Thursday, March 27, 2008
The Star: Is Bush the worst U.S. president ever?
Historians will argue over whether George W. Bush is the worst president the United States has ever endured. But that is not the point. Five years after Bush's ill-starred invasion of Iraq, three years after Hurricane Katrina and seven months into the unravelling of the U.S. financial system, the point is that the 43rd president of the United States – regardless of his ranking in the pantheon – is a unique and unmitigated disaster.
Whether Bush is more of a warmonger than James Polk, who in 1846 manufactured a crisis with Mexico in order to seize what is now California, more tolerant of cronyism than poker-playing Warren Harding (1921 to 1923), or more unlucky than William Harrison (he died after catching cold at his 1841 inauguration) is interesting but irrelevant. What we do know is that this president, this "decider" (to use his favoured term), decided his way into a war that has destroyed the nation he was allegedly trying to free, destabilized further an already rickety Middle East and given Islamic terrorism a whole new raison d'etre.
Bush is not the first U.S. president to take a cavalier attitude to civil liberties. Abraham Lincoln did so during the Civil War, while modern presidents reaching back to at least John Kennedy and Dwight Eisenhower have sanctioned the use of illegal assassination.
During the 1960s, when Bush was still a hard-drinking frat boy, American experts operating under presidential authority were teaching enhanced torture techniques to their Latin American counterparts. Bush didn't initiate the practice of extraordinary rendition – sending suspects abroad to be tortured. That honour goes to Bill Clinton.
In short, the road to Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay was open well before Bush took office in January 2001. But the current president has soared to new heights. His predecessors at least had the grace to be embarrassed about dabbling on the dark side. By contrast, Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney positively gloat about their attempts to subvert human rights.
True, most of the bad press against Bush stems less from his actions themselves than from the fact that they have failed. Had Lincoln lost the Civil War, history might well have treated him as a bum. Had the U.S. succeeded in Iraq and Afghanistan, Bush might be considered one of America's great presidents.
But Bush did not succeed there, or indeed in most of his efforts. With a few notable exceptions, such as stacking the Supreme Court with conservative justices, his record is one of failure. His attempt to beef up the government-subsidized health-care system for seniors has bogged down in confusion. His thrusts at social security reform were stillborn.
An alleged fiscal conservative, he drove the U.S. treasury into deficit to pay for his wars and tax cuts.
Part of the reason is ideology. Bush did little when Hurricane Katrina destroyed New Orleans, in large part because he does not think governments should involve themselves in matters of social welfare. His efforts in the current financial crisis are equally half-hearted and for much the same reason.
But there is something else, something disturbingly feckless about Bush. This has nothing to do with his malapropisms ("The only way we can win is to leave before the job is done"), his insistence on snuggling into bed early every night or his alarming propensity for bicycle accidents.
At a very basic level, Bush is incompetent. He likes to play at commander-in-chief of the U.S. armed forces. But in any other country a commander-in-chief who orchestrated an adventure as disastrous as the Iraq war would be court-martialled.
He clearly has a native cunning that stands him well in the game of politics. But at a deeper level, there seems to be something missing – a neural disconnect in his brain that at crucial moments causes him to be divorced from the constraints of rational thought. How else to explain the abrupt turnarounds such as his 2003 decision to disband the entire Iraqi army (a decision that fuelled the subsequent insurgency) just a few weeks after agreeing that these forces should be kept intact?
In some public events, he seems fully at ease. But in others – particularly his infrequent, televised press conferences – he seems to be observing events from another dimension.
Among U.S. historians, it has become great sport to rank the country's presidents. Bush vies with many for the title of absolute worst – from Ulysses S. Grant, who oversaw a post-Civil War era so corrupt it was known as Grant's Barbecue, to Richard Nixon of Watergate fame, to Herbert Hoover, the hapless president in charge during the stock market crash of 1929.
But Grant, Hoover and even Nixon did not do as much damage worldwide. Americans may still be debating Bush's legacy. I suspect the rest of the world has made up its mind.
Thomas Walkom's column appears Thursday and Saturday.
