G.W. Bush: probably the worst and most incompetent president in US history
Dissidentvoice.org (Edward Jayne): Conservative pundits such as Ann Coulter lash out against Democrats and liberals in general about such issues as affirmative action, racial preferences, illegal immigration, and campus speech codes.
All of these issues necessitate finding an appropriate balance between freedom and regulation, usually with different standards relevant to different circumstances.
Excesses are possible, and there is often room for criticism, even ridicule. On the other hand, such pundits avoid taking into account Bush’s current foreign and domestic agenda, which is far more deserving of critical scrutiny. For most of his supposedly conservative policy decisions are not debatable, as if one might reasonably support or reject them at one level or another.
Time and again they have simply been wrong and nothing but wrong.
1. Bush was wrong, for example, to downplay the terrorist threat before 9/11. He ignored Clinton’s warning on Inaugural Day, 2001, and on August 6, a month before 9/11, he cut short his only meeting about al-Qaeda in order to be able to go fishing early at his Crawford ranch.
He also revised his staff hierarchy to exclude Richard Clarke, his anti-terrorism coordinator, from continuing to serve in the White House with the same authority as with President Clinton. Moreover, just before the 9/11 attack, Attorney General Ashcroft actually sought to reduce the projected 2002 FBI budget for anti-terrorism. Why all these measures? One suspects that Bush sought to minimize terrorism as a national cause in order to divert as much of the federal budget as possible to the subsidization of Star Wars, an expensive boondoggle with no direct connection to the problem of terrorism.
2. Bush was wrong to let Osama bin Laden escape at Tora Bora. US troops attacked bin-Laden’s cave complex with US troops from three sides, but on the fourth side Afghan troops were stationed in steep valleys where reduced air support might have led to heavy casualties. As a result bin Laden could escape and the war against terrorism went on.
3. Bush was wrong to refuse US participation in international treaties such as the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, the Biological Weapons Convention, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, the Convention on the Prohibition of Land Mines, the Chemical Weapons Convention, the Kyoto Global Warming Accords, and the International Criminal Court. Within a few months the US, ostensibly the leader of the free world, also became its first and foremost outlaw state.
4. Bush was wrong to make a recess appointment of John Bolton as the US Ambassador to the UN without the consent of the Senate. Bolton has actually advocated the abolition of the UN and suggested the elimination of the top ten stories of the UN building would be beneficial. His incessant criticism of the UN for corruption and inefficiency seems cynical, given the present performance of the US Congress linked with K Street and corporate donors. Too many of Bolton’s best friends in Congress are almost as dishonest as his most visible targets at the UN.
5. Bush was wrong to overthrow President Aristide in Haiti and to attempt to overthrow President Chavez in Venezuela. These illegal and undemocratic maneuvers helped to provoke the growing backlash in Latin America today against US policies. Similarly, it was also counterproductive for Bush to promote and subsidize a “democratic” revolution in the Ukraine, Belarus, and other nations adjacent to Russia that were once part of the Soviet Union. This “democracy promotion” strategy has predictably antagonized Russia, accelerating retrogressive trends and policies as well as its closer diplomatic relationship with Iran, China, and the European Union independent of the United States.
6. Bush was wrong to junk President Clinton’s negotiations with North Korea that were almost brought to their completion before Bush took office. To the embarrassment of Secretary of State Powell, Bush abruptly made new and unacceptable demands and began vilifying North Korea as part of the Axis of Evil along with Iraq and Iran.
As a result, North Korea resumed developing nuclear weapons, and Bush was forced to shift to a neutral policy inferior to Clinton’s original arrangement. Bush’s double reversal helped to convince Iran and other nations to forge ahead with their own nuclear programs on the assumption that once they had produced atomic bombs the US would back as it had against North Korea. To prevent such a possibility, Bush now threatens to bomb nuclear production plants in Iran, but this can only compound US problems in Iraq and the rest of the Near East. All of this has been the product of botched diplomacy.
7. Bush was wrong to offer India almost full support of its atomic program despite its not having signed the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. Again, the wrong signal has been sent to other nations, and the arms race with Pakistan has been given new impetus.
8. Bush was wrong to invade Iraq as a preventive “war of choice.” Without exception, all the evidence relevant to weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and Saddam Hussein’s connection with al-Qaeda was fabricated by such disreputable figures as Chalabi and “Curve Ball.”
There was no hidden stash of atomic weapons, no aluminum tubing for atomic bombs, no yellow cake uranium contract with Niger, no mobile truck fleet loaded with the ingredients of chemical weapons, no secret meeting with al-Qaeda agents in Prague, and certainly no drones that might fly over the US loaded with atomic bombs, as Bush himself warned in his October 7, 2002, speech in Cincinnati.
Moreover, US intelligence knew of the absence of WMD as early as 1995, when Saddam Hussein’s son-in-law, Kamel Hussein, former director of Iraq’s bio-weapons program, fled Iraq and was debriefed by the CIA. He disclosed that all the programs had been destroyed in 1991.
If anything survived that might conceivably have been useful to the renewed development of WMD, it was destroyed in the 1996 and 1998 air attacks launched by President Clinton based on Kamel Hussein’s information. Later Paul Wolfowitz, the principal architect of the invasion, actually confided to associates that Iraq would be a quick and easy target because it lacked such weapons. This was at the same time he publicized the supposed threat of these weapons to justify the invasion.
9. Bush was wrong to mount an invasion that broke international law. Based on Article 41 of the UN Charter, Resolution 1441 mandated UN inspections for WMD, after which, according to Article 42, a second vote by the Security Council was needed to proceed with an invasion.
If Article 41 was invoked as specified by Resolution 1441 relevant to Iraq’s case, Article 42 necessitated a final Security Council vote to launch an invasion. However, no WMD whatsoever were found, and secret US wiretaps of delegates and UN officials indicated a second vote would be negative. So the US and UK delegations withdrew their motion supportive of invasion, and Bush attacked Iraq in defiance of both the U. Charter and the Supremacy Clause of Article 6 in the US Constitution, to say nothing of the Geneva Conventions and Nuremberg Tribunal. Article 6 obliges the acceptance of all foreign treaties, necessarily including the UN Charter, on the same basis as the Constitution itself.
10. Bush was wrong to insist that Saddam Hussein’s crimes against humanity justified the invasion.
Saddam’s career began as a CIA hit man, and he was a close US ally when the majority of these crimes occurred. Our government provided most of his WMD, and about sixty US advisors were stationed in Iraq at the time he was using them [NYT, Aug. 18, 2002]. Soon afterwards, President Reagan actually sent Rumsfeld as a special emissary to double US aid to Iraq as a reward for Hussein’s successful operations against Iran.
Now we blame Hussein alone for what he did to preserve Iraq’s national unity, something we ourselves have not been able to attain despite comparable levels of violence during our occupation.
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