A Friendly Reminder: Why George W. Bush Was A Terrible President

An admission: while I spent years watching and writing about the Bush Administration, I have not rushed out to buy a copy of George W. Bush's ghost-written autobiography. I have not watched or listened to one of his many media interviews.

All it took was Bush's take-away headline yesterday morning --- the false claim that his approval of torture via waterboarding prevented Terrorist Attacks in the United Kingdom --- to  reinforce years of conclusion that the 43rd President was/is a) lying b) immoral c) blissfully ill-informed d) all of the above. 

And I do not think that hundreds of pages of text can do more than this Bushian comparison, made in his television promotion on Tuesday: 1) Torture was not wrong 2) What was wrong was pouring vodka into my sister's aquarium, killing her goldfish.

Stephen Walt, however, did have the patience to go beyond the puffery to offer an incisive critique of Bush's "Delusion Points". He begins with an essential case for not giving in to historical revision/forgetting:

Two years into Barack Obama's presidency, it has become a cliché to observe that the newish president, who spent his 2008 campaign promising a U-turn from his deeply unpopular predecessor's activities abroad, has ended up with a foreign policy that looks surprising like George W. Bush's. The United States has more troops in Afghanistan than it did at the end of the Bush years, Guantánamo is still open, efforts to engage Iran have failed, and while American soldiers may have begun pulling back from Iraq, they've left plenty of Western defense contractors in their wake.

In anticipation of tomorrow's release of Bush's memoir, Decision Points, this line of thinking is reinforcing one of the Beltway press corps' favorite rituals: the "was he really that bad?" nostalgia for a president that the same reporters and analysts were happily pummeling only two years ago.

Don't believe a word of it. George W. Bush's presidency really wasthat bad -- and the fact that Obama has largely followed the same course is less a measure of Bush's wisdom than a reminder of the depth of the hole he dug his country into, as well as the institutionalized groupthink that dominates the U.S. foreign-policy establishment.

Mirroring the Bush/ghostwriter approach of 14 chapters claiming a key decision that Bush made in his adult life, Walt puts forth his own list of 14 foreign policy decisions distinguishing the Bush years as President. The Iraq War, the ignorance of Al Qa'eda before 9/11 and then the elevation of Osama bin Laden "to the status of a warrior heroically defying the world's sole superpower", the dismissal of international agreements on law, justice, and the environment, failures in the Middle East and with Iran, and Hurricane Katrina --- "observers around the world saw this debacle as both a demonstration of waning U.S. competence and a revealing indicator of continued racial inequality, if not outright injustice" --- are all here.

However, in light of Bush's decision --- with Oprah, with Fox News' Sean Hannity, with radio host Rush Limbaugh, with NBC television --- to highlight his Torture Is Right approach, here is Walt's Decision 6:

Within days of the 9/11 attacks, the Bush administration began preparing to authorize a set of practices -- meticulously documented in Jane Mayer's excellent The Dark Side -- that are normally associated with brutal military dictatorships. These measures included the systematic use of torture, the suspension of habeas corpus, secret renditions of suspected terrorists, targeted assassinations, and indefinite detention without trial at Guantánamo and other overseas facilities. These practices were endorsed and approved by John Yoo, a mid-level official in the Bush Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, and Bush admits in his memoir that he personally approved the waterboarding of captured terrorist suspects. The sordid debacle at Abu Ghraib prison was hardly an isolated incident conducted by poorly supervised subordinates; it was in fact entirely consistent with Bush's post-9/11 approach to human rights and civil liberties. And as Obama's inability to shut down Guatánamo suggests, it may take decades to dismantle these practices and restore America's tarnished international image.