The Misleading Bush Legacy: Nicholas Kitchen on Libertas

Before Enduring America was launched, our academic partner Libertas had a running set of commentaries on the attempt by Bush Administration officials and some supportive academics to enshrine a "Bush legacy" which a President Obama would follow.

As the Obama Administration settles in, a lot of that literature has already made its way to the filing drawer of history. Still, the rationalisation lingers: just last week The Wall Street Journal was crowing that Obama's decision to revive military commissions at Guantanamo Bay showed he was following Dubya's grand footsteps.

It's opportune, therefore, that Libertas returns with an analysis by Nicholas Kitchen of the London School of Economics on "Historical Revisionism and George Bush":

President Obama is attempting to return the United States to an internationalist position that is coherent with American diplomatic traditions. The fact that he has to move so far, and convince so many people that the United States is indeed prepared to return to the table, shows that the initial assessment of Bush Administration was correct - an outlier in the American diplomatic tradition. The revisionists have it wrong.

Read rest of analysis....

The Uncomfortable Heaviness of Responsibility: The Obama National Security Speech

Charles Gannon, a regular Enduring America and Libertas contributor, offers this evaluation --- complementing and challenging "the gut reaction" of Scott Lucas last Friday --- of President Obama's sweeping speech on national security and civil liberties at the National Archives:

Although it was not the most game-changing statement, President Barack Obama's May 21 speech at the National Archives may be one of the most defining of his Administration. It grapples frankly with topics that are largely held to be "third rails" for Presidents --- national secrecy, special powers, and interrogation --- as well as problematic inheritances from prior administrations.

For purely personal and self-serving reasons, I found this paragraph the most striking of a difficult but honest and outstanding speech:

We see that, above all, in how the recent debate has been obscured by two opposite and absolutist ends. On one side of the spectrum, there are those who make little allowance for the unique challenges posed by terrorism, and who would almost never put national security over transparency. On the other end of the spectrum, there are those who embrace a view that can be summarized in two words: "anything goes." Their arguments suggest that the ends of fighting terrorism can be used to justify any means, and that the President should have blanket authority to do whatever he wants - provided that it is a President with whom they agree.

Both sides may be sincere in their views, but neither side is right. The American people are not absolutist, and they don't elect us to impose a rigid ideology on our problems. They know that we need not sacrifice our security for our values, nor sacrifice our values for our security, so long as we approach difficult questions with honesty, and care, and a dose of common sense."

The dangers of radicalism, indeed. And a textbook example of why I contributed a series of essays, "Addressing the Dangers of Extremism", to Enduring America's predecessor and partner website, Libertas, more than a year ago (http://www.libertas.bham.ac.uk/analysis/index.htm)

The argument of that essay series, and this speech, are the same: there will be no easy answers. A "mess" such as the one left by an eight-year neocon cabal, still scrambling to live another day with front-men as dubious as Rush Limbaugh and Dick Cheney, does not clean up easily, as Obama sagely avers. And his address of the thorny issues of national security goes beyond mere functional honesty: indeed, there is more than simple ideological even-handedness at work here.

Consider either of the extreme reactions to disclosure and due prcess that Obama accurately outlines. Stand back and "game out" the employment of either extreme --- "full disclosure" vs "ends justify any means". What do you see at the end of either extreme? Success? Closure? Justice? Then you are envisioning a very different simulation-enterprise than I am. Any radical approach will surely summon its equal and opposite force into existence. This is the equilibristic property intrinsic to the gyroscopic reckoning of pluralistic political culture.

In addition to appropriating and propagating an extremified view of the situation (which will alienate and counter-activate the center of the opinion bell-curve), the optiions at either end of the spectrum would send a signal that transcends the issues being addressed.

To examine any one issue as a wholly discrete political or juridical incident is a trait of ingenuousness that can only be bred and sustained in those rarified, hyper-idealizing environments nurtured in academies, think-tanks, and coffee-house/sports-bar convocations of True Believers. I propose this very different view: in the world of political realities, Everything Influences Everything Else--and I do not mean this in some nebulous, Butterfly-effect sense. Any monofocal, sweeping gesture by Obama has the power to topple numerous delicately-balanced matrices of imminent reform like just so many cascading dominoes.

The feel-good mantra of "fiat justitia, ruat caelum" (loosely, "let justice be done, though the heavens fall") is an ideological indulgence that sideliners can enjoy because they are not the ones holding the reins of responsibility. In stark contrast, I don't think the actions of any President, but particularly this one, can be adequately analyzed without bearing in mind that he DOES hold those heavy reins, and they compel a more inclusive and balanced view of one's actions --- and the dire cause-effect chains they can set in motion.