand the situation, and might have cost Republicans badly in the 2006 races.

Even though Rumsfeld was replaced immediately after the election, even then the Bush would not acknowledge that Rumsfeld’s replacement, or the troop surge, represented a change in policy or that there had been bad judgment in the war planning. Ironically, Senator John McCain, who was right from the beginning about how to effect the war, still can’t get credit from President Bush or his water-carriers for the fact that he was right, because it would require that they admit that they were wrong.

I’m afraid that Bush’s absolute conviction that he’s right and his critics are irrelevant has led to a number of problems that must be overcome in the near future.

Politically, the Republican Party faces the struggle of trying to retain the Presidency following an administration which has managed record low approval ratings. We have a war in Iraq which was originally cast as a hunt for weapons that don’t exist, and a President who has never really made the case for why the war was right, even if there were no such weapons.

Instead of addressing reasons why we have abandoned the pursuit of Usama bin Laden, the Bush administration has simply gone on to say that he isn’t that important. This presents another problem for a Republican successor — explaining either why Republican policy has been wrong and he will do better, or why Republican policy has been right and we shouldn’t view the failure to capture the originator of the 9/11 attacks as a tremendous failure in foreign policy.

Internationally, President Bush has alienated many of our allies and cost us a great deal of standing in the world. While we are the United States, and we are still the most powerful nation in the world, but we no longer have the respect had under Presidents Reagan, Bush the Elder, or Clinton. We have condemned nations and accused of corruption those who disagreed with our decision to go to war in Iraq … and haven’t really addressed the fact that there were those in the UN Security Council who questioned the intelligence.

Domestically, we’re deeply divided. There are those who suffer from “Bush Derangement Syndrome,” the irrational need to blame everything on George W. Bush, but there are also those with Bush Apologist Syndrome, the inability to see that President Bush has done some things wrong. Those of us in between are accused of being the other if we question, or defend, the Bush administration’s policies.

Religiously, George W. Bush poses a problem for me. He rode into office on an evangelical wave, though I admit that I didn’t support him and more than once asked whether he was really the best Christian candidate we could find. Although he talked a good game, I remain unconvinced that faith is his primary motivation in anything that he does. I do not see the fruit borne out in his administration that I would like to see. I make no speculation on his heart or the state of his soul — that’s not my job. But I do know that President Bush has refused a lot of godly counsel, and that he has violated many of what I consider Biblical principles.

A legacy?

It’s traditional, in the last year of a Presidency, to obsess over the President’s legacy. I think that President Bush presents a mixed bag, here.

On the one hand, he did the right thing in response to the 9/11 attacks — he led the nation well and took the fight back to the people who attacked us. He did, though, then try to hide from scrutiny and responsibility. There was much grandstanding, and much alienating of our friends (”You’re either for us or against us” is one of the dumbest statements in Presidential history … Canada is against us? There are few nations I’d trust to back us up as strongly as Canada, when the chips are really down.)

Domestic policy will certainly not be a big part of Bush’s legacy. There was little done in that regard — good, bad, or otherwise.

One thing that George W. Bush has done, and he has this in common with his predecessor, is make people compromise their core beliefs in support of a President.

Bill Clinton managed to get feminists to support him — a serial abuser of women — for political gain. George W. Bush has managed to get people who believe in strict interpretation of the Constitution to engage in amazing convolutions of logic in order to support him.

Americans are actually having a conversation about whether it is okay for us to torture people, and exactly how badly we can treat someone before it really counts as torture … and I can’t believe it. My principles demand that we never consider torture, and never approach it. I don’t look for excuses to exempt “enemy combatants” and treat them as neither prisoners of war nor criminals.

President Bush will be remembered for what happens in Iraq — whether we secure the nation and establish it, or let it collapse into chaos and leave it worse than it was before we invaded. President Bush has little control over that, now. Whether he will be viewed as having been right or wrong will depend mostly on his successor.

He does bear responsibility for the international relations strains, and for the ethical nightmare that has come of the torture debate and related issues (rendition, secret prisons, etc.).

I’m not sure whether I view the Bush administration positively or negatively, overall. I think that I lean toward negatively, at this point. I would argue that even when Bush has been right, he has often gone beyond where he was right and pushed the envelope.

Beyond that, I think that we need more time to tell.