Bush Legacy
No, not the Obama administration. Good one, though … it’s turning out to be an early legacy bonus. This is about Bush himself, and how he hopes history will view him. As a liberator of millions who never sold out his principles for politics. AFP:
George W. Bush hopes history will see him as a president who liberated millions of Iraqis and Afghans, who worked towards peace and who never sold his soul for political ends.
“I’d like to be a president (known) as somebody who liberated 50 million people and helped achieve peace,” Bush said in excerpts of a recent interview released by the White House Friday.
“I would like to be a person remembered as a person who, first and foremost, did not sell his soul in order to accommodate the political process. I came to Washington with a set of values, and I’m leaving with the same set of values.”
He also said he wanted to be seen as a president who helped individuals, “that rallied people to serve their neighbor; that led an effort to help relieve HIV/AIDS and malaria on places like the continent of Africa; that helped elderly people get prescription drugs and Medicare as a part of the basic package.”
Sounds about right. Even as Obama moves today to adopt the legacy of Bush’s foreign policy, his challenge is going to be not undoing the good Bush has done in the most troubled parts of the world. He’s already behind the curve on that political-soul thing … unless, charitably, you want to consider that Obama may be buying back his soul with a political mortgage.
Hotair called it the Quote of the Day. I’d put it in the running for Quote of the Decade, but legacies need time to stew, and what chef Obama throws in, his current slurping at the pot aside, will make a difference to how history views all of this years on when we’re all dead and gone.
Anyway, for more on how Bush made the world a better place, Crittenden at Weekly Standard, “Obama’s Debt of Gratitude to George W. Bush,” via the White House Communications Office, where the Cheney-Bushitler regime is carrying my water for a change:
—– Original Message —–Sent: Wednesday, November 26, 2008 9:35 AMSubject: IN CASE YOU MISSED IT: “A Time For Thanksgiving”In Case You Missed It:
A Time For Thanksgiving
Obama’s Debt Of Gratitude To George W. Bush
By Jules Crittenden
The Weekly Standard
November 26, 2008
As the transition progresses and Barack Obama’s inauguration draws closer, it’s a good moment to mull the gifts George W. Bush has left for the incoming president. Bush has made the world a better place, and if Obama wants to do the same, he will take the good things Bush has done and move forward with them.
Early indicators are in fact positive. In foreign policy, possibly embarrassed by the eagerness with which the world’s most vile regimes have welcomed his election, Obama is backing off his many promises to sit down with dictators. His antiwar base is already outraged that he may not make closing the hated “Crusader gulag” at Guantánamo Bay his first act of national liberation from the Bush era. He is even reportedly considering allowing the CIA some leeway in interrogation techniques.
In the critical field of war and foreign policy, there are quite a few things for which President-elect Obama can thank George Bush.
First and foremost, Saddam Hussein-a state sponsor of terrorism, a producer of weapons of mass destruction, a warmonger, and a genocidal maniac-is gone. The threat he posed was a nagging concern to Bill Clinton, but Clinton, lacking the political will or perhaps a good excuse, was content to consider Saddam trapped in a box. George W. Bush didn’t have that luxury. After the September 11 attacks the stakes were raised and Bush understood the world could not tolerate the presence of someone like Saddam, who defied all international challenges and was actively subverting the restraints upon him.
For the last five years, Saddam has been viewed, in retrospect, as having been harmless, but that is only because he was deposed and captured by forces acting on George Bush’s orders, then tried and hanged by the Iraqi people. The Baathist regime is no more.
Thank you, George W. Bush.
That difficult task, which required the terrible resolve to send men to their deaths and also required several painful readjustments of strategy and tactics, was done in time so that Obama should be able to fulfill his campaign promise of getting out of Iraq and ramping up in Afghanistan.
It will be possible for Obama to draw down the U.S. troop presence in Iraq without a precipitous, premature withdrawal that could plunge the region into genocidal chaos and leave Iran the de facto regional power. Iraq is peaceful enough now that a policy fudge by Obama there-unlike on the Guantánamo issue-is something his liberal backers are unlikely to hold against him.
With minor policy adjustments that no one will notice, much less begrudge, he can stay past his 16-month deadline and continue to build Iraq as a beacon of democracy and a U.S. ally in the Middle East. Iraq’s cabinet has approved a deal asking U.S. forces to stay until 2012, and Iraq’s free parliament has been debating the matter in a highly spirited fashion - including fisticuffs - not unlike the early congressional proceedings of another nascent democracy.
Thank you, George W. Bush.
In the 1990s, anyone who told you Iraq would be a functioning, U.S.-allied democracy within a few short years would have been laughed out of the room. It has come at tremendous cost in both American and Iraqi lives. It is reasonable to assume, however, given the massive ethnic blood toll Saddam inflicted to maintain his regime, that establishing a Western-leaning Iraqi democracy has been accomplished with only a fraction of the violence that would have taken place absent U.S. intervention. Iran, while it meddles and wields deadly influence, has been kept at arm’s length in the process, when Iran and Syria might both have been expected to descend on a post-Saddam Iraq. This highly dangerous region is stable - and has hope of remaining so.
The very concept of democracy in the region received a major boost when Arabs saw millions of Iraqis voting while under threat of death. This evolution is playing out in fits and starts in Lebanon and even the Palestinian territories, where voters have learned that the democratic process only begins with a vote. When Hamas chose to reward its backers with a bloodbath and international isolation, George Bush used that opportunity to draw an unprecedented gathering for former adversaries together to talk peace. Meanwhile, the very delicate Pakistan has advanced, with U.S. support, from military rule to elected civilian rule and remains an ally, if a problematic one, in America’s war on Islamic extremism.
