Goodbye, Mr. Bush

At the beginning of my blog career, someone asked me whether George W. Bush was a “great” president.  At that time, I noted that America has not had a “great” one-term president, and that Bush would have to win re-election to even qualify.  I also noted that “great” presidents usually achieve that status in retrospect.  Even Ronald Reagan had to wait a couple of years for the Berlin Wall to finally fall and the Soviet Union to complete its collapse.

Today, President Bush returns to Crawford and his status as an ordinary citizen, albeit with a nice pension and at least ten years of Secret Service protection.  It’s still too early to decide on his historical stature, but we can certainly look to Bush’s legacy and give at least an interim analysis of it.

On foreign policy, Bush mostly triumphed.  He didn’t have the diplomatic skill of his father, but he had better follow-through.  Instead of allowing the twelve-year war with Iraq to drag on, or more likely to be lost, Bush removed Saddam Hussein in a lightning strike at Baghdad.  Unfortunately, he didn’t adjust properly or quickly afterwards to the kind of low-level terrorism that plagued Iraq for several years, but in the end his tenacity finally allowed a representative government to take control of its own security.  In the years to come, if Iraq succeeds as a representative democracy, Bush will be remembered for its birth.

In Afghanistan and Pakistan, the record is considerably more murky.  At first, we did a good job of clearing Afghanistan of the Taliban and setting up a representative government, but we failed to understand the deep lack of necessary infrastructure needed to unite the country and defeat the radicals.  Our allies, professing this to be the only front in the war on terror and eschewing Iraq, mostly paid lip service to the effort in Afghanistan.  Bush and Pervez Musharraf did an odd dance for seven years, and Pakistan never really improved its efforts against the terrorists to a degree that relieved the pressure on Afghanistan at all.

In Latin America, Bush had to deal with a resurgence of socialists that started in the late 1990s.  He countered with a strong alliance with Alvaro Uribe in Colombia, who had terrorists from FARC funded by Hugo Chavez of Venezuela and Rafael Correa of Ecuador.    Bush stood strong for freedom and against terror, while many here in the US professed sympathy with Chavez.

On domestic policy, Bush governed from the center.  Like his predecessor Bill Clinton, who also wound up in a more centrist position, his opponents hated him all the more for it, and his allies lost confidence in him.  He tried a number of times to push through an immigration-reform bill that would have legalized millions of illegal aliens, getting defeated each time.  He started off with tax cuts and defenses of private capital and ended up issuing hundreds of billions of dollars in ill-advised bailouts of private industry.  Bush tried reforming Social Security, but ran into Democratic insistence that it needed no reform.  Bush oversaw the biggest expansion of the federal government in a generation, angering conservatives and deepening the federal debt.

However, the primary role of government is to protect its citizens.  When al-Qaeda attacked the US on 9/11, it was the latest in a long line of AQ attacks on American assets over almost a decade coming about 18 months apart on average.  After the loss of 3,000 Americans on 9/11, Bush and the US finally understood that radical Islamist terrorists had declared war on America, and Bush responded in kind.  Outside of the war zones in Iraq and Afghanistan, AQ has not launched a successful attack on American assets in over seven years.   That didn’t happen by accident or because AQ wasn’t in the mood, as some have argued.

A great president?  Likely, no.  But George Bush did a good job in a very difficult time, and I think history will eventually treat him with considerably more kindness than present-day media did, or at least fairness, which present-day media never bothered to use.  He kept America safe, and whatever his flaws are, Bush had the interests of America in mind foremost.

Thank you, Mr. Bush.  Enjoy your retirement.

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