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I want to add to my earlier post. I think there is a certain tragedy to George W. Bush that needs to be expressed. I think GWB had the capacity to be a good President. I actually voted for his father in 88'. I saw him as clearly the better man when compared to his opponent Michael Dukakis George H. W. Bush is a good man and was an accomplished man as well who participated in many levels of government. He was willing to compromise and clearly represented the moderate wing of the GOP. On a personal level, he was a World War II veteran who had been shot down in combat. I believe in the saying "that the apple doesn't fall far from the tree". Some may dispute this, but I believe that sons and children generally have the same potential that their parents had.
George W. Bush had something many of us would never have had if we became President. He had a father he could fall back on for advice and support. Instead of doing this, he chose to take the advice of people like Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz. George H W Bush remained silent during much of his son't presidency. I suspect, deep down, he had grave misgivings about the choices his son made when it came to Iraq.
The other thing I imagine the older Bush had trouble with was seeing the unwillingness of his son to compromise. Had GWB been willing to compromise, he would have more support for what he was doing and there would have been much less bitterness in this country over the decisions he made. GWB instead chose to take advice from the neo-cons and tried to run the country on a bare majority of votes, rather than obtaining consensus for his decisions.
As a result, many of us were left with the impression that our President was uninterested in any views that did not mirror his own. I was often struck by what seemed to be his apparent limited view of the world and general lack of curiosity about anything or any view point that did not fit his own. This intransigence and inability to see any point of view, but his own alienated many people from GWB. In the end, it may have harmed his presidency as much as his ill fated decision to invade Iraq did.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Labonte18
Most of those people are the same people his father was leaning on for advice. So.. Don't particularly agree with you on that.. The one appointment of GWB that I totally disagreed with was John ********.. Not that he's any worse than the current attorney general, but.. I've got a real problem appointing someone to office who lost an election to a dead man.
Seriously? ******** hits the bad word filter?
I think all of this ties in with what I was trying to get at in my first post. People keep saying GWB did this, GWB did that, but I would argue that GWB was no longer in control of the Executive post 9/11. He entered as the "chosen" representative of the party, not the leader of the party and was largely a compromise choice among Republicans. In order for him to do anything, he had to build consensus within his own party and he was limited in his ability to do that.
HWB, who is a man I greatly respect, had the advantage of being the annointed successor of Reagan. In that role he had the support of the party. He lost re-election for two reasons: 1) he ticked off the neocons, who were trying to find something to do now that the Soviet Union was collapsing, when he didn't take Saddam out completely; 2) he ticked off the other wing of the party when he raised taxes. He lost two of the key coalition partners in the Republican machine at that time. Of course, HWB had earned the ability to do what he thought was right.
When it comes to the advisors, a lot changed between HWB and GWB's presidencies with those men. First, HWB had the benefit of being essentially chosen by Reagan and being older then most of those involved. He had the experience and chops necessary to lead these men and they respected him as many of them worked under him previously. After HWB lost his former advisors turned to different factions within the party, but many of them, most notably Cheney, became neocons.
When GWB was elected, he brought back many of his fathers advisors who had all been in leadership and/or influential positions within the Republican party in the Clinton years. They did not necessarily respect GWB because he did not have the legacy or experience of his father and had not earned the leadership position of the party and had been essentially chosen as a compromise candidate.
As soon as 9/11 hit it was all about foreign policy and Cheney the foreign policy half of the ticket and now arch-neocon sprung into action. From 9/11 on I honestly believe GWB was largely an observer in his own presidency. The real power resided with Cheney who had no problem building a coalition around his neocon supporters in a post-9/11 world. That would not have been the case under HWB given a similar situation because he was a far more experienced leader and could control his own office.
None of this excuses GWB for anything. It was still his presidency and he is repsonsible for what happened. Losing control is not an excuse, especially when you are the president.
I have a mixed feelings about George W Bush. Personally I think he is a good man who means good. He is definitely a down to earth person, and not acting smug about his background or degree like Obama perceives to me. That said, when I looked at his polices and actions it's a mixed bag.
First I applaud him how he handled 9/11, helped get the country back on his feet afterwards, and started going after the people who did this. That said, we started using the word "security" as a means to invade our personal space, and I'm mixed about that as I can't define what the line is. I will say it's a dangerous path to go on as eventually the government will go to far, and it'll be interesting to see if we have crossed a point of no return when it happens.
