Wednesday, August 20, 2008

The Bush Legacy

George W. Bush is about as popular with Americans as a funeral director visiting a nursing home. The most reviled president in American history, however, is dead certain he’ll be vindicated by posterity. Several prominent pundits – Robert Kagan, Fareed Zakaria, and David Frum – wrote recently that history might go easier on the forty-third president than liberals imagine. They argue, for instance, that the surge is working, liberals are in denial, and Bush has succeeded in his most important responsibility: protecting the nation against another attack. However, an overwhelming body of evidence suggests that Bush’s tenure will almost certainly rank at or near the bottom of American presidents.

When Bush leaves office the world (and most Americans) will breathe a collective sigh of relief. There is no doubt that the next chief executive will inherit the most formidable domestic and foreign policy challenges any American leader has ever faced. The American financial system is on the precipice of the worst economic meltdown since the Great Depression, the U.S military is stretched to brink in two indecisive wars, and ecological and weather-related events are taking their toll on America’s resilience and infrastructure as never before. Meanwhile, Osama bin Laden is on the loose and the threats stemming from nuclear proliferation and “loose nukes” is growing more urgent by the day. To make matters worse, the precipitous decline in Bush’s short-lived Pax Americana is occurring at the same time that authoritarian regimes like China and Russia appear to be on the rise.

On the economic front, Bush’s supply-side policies have been a complete bust. The administration’s policies have engendered the weakest job growth in the past sixty years, inflation is rising at the most torrid pace in nearly thirty years, and the country is drowning in debt. As Al Gore trenchantly observed some years ago, we’ve been borrowing money from China in order to keep buying Middle Eastern oil, thus mortgaging our future to a rising rival while transferring wealth to a region brimming with anti-Americanism.

The Bush administration has come close to bankrupting America morally too. The so-called “enhanced” interrogation techniques codified by Cheney’s legal scriveners have decimated America’s moral authority. Put simply, Bush’s decision to unilaterally suspend the Geneva Convention when it came to the War on Terror has proven as unwise as it was unlawful. America’s Constitution refers to the inalienable rights that belong to all persons. Thus, Bush’s efforts to deny a certain category of persons – enemy combatants – all due process and legal rights is nothing less than an assault upon the most cherished and fundamental of American values.

Bush is the first American president to hold an MBA, but his management “skills” makes Drew Carey seem like CEO material in comparison. The bungled mishandling of post-war Iraq and post-hurricane New Orleans shattered America’s image as a can-do nation. Bush’s installation of political hacks at FEMA, the Justice Department, and the reconstruction efforts in Iraq corroded the competencies of institutions Americans count on. And Bush’s gut instinct has proven disastrous when it comes to picking subordinates (e.g., the axis-of-incompetents: Donald Rumsfeld, Alberto Gonzales, & Michael Brown) or sizing up world leaders (Vladimir Putin and Pervez Musharraf).

Bush’s apologists and enablers claim that “victory is within sight” in Iraq. It may be possible to win a phyrric victory in Iraq (“one more victory like that and we are doomed”), but America is sacrificing its global strategic position to “win” in Iraq. How long can the United States afford to spend $10 billion dollars a month in Iraq, essentially paying Sunni insurgents to shoot at al-Qaeda instead of us? It may seem like a bargain, except that al-Qaeda wasn’t in Iraq until after we invaded, and the Sunni militias are likely to start shooting at us and/or the Shiite government if their U.S. taxpayer financed monthly stipends are ever cut off. Meanwhile, Iran’s regional ambition, which include acquiring nuclear weapons and dominating the Persian Gulf, have been furthered because the U.S. toppled the Mullahs’ main enemy, the Baathists, and then got bogged down in Iraq where U.S. soldiers would essentially become 160,000 hostages should America attack Iran’s nuclear program.

The invasion of Iraq set a dangerous precedent because the U.S. came to be seen as a rogue nation. Conservatives have a hard time absorbing this, convinced as they are of America’s exceptionalism. But the Bush administration’s attempt to establish a Pax Americana has instead led to a steep decline in America’s power and prestige. Sensing this, Russia and other authoritarian countries are likely to ally themselves against American interests and cite U.S. hypocrisy to cover their own unilateralism and aggression. Russia’s foray into Georgia is likely just a prelude to an era where the “strong do what they can and weak suffer what they must.”

