George W. Bush Revisited

He left office a year ago today. He has maintained a dignified silence in the last twelve months — even though his successor denounces him in almost every speech and acts as if he is still running against the man. I reviewed President Obama’s disastrous first year on Saturday. Today, I ask, “What, in retrospect, should we think of George W. Bush?”

The first thing that needs to be said is that he meant well. He is not a vindictive man, and he sought to put behind him the controversies and turmoil of the Clinton years. He thought that his focus would be domestic policy, but, as tends to happen, events intervened.

Had it not been for 9/11, George W. Bush would probably have been a one-term President. He fell short of his adversary in the popular vote but won a majority in the electoral college. He was destined to be weak — but when disaster struck, he was in the line of fire, and he rose to the occasion.

He made one crucially good choice when he ran for office. He chose Dick Cheney as his running mate, and he leaned on him for advice throughout his Presidency. With the support of Cheney, Bush chose to treat 9/11 as what it was: an act of war. He launched an assault on the regime of the Taliban in Afghanistan, which had supported Osama bin Laden and Al Q’aeda; he managed to drive them from power and install a government more friendly to the United States: and he set in motion a twilight war against Al Q’aeda that prevented further attacks within our borders. This was no mean accomplishment.

Mindful of Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990, of his failure in the intervening years to honor the ceasefire negotiated in 1991, of the role he seems to have played in the first attempt to bring down the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York, and of intelligence reports strongly suggesting that, contrary to the terms of that ceasefire, the man had maintained a clandestine program for the production of chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction, Bush turned his attention to Iraq, and there, too, his administration managed to overturn a tyrannical regime.

It was in the aftermath that things began to go sour. Saddam was adept at bluffing, and he fooled everyone. He had maintained a skeleton operation, ready to produce such weapons, and he had played cat-and-mouse with the UN inspectors in such a fashion as to leave the impression that he had a great deal more to hide. The absence of a large-scale program made it possible for the left to mount a vicious assault on Bush’s integrity, and he never managed adequately to counter their claims.

One cannot blame him for the invasion. Given the information available, it was the right thing to do. One can, however, blame the Bush administration for failing to make use of the information available to respond to their critics.

When the United States took Baghdad, our soldiers captured a treasure trove of tapes, recording Iraqi cabinet meetings and numerous other meetings between Saddam Hussein and others — including foreign visitors and those within his inner circle. The Institute for Defense Analyses ran these tapes through a computer designed to identify passages in which certain key words for used, and from this they produced a series of classified reports — some of which documented in detail the connections between the Iraqi regime and various terrorist organizations. When officials at the institute sought permission to release these reports to the general public, they were repeatedly turned down.

Bush and his advisors blundered in one other crucial regard. They were advised by military men with experience in Kosovo that it was crucial that they flood Iraq in the aftermath of the American invasion with military police capable of maintaining order. I am told that Jim Webb, now a Senator from Virginia, repeatedly proffered similar advice reflecting his experience in Vietnam. This they ignored. The army was, as always, reluctant to do anything other than re-fight World War II, and Bush himself appears to have had no idea what to do next. The first few months were squandered because of a lack of clarity with regard to postwar policy, and the administration ultimately opted to attempt an occupation on the cheap.

The result — which was not only predictable but predicted — was a Sunni insurrection supportive of and supported by Al Q’aeda and something approaching a civil war. It was not until after the losses suffered by his party in the midterm elections of 2006 that Bush felt compelled to alter his strategy. And, then, against all the odds and in the teeth of fierce opposition within Congress, the armed forces, and our intelligence agencies, he not only managed to install in Iraq a group of officers prepared to implement a counter-insurgency strategy and eager to win; he also managed to fend off attempts to deny them support; and, sustained by his resolution, they brought the struggle to a successful conclusion.

This was undoubtedly Bush’s finest hour, and it was a fine hour, indeed. In the long run, developments in Iraq may justify the blood we shed and the treasure we spent. As I argued in a recent post on Powerline, the era of Arab nationalism is coming to an ignominious end; the only seemingly viable alternative in the field is the Islamic revival fostered by the Muslim Brotherhood; and it, too, is bound to fail in the long run — for, while Islam may offer spiritual solace, it does not provide a plausible answer to the social, economic, and political problems that beset the Arab-speaking world. If, however, the Iraqi democracy survives and prospers, it will serve as another alternative, and there lies hope.