Then economically it's mixed as he pushed for the housing bubble, but it started during the Clinton years when regulations were loosen up, but Bush pushed it further. That said, his tax breaks and policies gave us strong economic growth from 2003 to 2007. The sad thing is the liberal media were making a big deal when unemployment was 4.5% and how his policies were failing, and now unemployment near 7% is acceptable and indicating we are on the right track. There is a double standard when they hold one party accountable to another in regards to economics. Overall it is mixed as his policies did create growth, but a massive bubble in other areas. Then the bailouts are tough too as they did save some companies and industries, but are we better off for it? We stopped the bleeding at the banks in 2008, and now they are making as much money as before, but have they brought back the jobs they cut or helped turn the economy around? Same with GM and Ford. I believe that you deserve to be eaten or struggle when you make poor decisions, especially with the automakers as twice now in the last 50 years they put themselves in a bad spot. First in the 70s when they cheapen up cars and disregard safety killing loyal customers, then in 2000s thinking that producing more won't be an issue as everyone will want a new car every year. They deserved to get bitten in the butt with their idiocy.
Finally foreign policy is a mix bag. I feel like Bush didn't help us to earn trust and respect with our allies, especially within the NATO sphere and Japan; however, I like how he didn't take crap from anybody either. I know with diplomacy it's a tough road to endure, but sometimes I feel like Obama is weak by allowing China and Russia walk over him. George Bush had a tougher stance with them, and I'm not saying a war like stance, but he seem to earned respect from them while they see Obama as this big baby they can push around. I have a feeling Bush would be more outspoken about China claiming several Japanese Islands and implementing new airspace restrictions which I think it's a good thing as you can't abandon your strongest pacific allies, South Korea and Japan. Again, I'm not pushing for war, but sometimes when you see countries trying to be bullies you need to stand up to them and not act like you have a red line to cross. The whole mess with Syria and Obama's red line was a joke. Asad cross it, and Obama basically scrambled around and got lucky John Kerry had an off topic remark that he was able to use. Obama set himself up to look weak as everyone knew he won't do anything, so Asad embarrassed him on a global stage and we are back to square one with the Syrian Civil War.
I can go on and on about policies on both administrations, but personally I would take George W Bush over Obama any day. At least George W doesn't blame Clinton or the Democrats for every problem that happen in his administration unlike Obama.
GWB (or his administration; I don't know exactly how power was distributed in practice between them) didn't really engage in realpolitik, though. He was far more of a dreamy foreign policy romanticist. The very idea of "exporting democracy" is not a realist notion; foreign policy realists are far more skeptical about the ability of foreign powers to impose those sorts of systems on widely divergent cultures.
So for example, France's invasion of Algeria in 1830 and its conversion of the Barbary coast into a French colony had strong elements of realpolitik. No more pirates from Oran or Algiers; France picks up an economically-useful North African base and sets itself up nicely for the later "scramble for Africa," and so on.
The US/UK/coalition invasion of Iraq had very few elements of realpolitik. And it was clear within months that the invasion planners had no actual plan, at least not in the traditional sense. One of the long-running stories of the war was about how soldiers would help build something socially-useful, like a school or a health clinic, and then the new facility was bombed or ruined by militants.
That's not realpolitik; that's trying to act out a bizarre fantasy of cultural influence using actual lives and real taxpayer money in the process.
This was doubly disappointing due to Bush's campaign comments in 1999/2000 in which he called for foreign policy restraint, and seemed to push back a bit at "Clintonian" interventionism of the Serbia-Kosovo variety. When he was given the opportunity post-9/11 to show what he meant, it turned out he meant the opposite.
Good
-initial 9/11 response
-I’m okay with the Afghanistan invasion, even though I generally don’t like wars
-kept country safe post 9/11
-Funding for AIDs
-Made some very solid relationships with some countries
-Told it the way he saw it
-Lowered taxes, although I would have preferred a different approach to part of his tax cutting
-Efforts to overhaul social security…even though they were fruitless.
Bad
-kept spending, while cutting taxes, he should have lowered government spending in the good years
-Iraq, was a REALLY bad decision that I didn't realize how bad it was at the time
-Katrina was a mess, but New Orleans was a mess, too, so only partially his fault
-Alienated some leaders, and his bluntness was not appreciated by many internationally
-Not a fan of some of the laws that came out post 9/11
agree
would add as a bad that he had this true belief that the human soul hungers for freedom and I believe he should have had a quick class in Maslowe's Heirarchy of Needs. Safety, food, and security come a lot sooner than a desire for freedom. Bless his heart, I think his intent was to have a functioning arabic/muslim democracy in a semi secular Iraq that was economically powerful to offer a balance to Israel being the sole functioning democracy in the region and to use this to give the region something to strive for rather than the radical fundamentalist Al Queda type rule. A lever against radical Islam.
