But that's nothing next to the mess Barney's master left for the world - and the world has to pick up his mess while he keeps spreading his sadistic bravado in media headlines without any fear of accountability - Ghulam Muhammed
http://www.guardian.co.uk/
This bid to rehabilitate Bush must be defeated: he left a trail of destruction
The former president's memoir may seem to be all about the past, but it is most emphatically about America's present-
- Jonathan Freedland
- guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 9 November 2010 21.00 GMT
- Article history
For Tony Blair it was sex with Cherie. For George W Bush, it's a turd from his pet dog Barney. In this season of memoirs the two leaders who so dominated the first decade of the century have been engaged in similar efforts to secure absolution by autobiography, to seek our understanding, even our forgiveness, by telling within two months of each other their story, their way.
Central to this effort is the personal revelation, the choice anecdote that might humanise the man behind the demonised politician. Blair allowed readers a peek inside the marital bedroom, bagging a Bad Sex Award nomination for his recollection of the night he steeled himself by devouring "that love Cherie gave me, selfishly ... I was an animal following my instinct". Bush offers earthiness of a rather different kind, letting us accompany him as he walks the dog in Dallas shortly after he's left the White House: "Barney spotted our neighbor's lawn, where he promptly took care of his business. There I was, the former president of the United States, with a plastic bag on my hand, picking up that which I had been dodging for the past eight years."
To be fair, Bush doesn't rest his entire bid for rehabilitation on animal faeces. His new book, Decision Points, deploys several methods. There is contrition, limited and always qualified; blame-shifting and finger-pointing, most notably over his government's inertia in the face of Hurricane Katrina, standing idle as New Orleans drowned; and pleas for mitigation, typified by his suggestion that Guantánamo wasn't that bad – after all, prisoners had personal copies of the Qur'an and access to a library that included "an Arabic translation of Harry Potter". Above all is the Blair-style insistence that, while some of the practicalities might have gone awry, his principles were sound and just.
So while Bush admits that the absence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq gives him a "sickening feeling", and while he recalls the handwritten letters he sent to the families of the 4,229 Americans who died on his watch in Iraq – presented as evidence that, even though he describes himself as a "comfortable dude", he has a conscience – he cannot apologise for the invasion itself. That cause is "eternally right".
The Bush that Bush wants to present is a decent man, personally courteous, honest enough to admit his flaws – including his boorishness back when he was a heavy drinker, once asking an elegant female friend of his parents, "So what's sex like after 50?" – and who did what he thought was right. For Bush, as for Blair, whether the actions of a leader were actually right or wrong is always secondary to the purity of his convictions. That he thought he was right is enough.
Will this work? There are plenty who hope it will, not confined to former Bush lieutenants tweeting up the book's charms the instant it was released. They are backed by media friends, typified in Britain by the Murdoch-owned Times, which rolled out the serialisation red carpet. Among the not-quite-Paxman questions hurled the author's way: "I ask Mr Bush whether he thinks he will be the last of the US presidents to stand taller than all other world leaders." A warm editorial declared that Bush had got the great question of the age – how America responds to its enemies – "emphatically right" and that "posterity may be kinder to Mr Bush" than his critics today.
There's more to such sentiment than Bush's own desire to see his reputation pulled out of the trash can in which it was dumped in January 2009, when he left office with the lowest presidential approval ratings on record. Nor is this a battle for history, whose verdict will be a long time coming: as Bush has joked, "I'm gonna be dead when they finally figure it out." This, like every discussion of the political past, is most emphatically about the present.
Until now the American right has dealt with Bush the way Stalin dealt with Trotsky – via the airbrush. Most Republicans have tried to vanish him from the record, avoiding the merest mention of his name. But that's not sustainable for ever.
Eventually, if the Republicans are to return to the White House, they will need an account of the last Republican presidency – ideally one that does not have Americans cowering behind the sofa, terrified to look. If they can pretty up Bush's image just a bit, make the Bush era seem less like a nightmare to which the US must never return, that can only help.