Scrapping the Geneva Conventions, unilaterally abrogating the ABM treaty, heaping scorn upon the Kyoto Accord, trashing the UN, and ignoring international law was in keeping with the Bush administration’s mind-set, namely that “might makes right.” The concept that peace and stability might be promoted through collective security, international legitimacy, and soft power seemed inconceivable for the ideologically rigid reactionaries that made up the administration. Bush has demonstrated greater flexibility, including an increased emphasis on diplomatic suasion, in his second term, but much of the administration’s energy has been consumed undoing the damage wrought during the first term.

It would be hard to pick the most despicable aspect of Bush’s failed presidency. But certainly, Bush and Cheney’s willingness to let a low-level military personnel take the heat for abusive practices approved at the highest level is especially loathsome. Top legal advisors to the president and vice-president (David Addington, Alberto Gonzales, and John Yoo) crafted torture memos that codified barbarism, sexual sadism, and psychological cruelty. These legal scriveners did for the law what Arthur Anderson did for accounting; they made a mockery out of the ideals their respective professions stand for. For Bush and Cheney to deplore the abuses at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo that their policies legitimized is cowardly, hypocritical, and dishonest.

Few thinking Americans take the Bush administration seriously anymore. Bush’s rhetoric has been so at variance with reality that most people sensibly ignore what he has to say. Bush’s greatest accomplishment -- prior to his 5 to 4 win in the Supreme Court, which effectively overturned the will of the majority of American voters – was overcoming his chronic alcohol abuse. Power has a way of revealing character – or lack thereof – and so does history. That’s why I wouldn’t bet a wooden nickel that George W. Bush will look much better once the dark recesses of his shady administration are exposed to the light of history.

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Saturday, August 09, 2008

Russian Offensive Against Georgia

In 1990, following Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, the first President Bush (George H.W. Bush) worked with his Soviet counterpart (Mikhail Gorbachev) to roll back the dictator’s unprovoked aggression. With the Cold War over, the elder (and wiser) Bush viewed Saddam’s invasion as an opportunity to establish a precedent whereby the United States (and other responsible powers) would establish and enforce international norms aimed at creating and sustaining a more peaceful and stable world order. Chief among these standards, Bush argued, was the basic principle that the world community could not sit back and allow predatory regimes to violate the sovereignty of weaker states without inviting anarchy.

The senior Bush’s “new world order” was much derided at the time, particularly among paleoconservatives who thought international law was for wimps. But the logic and wisdom of Bush’s concept was rooted in ethical and political precedents that had a proven track record (compared to the alternatives) of engendering a more peaceful global order – i.e., the Treaty of Westphalia and FDR’s vision of the United Nations as a arbiter of international disputes.

It is one of history’s ironies George W. Bush has simultaneously undone his father’s legacy while proving the wisdom of it. Bush Junior’s invasion of Iraq, of course, was a not too subtle repudiation of everything the realists in the first Bush administration (Bush Sr., Brent Scowcroft, and James Baker) stood for, such as building a consensus among allies and establishing legitimacy by working through international institutions. Bush Jr., and the neoconservative idealists that steered him into the disaster of a “preventive” war to remake Iraq, in contrast, extolled the virtues of imperial hegemony, unilateralism, and the doctrine that might makes right. Their attitude at the time could be summed up by the ancient Roman dictum, “let them hate us so long as they fear us.”

The war in Iraq has brought about the worst of all possible worlds; the United States is neither liked nor respected. Russia’s invasion of neighboring Georgia – timed as it was while George W. Bush was attending the Olympic ceremonies with his buddy Vladimir Putin -- is symptomatic of how little respect the cagey Russian leadership has for the lame duck Bush. With the U.S. tied down in two inconclusive, mismanaged, and immensely draining wars the Bush administration can ill afford to open up another front by defending Georgia. As a result, Bush’s rhetoric about defending and spreading democracy will soon ring even more hollow as the administration is viewed as impotent by Eastern Europeans and others.

Russia’s invasion of Georgia may be viewed as ironic extension of Bush’s doctrine of preemption. In this case, Russia’s aggression was meant to preempt Georgia’s inclusion in NATO, which would have obligated a NATO response to Russia’s invasion. The Russian gambit, of course, is of great geo-strategic significance. After all, a crucial oil-pipeline passes through Georgia, and a pro-Western government in that country will help to contain an increasingly authoritarian Russia. Conversely, Russian autocrats would dearly love to reverse what they view as Washington’s (through NATO) encroachment on their sphere of influence.

For those of us who opposed the Iraq War -- on the grounds that the Bush administration’s unilateralism would weaken America’s position strategically and set the stage for resource wars -- the Russia-Georgia conflict may be a prelude of things to come.