Thank you, George W. Bush.
George Bush has put a bow on his gift. The U.S. military’s leading counterinsurgency warrior-philosopher, General David Petraeus, who resolved the initial mistakes of the Iraq occupation, now commands U.S. forces in the entire region, including Afghanistan. As some of the same voices that despaired in Iraq, declaring quagmires and demanding precipitous withdrawal, turn their despair to Afghanistan, Obama goes into battle without having to search for his Grant. He’s already been found.
Thank you, George W. Bush.
The nuclear arms race in the Middle East was checked after 2003 when Iraq was cut out of it, Libya surrendered, and Iran momentarily halted its pursuit of nuclear weapons. Iran is back in the game, and apparently Syria as well, but Europe and the U.N. have come into line with George Bush on Iran, recognizing that ultimately someone must be willing to use force when all else fails. Bush has demonstrated to Obama that it is possible to negotiate from a position of strength with the international blessing that Obama craves.
Iran is perhaps the greatest challenge Obama will face. It requires him to be willing to take action on his own and not simply manage what was initiated by Bush. The prospect of a nuclear-armed Islamic Republic of Iran is one that threatens to upset the pro-democracy, pro-American balance of power Bush has painstakingly created.
There is one thing Bush did not do for Obama, a key bit of unfinished business in a midwar transition. Bush failed to increase the number of U.S. ground forces in the immediate post-9/11 period when Congress would have signed a blank check. As a result, Obama will become commander in chief of an overstressed military at a time when there is still more fighting to be done. To establish himself as a wartime president and show that he is serious about America’s obligations and vital interests in the world, Obama, among his first acts as president, must make an effort to increase the size of the Army and the Marine Corps.
George W. Bush did not solve all the problems of the world’s most troubled and dangerous region. But, for all his shortcomings, he has moved them forward and established the United States as the dominant agent for change in the Middle East. Consider the mess Obama would be inheriting in the region if the Bush administration had just sat on its thumbs - Ahmadinejad’s Iran with an even further advanced nuclear arms program, an aging Saddam installing one of his psychopathic sons in power or Iraq being torn apart in a genocidal nightmare. Imagine all the regimes of the region, unchastened and unimpressed by the U.S. exercise of power, looking for any weakness or advantage to exploit and quite possibly finding it in al Qaeda and its affiliates.
Bush has set conditions that could allow Obama, if he abandons the desire to be liked as the underlying principle of his foreign policy and sticks to the path the Bush administration has laid out, to preside over the greatest blossoming of liberal democracy and stability the Middle East has ever seen, and in all likelihood, to get the credit for it.
For all of this, Barack Obama owes George W. Bush a tremendous debt of gratitude.
Jules Crittenden is an editor at the Boston Herald and blogs at JulesCrittenden.com.
Topics: Bush
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 10:02 am on Monday, December 1, 2008
7 Responses to “Bush Legacy”
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December 1st, 2008 at 11:20 am
My Goodness, this must be an awful pill to swallow for the Leftoids. Here they’ve been hoping for a Nuremberg Trial for Boooosh, Cheney and Rummy…And, what does The Messiah give them..? A tough Marine General as National Security Advisor, the same gifted Sec’y of War for the Evil Booosh, a smart-pragmatic economic team and the Triangulating-Pragmatic-Publicity Craving Hill & Bill as Co-Sec’ys of Foggy Bottom.
I am (Very)guardedly hopeful.
December 1st, 2008 at 12:46 pm
I hope to be proven wrong about my initial perceptions of Obama (which perceptions are thanks to his campaign cadre of nutbags).
That said, I’ve always believed Bush would be vindicated by history (although you’re probably right, it will only happen after we’re dead and gone… or more correctly, after the current generation of media mobsters are dead, and silent, and can be fact-checked). I believed in the Iraq war in the beginning, and had only begun to lose hope just before the Surge. Bush’s greatest blunder was in not clearly articulating the benefits of what he was doing, but I can’t blame him too much for that either. Everything he said would have been twisted and rephrased and ridiculed by the general media to make him look like a self-absorbed whiney loser, and he probably knew it.
December 1st, 2008 at 12:57 pm
The Thunder Run has linked to this post in the - Web Reconnaissance for 12/01/2008 A short recon of what’s out there that might draw your attention, updated throughout the day…so check back often.
December 1st, 2008 at 1:58 pm
I was, have remained and will be in the future a true, steadfast supporter and admirer of President Bush. He truly has been ‘The Right Man’. I, like Rebecca, fault him only for not communicating regularly to America, by use of the Bully Pulpit, the meaning of The Mission and its profound necessity. And, the nature of the Massive Evil we are fighting. I think that the President has assumed that Americans aren’t as Attention Deficit Disordered as we are. He saw his Duty and has done it. His strength of character, unwavering love of country and absolute focus on the Big Picture puts him in the company of Harry Truman–at least.
Just one other bi**h I have for this brave man. I wish he’d have used the Veto Pen a gazillion times more.
December 1st, 2008 at 5:31 pm
That was very good.
December 1st, 2008 at 5:34 pm
NeoCon:
Well, I blame Republicans in Congress myself. When Bush tried to reform social security they bailed on him and when he did veto spending bills like the pork laden farm bill, they crossed party lines and over rode the veto.
December 1st, 2008 at 8:24 pm
Terrye…Well said and true.
He has been a Giant with some very muscular help in high positions the likes of which we’re not likely to see again for a long while. Think of it: Dick Cheney followed by the self-caricatured Biden. Condi Rice followed by Hillary..!