There is a more immediate need, too. So long as "Bush" is a byword for failure, Barack Obama can pass at least some of the blame for the US's current woes to his predecessor. But if Bush wasn't that bad then maybe it's Obama's fault that the country is economically sluggish, dragged down by one ongoing war and the lethal legacy of another. If Republicans are to take down Obama in 2012 – "the single most important thing we want to achieve", according to the party's leader in the Senate, then the rehabilitation of Bush is a necessary step on the way.
In this, US and British Conservatives find themselves with opposite needs. In Britain, the Tories need to cast the previous administration as a pantomime villain, a wild spender who drove the economy off a cliff: that way, they can justify their current actions as "cleaning up the mess". Their American brethren need to pull in a different direction, claiming – in defiance of the facts – that the economy was doing swell until Obama came along and wrecked it.
What this adds up to is a challenge for those on the centre-left in both countries and beyond. They cannot, as Tariq Ali has done, perpetuate the fiction that Obama is as bad as Bush – all that does is make Bush look good. Nor can they see the battle of the memoirs as a mere scramble by famous men to safeguard their reputations. Much more is at stake than that: for the political choices of the future will depend on the prevailing view of the immediate past.
So, with a loud voice, they have to stop this incipient attempt to rehabilitate Bush in its tracks. They need to remind the public of a record whose litany of failures is so inarguable, much of it can be evoked by names alone: Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantánamo, Katrina, Abu Ghraib, Lehman Brothers. They have to recall a world view that still condones torture – not "coercive interrogation" as the Times euphemised it – a "kick their ass" approach that never understood that by its actions it strengthened, not weakened, America's and liberty's most extreme enemies.
They need to recall an administration that cherry-picked intelligence, that misled a nation to war on false pretences, that ignored expert advice that it didn't want to hear, that invaded a country with barely a modicum of planning, then declared Mission Accomplished.
They need to remind the world of an economic policy that gave billions to the very richest in tax cuts and turned a healthy surplus into a ballooning deficit, that allowed a deregulated Wall Street to run riot and to crash the global economy.
So yes, it's charming to read about Barney out for his morning stroll, leaving a mess on the neighbour's lawn. But that's as nothing next to the mess his master left for the world – and we should let no one forget it.
Central to this effort is the personal revelation, the choice anecdote that might humanise the man behind the demonised politician. Blair allowed readers a peek inside the marital bedroom, bagging a Bad Sex Award nomination for his recollection of the night he steeled himself by devouring "that love Cherie gave me, selfishly ... I was an animal following my instinct". Bush offers earthiness of a rather different kind, letting us accompany him as he walks the dog in Dallas shortly after he's left the White House: "Barney spotted our neighbor's lawn, where he promptly took care of his business. There I was, the former president of the United States, with a plastic bag on my hand, picking up that which I had been dodging for the past eight years."
To be fair, Bush doesn't rest his entire bid for rehabilitation on animal faeces. His new book, Decision Points, deploys several methods. There is contrition, limited and always qualified; blame-shifting and finger-pointing, most notably over his government's inertia in the face of Hurricane Katrina, standing idle as New Orleans drowned; and pleas for mitigation, typified by his suggestion that Guantánamo wasn't that bad – after all, prisoners had personal copies of the Qur'an and access to a library that included "an Arabic translation of Harry Potter". Above all is the Blair-style insistence that, while some of the practicalities might have gone awry, his principles were sound and just.
So while Bush admits that the absence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq gives him a "sickening feeling", and while he recalls the handwritten letters he sent to the families of the 4,229 Americans who died on his watch in Iraq – presented as evidence that, even though he describes himself as a "comfortable dude", he has a conscience – he cannot apologise for the invasion itself. That cause is "eternally right".