Would add a plus that the most of the military I knew during and after his presidency loved him and felt that he had their backs.
Have your thoughts about Bush Jr.'s presidency changed in the last five years?
No, I think that his invasion of Iraq was one of the worst moves in American foreign policy since the end of WW II. It has totally destabilized the Mideast, and provided a nest for the most extreme forms of Sunni militancy. Saddam Hussein was an obstacle between Iran and Syria, and a constant source of worry for Iran...he was also an enemy of Sunni extremists.
Bush and/or his clique failed entirely to understand the tensions brewing in the Muslim world between Sunnis and Shiites, and the extreme political-military forces operating at the edges of each. His invasion put them into a basket, shook them up and dumped them out into the world like a swarm of killer bees.
A continuing no-fly zone over Kurdish territory, and a "rehabilitated", lightly armed Iraq might have saved us, or at least postponed, the mess that the invasion has provoked. As long as this upheaval continues, his name will always be cited as a precipitating agent for it.
I have always felt that Iraq was less about SH and more about Iran. On 9/10/01, we had a few airfields in Turkey, S. Arabia and Kuwait, all pretty much on bare-bone detail. We had no way of responding to Iran's threats (even back then) other than a few cruise missles, and Iran knew it. On 9/10/08, we had the world's military might on all of their borders. They were surrounded and the world was in a position to respond to anything from them with a moment's notice. I think that's impressive. I'll also note that there are documented reports and supporting video out there taken by US Recon troops sitting in the dark along the border of Iraq and Syria, just watching Iraqi military vehicle after vehicle crossing into Syria with "unknown" cargo, for several weeks that led up to the war. Some have said, those containers were the chemicals weapons. I think we might actually be seeing those weapons today being used in Syria.
This really makes no sense at all.
Pre-2003, we had numerous airfields in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Turkey, Qatar and Jordan. How does gaining air bases in Iraq make the position against Iran any better? Well, the answer is that it doesn't. In the 21st century, Diego Garcia is 3000 miles from Iraq and is a perfectly suitable base from which we launched B-52 and B-2 strikes. The distance from the Gulf states or Turkey is trivial compared to that. We did not need air bases in Iraq. And, certainly, spending nearly a trillion dollars gaining such bases is completely absurd when we simply could have upgraded existing bases for a tiny, tiny fraction of that trillion. On, then there's Bagram. Yeah, we already occupied a country right on Iran's border. And in 2001 we sub-leased Shamsi airfield in Pakistan, just west of the Iranian border. Boomers and carrier groups in the Arabian Sea to the south of Iran, air bases in Gulf States to the southwest, air bases in Turkey to the northwest (again, bordering Iran) - and yet we just had to have bases right on their western border or they were immune to potential American military action?
Finally, you might note that for our occupation of Iraq, we were unable to cut a deal with Iran. We have a potential deal now, but that deal didn't come about until after the U.S. military had departed Iraq, so clearly our occupation there did not put substantive pressure on Iran.
Quite the opposite, really. In 2003, Iran had a hostile Sunni regime on its western border. Soon thereafter, it got a friendly Shiite regime. Post-2003, Iraqi-Iranian relations are better than they've been in many decades. Nouri al-Maliki regularly makes state visits to Iran. Bilateral cooperation exists on all sorts of issues. This is completely new. The 2003 invasion of Iraq removed an anti-Iranian regime from Iran's western border and replaced it with a friendly regime. That was a strategic godsend for Tehran.
As for Syria's chemical weapons, why would they get them from Iraq? Chemical weapons are not nukes - frankly, they're trivially easy to acquire. Sarin and VX are munitions Syria wouldn't need to acquire; they've had a chemical weapons program since at least the 1970s. The idea that the regime in Damascus would court international condemnation but haplessly importing from a pariah regime weapons it could and was manufacturing for itself simply makes no sense.
Finally, the Bush Administration long ago conceded that the Iraqi WMD program allged to have existed in 2003 simply did not exist. Don't you think, if there was anything at all to the "Iraq gave all it's WMD to Syria!" reports that the Bush Administration would have made a point of that, rather than conceding that they were wrong? I'm also amused at how easy it supposedly was for Iraq to ship vast quantities of chemical weapons and volatile precursors across hundreds of miles of open desert under cloudless skies to the Syrian border, beneath an adversary that had complete and total air superiority, and the U.S. could do nothing about it nor even detect it in any substantive way. Again, that simply makes no sense at all.