What I have to say in this regard is not mere speculation. Across the border in Iran, the Iraqi achievement has already served as an inspiration. If our fellow Muslims in Iraq can be free, can openly debate anything and everything and decide matters in free and open elections, the Iranians tell themselves, there is no reason why we cannot do so ourselves; and now, as a consequence of the Iraqi example, the Iranians are willing to fight for their freedom. Had the Obama administration had the wit to give them wholehearted American backing last summer, we might not now be worrying that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will soon have nuclear weapons at his disposal.

There is a little to be said in praise of George W. Bush’s domestic policy, but only that. The tax cuts he initiated have undoubtedly been a help, and the stimulus checks sent out in his first term may have done some good at the time. But the easy-money policy followed by the Department of the Treasury and the Federal Reserve Board during his time in office was a disaster exceeded only by the policy followed by those bodies under Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover. Bush never managed to find an adequate Secretary of the Treasury; he failed to put an end to mismanagement at Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae; and we have paid dearly for the fecklessness of his administration.

In other areas, he also did damage. Though well-meaning, he was not well-instructed, and the advice he received was often not good. Many of those who served him are proud of his educational initiative (“No Child Left Behind”) and of the Prescription Drug Benefit he added to Medicare. They should be ashamed.

Both programs were unprincipled efforts at triangulation on the model of the Clinton administration in the days when Dick Morris was riding high. The first opened the way for even more extensive federal regulation of institutions that should be regarded as resolutely local. The second paved the way for Obamacare.

Like his father and like Herbert Hoover and Richard Nixon in an earlier time, George W. Bush was a business progressive, marching — if at a slower pace — to the same drummer as the Democratic Party and committed, as its adherents are, to the notion that “rational administration” from the center is the answer to every political question. With these initiatives, he contributed mightily, if unwittingly, to an expansion of the administrative state and to its propensity to subvert federalism and run roughshod over local autonomy.

There was one other regard in which the younger Bush fell short, and it was, I believe, reprehensible in the extreme. When he was inaugurated, Bush — like every President before and since — swore to uphold and defend the Constitution. George W. Bush broke that oath; he betrayed this country; and he did so knowingly — when he signed McCain-Feingold.

The first and most important of our liberties is political liberty. All of our rights depend upon its being sustained. It is essential that American elections be free and open. That is why we have the First Amendment to the Constitution. It is the most important item in the Bill of Rights. Those who framed this amendment were not concerned with artistic freedom and with freedom of expression; they took moral police and moral censorship at the local level for granted — and rightly so. They stipulated, however, that political speech be free and that the press be free as well, and they did so because they recognized that, in the absence of this freedom, if there was not free and open political debate, we would cease to be a self-governing people.

McCain-Feingold is an attempt on the part of progressives to introduce “rational administration” into the messy realm of politics by empowering an appointed commission of putative experts — in no way accountable to the American people — to decide who can say what, when, and where in the political arena. George W. Bush understood this; he expressed his misgivings; then, he signed on. For this, he cannot be forgiven.

I think that I know why he did it. If my suspicions are right, it was all part of a deal with John McCain, who, after being unjustly included in the Keating Five, set off on a futile, pathetic, and disgraceful quest to recover what he took to be his honor — in which he sought to eliminate the system that requires public officials to raise money for campaigns and was willing to sacrifice our liberty in the process. That deal, if a deal there was, guaranteed Senator McCain’s enthusiastic support for President Bush’s re-election bid. If this is what happened, however, if there really was such a deal, it was as corrupt a bargain as we in America have ever seen.

It was President Bush’s hope and expectation that the Supreme Court would declare McCain-Feingold unconstitutional. Thanks to Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which is now before the Supreme Court, his hopes may — as Bradley A. Smith suggests in the current issue of National Affairs — soon be vindicated. But nothing can excuse Bush’s failure as President to do what he knew to be his constitutional duty and veto the bill.

Barack Obama represents a threat to liberty, but he may not be as dangerous as certain of liberty’s putative defenders. What he stands for is clear enough, and, as Scott Brown and his supporters have now shown, we have the means with which to resist such an onslaught. Those, however, whom we take to be on our own side, those who nonetheless betray the cause of liberty and advance — even if at a slow pace — the growth of the administrative state are, I think, a greater threat — for, by taking us in, they make us complicit in liberty’s demise.

It is vitally important that, in 2012, the Republicans nominate for the Presidency a principled defender of limited government and American constitutionalism. One more business progressive, one more rational manager who thinks that he can make the welfare state hum, and we are doomed.