The Bush that Bush wants to present is a decent man, personally courteous, honest enough to admit his flaws – including his boorishness back when he was a heavy drinker, once asking an elegant female friend of his parents, "So what's sex like after 50?" – and who did what he thought was right. For Bush, as for Blair, whether the actions of a leader were actually right or wrong is always secondary to the purity of his convictions. That he thought he was right is enough.
Will this work? There are plenty who hope it will, not confined to former Bush lieutenants tweeting up the book's charms the instant it was released. They are backed by media friends, typified in Britain by the Murdoch-owned Times, which rolled out the serialisation red carpet. Among the not-quite-Paxman questions hurled the author's way: "I ask Mr Bush whether he thinks he will be the last of the US presidents to stand taller than all other world leaders." A warm editorial declared that Bush had got the great question of the age – how America responds to its enemies – "emphatically right" and that "posterity may be kinder to Mr Bush" than his critics today.
There's more to such sentiment than Bush's own desire to see his reputation pulled out of the trash can in which it was dumped in January 2009, when he left office with the lowest presidential approval ratings on record. Nor is this a battle for history, whose verdict will be a long time coming: as Bush has joked, "I'm gonna be dead when they finally figure it out." This, like every discussion of the political past, is most emphatically about the present.
Until now the American right has dealt with Bush the way Stalin dealt with Trotsky – via the airbrush. Most Republicans have tried to vanish him from the record, avoiding the merest mention of his name. But that's not sustainable for ever.
Eventually, if the Republicans are to return to the White House, they will need an account of the last Republican presidency – ideally one that does not have Americans cowering behind the sofa, terrified to look. If they can pretty up Bush's image just a bit, make the Bush era seem less like a nightmare to which the US must never return, that can only help.
There is a more immediate need, too. So long as "Bush" is a byword for failure, Barack Obama can pass at least some of the blame for the US's current woes to his predecessor. But if Bush wasn't that bad then maybe it's Obama's fault that the country is economically sluggish, dragged down by one ongoing war and the lethal legacy of another. If Republicans are to take down Obama in 2012 – "the single most important thing we want to achieve", according to the party's leader in the Senate, then the rehabilitation of Bush is a necessary step on the way.
In this, US and British Conservatives find themselves with opposite needs. In Britain, the Tories need to cast the previous administration as a pantomime villain, a wild spender who drove the economy off a cliff: that way, they can justify their current actions as "cleaning up the mess". Their American brethren need to pull in a different direction, claiming – in defiance of the facts – that the economy was doing swell until Obama came along and wrecked it.
What this adds up to is a challenge for those on the centre-left in both countries and beyond. They cannot, as Tariq Ali has done, perpetuate the fiction that Obama is as bad as Bush – all that does is make Bush look good. Nor can they see the battle of the memoirs as a mere scramble by famous men to safeguard their reputations. Much more is at stake than that: for the political choices of the future will depend on the prevailing view of the immediate past.
So, with a loud voice, they have to stop this incipient attempt to rehabilitate Bush in its tracks. They need to remind the public of a record whose litany of failures is so inarguable, much of it can be evoked by names alone: Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantánamo, Katrina, Abu Ghraib, Lehman Brothers. They have to recall a world view that still condones torture – not "coercive interrogation" as the Times euphemised it – a "kick their ass" approach that never understood that by its actions it strengthened, not weakened, America's and liberty's most extreme enemies.
They need to recall an administration that cherry-picked intelligence, that misled a nation to war on false pretences, that ignored expert advice that it didn't want to hear, that invaded a country with barely a modicum of planning, then declared Mission Accomplished.
They need to remind the world of an economic policy that gave billions to the very richest in tax cuts and turned a healthy surplus into a ballooning deficit, that allowed a deregulated Wall Street to run riot and to crash the global economy.
So yes, it's charming to read about Barney out for his morning stroll, leaving a mess on the neighbour's lawn. But that's as nothing next to the mess his master left for the world – and we should let no one forget it.
