How Bad Was Bush for the World, Really? is a 2-part piece on Bush by Nicholas Guariglia on Pajamas Media. I recommend it to all students of foreign policy, including those (like me) who are on the fence about Bush's legacy. Summary follows, but don't miss the entire thing (Parts One and Two):
President Bush had plenty of foreign policy failures and oversights. Mexico has become the Wild West incarnate; drug lords and militias rule the streets. Our border with the Mexicans remains porous. Overseas, the Russians shifted in the direction of autocracy on Bush’s watch. The North Koreans nuclearized their arsenal. The Iranian problem has been left unaddressed. Bush was at many times incompetent — and at all times inarticulate and incapable of explaining himself or his views. Yes, in retrospect, Senator McCain might have been the better candidate in 2000. All this and more is true.No, not hardly. Especially not if your political ilk's Goliath of international affairs is Jimmy Carter.
But to claim Bush was a foreign policy disaster on some unprecedented level is simply untrue. It is an anti-academic accusation and entirely inaccurate, despite what feisty foreign op-eds, YouTube hate videos, late-night wisecracks, and nightclub one-liners would have you believe. President Bush, in fact, did much good internationally.
President Obama has said we must defend ourselves and not undermine our ideals at the same time — a critique of the Bush era, implying his predecessor thought otherwise. But this is a fundamental misunderstanding of everything President Bush’s foreign policy was. Not only could we simultaneously uphold our ideals and protect ourselves, Bush believed, but we must also promote those ideals in order to protect ourselves. This was, in effect, the Bush Doctrine: that “the survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world.”
George Bush made the promotion of democratic principles the cornerstone of American foreign policy, particularly in the Middle East. While this has been our traditional role throughout history, we have at times strayed away from this democratic calling, especially in the Mideast. Bush changed that with an emphatic defense of Arab liberty. He also tackled HIV/AIDS and African poverty, Latin American narcotics, the Asian sex slave trade, and Islamist state sponsorship of terrorism unlike any leader we have ever had. Oh, and lest we forget, his administration prevented another 9/11 — a feather in the cap that was thought to be impossible on the morning of September 12, 2001.
Despite what you may feel about George W. Bush, this is not a record to scoff at.
I think on balance Bush got it right. He saw the big picture, even though he missed some of the details. I think his Christian faith (for which he has been so maligned by his enemies) clouded his judgment and led him to try to win a war without killing innocent people -- a noble effort, but against the grain of history. Never has an enemy been defeated without being defeated so decisively that the people -- not merely the combatants -- lose the will to fight. (Well, except for Fwance; the Fwench lose their will to fight and surrender without firing a shot in defense of their homeland. But that's another story...) As Japan and Germany learned in the previous century, it is better to be at peace with America than at war. There was a time for compassion, and we delivered it by airlift and boatload, but not until after our enemies' will to fight was as thoroughly crushed as their armies, navies and cities.
A war doesn't end until both sides agree that it has ended, and the surest way to make sure a war has really ended is to flatten the enemy so hard that they never again think to take up arms against America or their neighbors. When our politicians promise to "end the war" by bringing home the troops, it would be nice if they could at least get the same concession from the Jihadists who will undoubtedly use the time out to rearm and regroup. Ask Israel how well it works every time they unilaterally "end" their war with the Islamists.
The classic formula of winning wars by crushing the enemy worked well for every great war in history, up to and including World War II. Somehow after 1945, however, it was decided that ending a war was a more important objective than defeating an enemy. Perhaps some believe it's the same thing; it is not, just as peace is not the same thing as freedom. Following World War II, war as we knew it was replaced by a series of limp-wristed "peace keeping" missions that, in the end, always concluded with a "deal" that left a tyrant (if not several of them) in power to rule over an oppressed population. North Korea, Southeast Asia, Gulf War I -- these are just the big wars, the ones the United States led. We won't mention all those UN peacekeeping successes such as Darfur, Somalia, Rwanda, Bosnia (pre-NATO), Srebrenica... all bustling democracies now. Not.
War aside, I think Guariglia makes a strong case that Bush did an above average job on foreign policy. If the Iraq war never happened, would the left be any less displeased with Bush? I doubt it; just as the history of Obama has already been written, I believe it was already decided by the pinhead "intellectuals" that the Bush presidency was an abject failure long before he took office. Coupled with an eight year media and pop-culture campaign to promulgate the idea that "Bush failed" among the ignorant and uninformed, without actually backing up such a statement with facts, it will be difficult to change many minds for at least two generations.
This all gets me thinking about the worn-out mantra of the left, about how Bush "squandered he world's good will after 9/11" and how "the international community" holds (or formerly held, for those 8 dark years) America in contempt for whatever imagined greivance. I especially find rich the assertions by leftoids that it's once again cool to tell Euroweenies that you're American.
My general rules of thumb are:
- If you're embarrassed to tell others you're American when you travel abroad because of who we elect, you can go fuck yourself.
- If you're not American, and you dislike my country because of who we elect, you can go fuck yourself.
Don’t get me wrong, of course I’m glad that English people may be less likely to accuse me personally of prosecuting the Iraq war no matter how incredibly “enlightened” and “accurate” that accusation may or may not be, but what pisses me off is how grateful all these expats sound, how relieved they are they can finally stop pretending they’re Canadian. I’m not grateful; frankly I profoundly resent the implication that my own personal worth has anything whatsoever to do with who half the American voters chose.Frankly, when I was in Ireland and the UK in 2004, at the height of the Iraq war, I had no problem telling people where I was from. To be honest, the only people who brought it up were a few locals at a pub, and they were pretty damn supportive of the USA. They didn't ask me about the war; they asked me what it was like to be near Ground Zero on 9/11, and got a vivid description of the smell of burning steel and flesh that we in the NYC metro area were treated to for weeks after 9/11. Things got pretty fucking quiet for a while.
I can’t help but imagine how this sort of thing would play were the tables turned. Such as if Venezuela finally got rid of that little pig monkey Chavez and suddenly all the Venezuelan papers had gushing, swooning articles about how Venezuelans living in America no longer have to be ashamed of themselves because NOW, Americans are treating them nice because their home country got a new leader. What the fuck? Does anyone out there know Venezuelans whom you hold personally responsible for Chavez? Do you treat those Venezuelans poorly because you don’t care for Hugo Chavez? If so, you’re an asshole. Just like all the Europeans mentioned in that article up there are assholes.
Frankly, I think the Euroweenies vilify and scowl at America for the same reason the American Left assaults Christianity: because they know that no harm will come to them. If the "European street" was a fraction as vocal about radical Islam, there would be bloody repercussions, so they limit their wrath and aim it West because, well, it's safe. That they do this while Europe is slowly rotting away from the inside with Islamist cancer, well... let's just wait and see who Europe calls in a decade or two when they need help again.
In the meantime, they won't have Bush to kick around anymore.
Posts