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Saturday, August 02, 2008

The Conservative Meltdown

The conservative movement is melting faster than the polar ice caps. Speaking of which, a seven square mile chunk of ice just broke off from an arctic glacier the other day. But global warming is hardly the only issue that conservative curmudgeons have mussed up. The Republican establishment has virtually imploded thanks to its incestuous relationships with corrupt lobbyists, rampant sexual hypocrisy among the rank and file of the supposed “values” Party, and the bankruptcy of its economic and social ideologies.

Katrina, Iraq, and the looming Bush Recession. Talk about an axis-of-evils. There’s an overwhelming consensus that when Bush finally leaves office he’ll bequeath his successor the most formidable set of foreign and domestic challenges since Herbert Hoover dropped the Great Depression on to FDR’s lap.

Republican stalwart Phil Graam, until recently McCain’s economic advisor, contends America is in a “mental recession.” But by any measure America’s economic outlook has been pretty bleak of late. After all, the economy has shed jobs seven straight months and the United States is drowning in red ink. Indeed, impending bailout of mortgage giants Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae will effectively double the size of America’s debt obligations virtually overnight.

The fiasco at the heart of Freddie and Fannie is symptomatic of how the Bush administration mortgaged America’s future to pay for yesterday’s tax cuts, which mainly benefited those who benefited the most from rigging the system to their advantage. On the assumption that some institutions are too important to fail (i.e., institutions that spend hundreds of millions of dollars on lobbyists) America’s taxpayers will be expected bailout foreign investors who bought bad loans (in the form of complex financial instruments) peddled by Wall Street.

Here’s the essence of the problem: the collateralized debt obligations the financial wizards packaged and sold to foreign interests have proven to be as toxic as the dog food the Chinese sell to us with the money we borrow from them. If the American taxpayer doesn’t make good on their losses, then they’ll stop lending us money and interest rates will soar.

Sure, the apple juice the Chinese sell us tastes like radiator fluid, but if foreign creditors like China stop lending us money we won’t be able to afford to buy gasoline from regimes that hate us. The whole economic order will collapse and the United States will descend into a Hobbesian nightmare where life is “short, nasty, and brutish.” Oddly enough, this brings me to Dick Cheney, architect of the Bush administration’s “enhanced” interrogation policy. Enhanced interrogation, of course, is a euphemism for the torture techniques perfected during the Dark Ages by inquisitors and witch hunters.

The civilized world has equated torture as barbarism ever since the Geneva Conventions were ratified. The United States was a signatory and the custodian of that treaty, until George W. Bush unilaterally (and unlawfully) cast them aside as “quaint” relics of a bygone era. In doing so he ignored the advice of counter terrorism officials, law enforcement experts, and human rights activists. Put simply, the experts recognized that torture yields false confessions at least as often as valuable intelligence, as detainees tell their captors what they think they want to hear in order to stop the pain. The case of Ibn al-Shaykh al Libi, for instance, is instructive; after being tortured, al-Libi told his captors that Saddam was in cahoots with bin Laden. In other words, it wasn’t just the Bush administration’s tortured reasoning that brought about the strategic blunder of Iraq.

There is an insidious connection between the Bush administration’s moral bankruptcy and America’s dire economic predicament. The administration has treated laws, regulations, and oversight as impediments to the brute exercise of force. Indeed, with Alberto Gonzales, David Addington, and John Yoo (the infamous trio who crafted Bush’s torture memos) the law was parsed and twisted so finely that the barbarism associated with the Middle Ages was codified and bureaucratized for the 21st century. Simply put, they provided the veneer of legality for criminal acts. Such mediocre political hacks, of course, have been the rule rather than the exception in the Bush administration. Their legal contortions have since been rejected multiple times by the Supreme Court, but the damage to America’s reputation has been as damaging as the images the world saw in the aftermath of the Bush administration’s shameful response to Katrina.

The conservative movement has squandered America’s economic, intellectual, and moral capital at a time when environmental, financial, and military challenges are mounting exponentially. It’s not hard to see where the Bush administration went wrong. Torture and preventive war cannot serve as the basis for a sound national security policy. Rigid ideological assumptions, like the ones that treated the scientific evidence of global warming as a hoax, or the ones that insisted that less taxes and less regulation always led to economic growth, are invariably pernicious. Support for the conservative movement has evaporated, in no small measure because it has been so radically wrong.

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