Much of this amounts to 20/20 hindsight. It would be much more impressive if someone could supply a link to similar analysis from March, 2003 or earlier, but I doubt if it exists. But think back to what we knew in 2003. A terror network had just demonstrated the ability to strike on US soil. Saddam had much reason to consider us as an enemy. And we all know the Mid East maxim: "The enemy of my enemy is my friend." The terror network's only weapons of 9/11 were box cutters, so perhaps they didn't have access to advanced weaponry, but Saddam did. He not only had produced chemical weapons, but used them at least 3 times. And he had a history of dabbling in other kinds of advanced weaponry: The Man Behind Iraq's Supergun - NYTimes.com
Not to mention that prior to the invasion, virtually all intelligence agencies, and even Saddam's own generals, believed that he still had WMD. In interrogation after being captured, Saddam said that this was by design; he pursued a strategy of 'deterrence by doubt' mainly intended to make the Iranians believe that he still had WMD.
And Saddam did have existing connections to other terrorists. Read Richard Engel's book, A Fist in the Hornet's Nest. Engel lived in Iraq almost up to the start of the invasion. According to Engel the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad, where he lived was replete with Islamic terrorists from around the world. In August 2002, legendary terrorist Abu Nidal was killed in Iraq, perhaps on orders from Saddam. Still the fact that he had decided to retire in Iraq is not insignificant.
I was against invading Iraq when the idea was first floated. I thought that Saddam was contained and therefore not our problem. But I changed my mind and decided that there were enough special circumstances to warrant going to Iraq, as did 70% of the American people, according to polling at the time.
The real tragedy of Iraq was that we didn't follow through. Once we as a nation made a decision to invade, occupy, and transform Iraq, we should have perservered until the job was done. We didn't do that, primarily IMO because many Democrats who supported the invasion, and doubtless would have taken credit if it had turned out well, saw an opportunity to make partisan hay, and took it.
In general, the Constitution was trashed under G, and very little of what Bush broke has been put back together by his successors. The rhetoric of Obama so far, and Hillary even more so, seem perfectly willing to continue to operate pretty much in the same underhanded way, with unfettered spying at home, swashbuckling military might abroad, seriously eroded due process for suspects, free reign for corporatism, and little relief for the downtridden. Things are obviously not as bad as ln the G regime, but probably only because global events have not transpired that might have triggered hasty and extreme measures.
Since Bush left, I haven't heard very much about abolishing Homeland Security, limiting the powers of FEMA, or repealing the Patriot Act. Current and future occupants of the White House seem perfectly happy to embrace those Bush executive powers.
In general, the Constitution was trashed under G, and very little of what Bush broke has been put back together by his successors. The rhetoric of Obama so far, and Hillary even more so, seem perfectly willing to continue to operate pretty much in the same underhanded way, with unfettered spying at home, swashbuckling military might abroad, seriously eroded due process for suspects, free reign for corporatism, and little relief for the downtridden. Things are obviously not as bad as ln the G regime, but probably only because global events have not transpired that might have triggered hasty and extreme measures.
Since Bush left, I haven't heard very much about abolishing Homeland Security, or repealing the Patriot Act. Current and future occupants of the White House seem perfectly happy to take advantage of those Bush measures.
In general, the Constitution was trashed under G, and very little of what Bush broke has been put back together by his successors. The rhetoric of Obama so far, and Hillary even more so, seem perfectly willing to continue to operate pretty much in the same underhanded way, with unfettered spying at home, swashbuckling military might abroad, seriously eroded due process for suspects, free reign for corporatism, and little relief for the downtridden. Things are obviously not as bad as ln the G regime, but probably only because global events have not transpired that might have triggered hasty and extreme measures.
Since Bush left, I haven't heard very much about abolishing Homeland Security, limiting the powers of FEMA, or repealing the Patriot Act. Current and future occupants of the White House seem perfectly happy to embrace those Bush executive powers.
Second Amendment trashed with the so-called "assault weapons ban." Fourth Amendment trashed with the anti-terrorism act of 1996. In fact the Fourth Amendment has been a dead letter since Wilson created the FBI, with, as Nixon put it, 'files on everyone.'
Bush did nothing to reverse the trend, but really he was just a bit player in this process.
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