We've lost lives and allies, liberties and freedoms. In the
age of George Bush, we have lost our way
Carter's new book, What We've Lost
Profile of Graydon Carter
Tuesday August 31, 2004
The Guardian
"I'm the commander - see, I don't need
to explain - I don't need to explain why I
say things. That's the interesting thing
about being president. Maybe
somebody needs to explain to me why
they say something, but I don't feel like
I owe anybody an explanation" - George
W Bush, August 2002
Making his final decision to launch an
invasion of Iraq, President George W
Bush did not seek the advice of his
father, a veteran of the second world war
and a former president who had gone to battle with the same foe
a decade earlier. Nor did he seek the overall final
recommendation of his secretary of defence, or of his secretary
of state, the only man in his cabinet who had been decorated for
military service in wartime with the medals befitting a national
hero. Instead, as Bob Woodward wrote in his book, Plan of
Attack, Bush consulted his God, a God who the president
presumes takes sides in disputes between peoples.
I am an American by choice rather than by birth. I'm a white,
55-year-old Episcopalian. Born in Canada, I've lived in America
for half my life. I've raised four children here, have done
reasonably well professionally, and am by most measures a
happy man. I've followed politics all my life, but politics has
never been my life, if you know what I mean. To be honest, I
really never had much truck with politicians of any stripe.
But I love this country, its land, its soul, and, above all, its
people.
So what does it say about us that we let a man of such blind
conviction and wilful ignorance lead us?
Bush's reckless, unnecessary decision to wage a war of choice
with a country that was neither an enemy nor a real threat is at
the very root of all we've lost during his presidency. We've lost
our good reputation and our standing as a great and just
superpower. We've lost the sympathy of the world following
September 11 and turned it into an alloy of fear and hatred.
We've lost lives and allies. We've lost liberties and freedoms.
We've lost billions of dollars that could have gone toward a true
assault on terrorism. It could fairly be said that in the age of
George W Bush, we have lost our way.
The deceptions that took the United States into Iraq were the
work of an administration without care for logic or truth. The
aftermath, a war seemingly without end and one that is costing
the country tens of billions of dollars and the lives of about 13
young American soldiers every week, is the work of an
administration without judgment or foresight.
The sideshow in the Middle East proved in the end to be a
convenient diversion for the Bush White House: it distracted
Americans' attention from the administration's domestic agenda,
its ideological war at home. Iraq also served as a shield for the
administration, in the sense that the White House defined any
opposition to or criticism of what it was up to in those early days
as the work of the unpatriotic or the traitorous. With the country
looking the other way, Bush and Cheney began dismantling
decades' worth of advances in civil liberties, healthcare,
education, the economy, the judiciary and the environment.
The Bush White House inherited a robust economy brimming
with jobs and budget surpluses. It may well end its four years
with a net loss of jobs during Bush's first term, a feat
unsurpassed since the Hoover administration. In its desire to
create tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, it created a
horizon of budget deficits, crippling debt and trade imbalances.
The Bush White House inherited an education system that,
while not perfect, was in many ways the envy of the world. Its
unreasonable and underfunded No Child Left Behind programme
hobbled state systems by placing rigid demands on school
districts but pledging little money to meet those demands.
The Bush White House inherited an environment that had been
all but saved by the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts of the
1970s. The administration, many of whose members were
plucked from the oil and gas industries, turned its back on more
than 30 years of advances in environmental legislation and
global treaties to reward its campaign backers from the
petrochemical industry. The Bush administration made it clear
that it refused to live with any kind of restrictions on its energy
use. When the White House officially pulled the United States
out of the Kyoto Protocol in March 2001, it was the first in a
series of defiant snubs to allies, trading partners and neighbours
that began the dramatic decline of America's reputation around
the world.
The Bush White House inherited a healthcare system that
favoured the rich, then made it worse, turning it into a complex
apparatus that will produce unprecedented profits for another set
of major campaign backers - the health and pharmaceutical
industries - all at the expense of regular patients, the elderly and
the poor.
The Bush White House inherited a government of model
transparency and purposefully bent it to the will of the most
secretive administration in recent American history. It inherited a
judicial system that was America's centrist, if not conservative,
legal safeguard and turned it into an ideological, rightwing
juggernaut.
At the heart of all of this loss were two unforgivable deceptions
embedded in George W Bush's 2000 presidential campaign: that
he was a "uniter and not a divider", and that he was a
"compassionate conservative". This "uniter" became a president
who has divided Americans more than at any time since the civil
war. "Compassionate conservative" was a meaningless bit of
public relations designed to appease the middle ground of the
Republican party and the conservative flank of the Democratic
party. Once in office, the Bush administration pursued not a
compassionate course but rather a harsh, far-rightwing effort to
roll back decades of liberal legislation.
Electing George W Bush was seen in many quarters of the
world as a mistake, a voters' aberration. Now the goodwill that
poured in from around the world after September 11 has
dissolved in the president's hands. America has gone from being
loved to being hated. His re-election would send those same
quarters a message of intent and hostility on the part of the US
that may take decades fully to recover from.
A second term would see more tax cuts for the wealthy. A
second term would see further encroachment on civil liberties as
the administration pushes for passage of Patriot Act II. A
second term would see rightwing ideologues further transform
the nation's health, education and environmental departments. A
second term would see one, and possibly two, new rightwing
justices on the supreme court, skewing the political balance in
the US's most important judicial arena for decades to come.
America itself has been rent asunder, more divided along party
lines than at any time in recent memory. It is safe to say that
history will not be kind to the Bush administration. Long after it
is out of office, after the investigations have run their course,
after we examine the wreckage to our land and to our fragile but
enduring democracy, only then will we fully comprehend all that
the Bush presidency has done. And only then will we fully
realise what we've lost.
· This is an edited extract from What We've Lost, by Graydon
Carter, published by Little, Brown
guardian.co.uk |
