George W. Bush's damaging legacy:
Unless you lived under a rock during the eight years when George W. Bush ran the country, the chances are you have a pretty strong opinion about him, for better or worse.
So as his library is dedicated today, start by taking a deep breath. Most Americans thought Dwight Eisenhower and Harry Truman were mediocre leaders when they stepped down, and historians have rehabilitated both of them. You never know.
Start with Bush’s effort to fight AIDS in Africa. He scored few political points with that, because liberals hated him anyway and conservatives had no great fondness for spending money on humanitarian aid in the developing world. This was heartfelt stuff.
When Bush launched the program in 2003, only 50,000 HIV-infected people on the continent were getting the drugs needed to keep them alive. When he left office, the number was 2 million, and has since grown to 4 million around the world.
On immigration, Bush stuck his neck out to push for the kind of sensible reform that Congress is finally coming around to this year. On education, he joined with Sen. Edward M. Kennedy in the first federal effort to hold schools accountable for performance, and to break out the results by income and race so that poor minority kids could no longer be quietly left behind. He was right about the “ soft bigotry of low expectations.”
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When he took office, elderly Medicare patients had no coverage for prescription drugs, in a day when drugs are more vital and more expensive than ever. His reform ensured that even the poor elderly could get the pills they needed.
After the Sept. 11 attacks, he launched an invasion to topple the Taliban in Afghanistan and began fortifying national defenses, leading to the disruption of several attempted terrorist attacks on his watch.
And in Iraq, he at least began to clean up his mess with the surge in 2007 that tamped down a sectarian civil war and gave a nascent democracy a chance to live.
So give the man that much.
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On the other end of the scale, sadly, is a mountain of horrendous mistakes.
You can argue that the world is better off now that Saddam Hussein in lying in his grave and not sitting on his throne. But you cannot justify an invasion of a sovereign country that was no threat to us, based on phony intelligence that was deliberately hyped.
The decision to invade Iraq will go down in history as an indefensible exercise of American power, one that backfired terribly and left the nation weaker and poorer. More than 100,000 Iraqi civilians were killed, by the most conservative estimate. Nearly 4,500 U.S. troops were killed as well, with another 32,000 wounded. That blood is on Bush’s hands.
The Iraq war also diverted resources and attention from the just war in Afghanistan, leaving President Obama a nearly hopeless mess when he swore his oath.
And while pursing both wars, the United States engaged in torture that was justified by the twisted acrobatics of the Bush legal team. The image of American officials strapping down prisoners and waterboarding them, banging their heads against walls, depriving them of sleep for long stretches, and threatening them with dogs is bad enough.
The fact that Bush signed off on legal memos justifying that is simply unforgivable. The fact that it was ineffective, as concluded recently in an exhaustive 576-page report by a bipartisan commission of elite policymakers, means it was stupid as well.
The neglect of the administration during the Hurricane Katrina crisis will be remembered forever as a jaw-dropping case of incompetence, for which Bush planted the seeds by appointing an unqualified crony to run the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
Give Bush a healthy share of the blame for the national debt crisis as well. He inherited a surplus from Bill Clinton and promptly gave it away by cutting taxes in a way that disproportionately benefited the wealthy. He refused to raise taxes to help pay for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, or the new prescription drug entitlement. All of that went on the nation’s credit card.
After the financial crisis hit during Bush’s final months, the economy shrunk by 9 percent and millions of people lost their jobs. But the Treasury was empty, so Obama had little choice but to borrow more to cope with the emergency.
Yes, Truman and Eisenhower were rehabilitated, but even the most creative and partisan historian will have a hard time giving Bush a passing grade. The former presidents and foreign dignitaries who gather today to dedicate Bush’s library will be polite and say nice things.
But on balance, Bush was among the worst presidents in our history. His mistakes were enormous, and they haunt us still. |
