The Decisive President

George W. Bush, Decision Points (Random House, 2010). 

With Decision Points George W. Bush has once again wrong-footed his political foes. How they would love to disparage his tome as tedious and self-serving and at the very same time dismiss it as bogus, ghost-written by somebody else—perhaps Chris Michel, who is mentioned in the acknowledgments and was a Bush speechwriter. A number of ingenious critics are now suggesting that Decision Points has not been penned by George W. Bush but by someone who can imitate Bush to perfection, which is a bit like arguing William Shakespeare did not write Hamlet but another man named William Shakespeare did.

Back in mid-2001 the journalist Matthew Norman wrote an opinion piece for the Guardian claiming Bill Clinton’s IQ was 182 and George Bush’s exactly half that. Trouble was, Norman had failed to realise his source was a hoax, a point conceded by the Guardian a few days later. If only our journalist had used his—dare I say—intelligence, he would have known Clinton’s IQ is closer to 100 than 182, and that Bush’s IQ, extrapolating from his Scholastic Aptitude Test score, is 124 or 125.

Now writing for the Independent, Matthew Norman sounds as if he is still sore at being duped all those years ago, arguing as recently as October 2010 that Bush’s possession of a three-figure IQ is “a moot point”. Norman suffers from what has come to be known as BDS, Bush Derangement Syndrome. First coined by Charles Krauthammer, BDS describes the condition in which a seemingly rational being is brought undone by an unmanageable loathing of George W. Bush.

BDS has its origins, partially at least, in the unparalleled closeness of the 2000 presidential election. It was not until thirty-six days after the election that the US Supreme Court ordered the recounts in four counties in Florida to cease and Bush be declared the winner. Many Democratic partisans were unable to reconcile themselves to this turn of events, even when the Washington Post—no friend of Bush—released the results of an extensive study showing Bush would have received more votes if the recounts were completed. 

Bush had been known as a unifier in his time as Governor of Texas (1994–2000), partly because of the strong relationship he built with Bob Bullock, long-time Democratic Lieutenant Governor. Nobody, least of all Bush himself, would describe the tone of political discourse during his eight-year presidency as bipartisan. The indicators were there on Inauguration Day:

They carried big signs with foul language, hurled eggs at the motorcade, and screamed at the top of their lungs. I spent most of the ride in the presidential limo behind thick glass windows, so their shouting came across in pantomime. While I couldn’t make out their words, their middle fingers spoke loudly: The bitterness of the 2000 election was not going away anytime soon.

Although outraged that Bush had found his way into the Oval Office, his enemies could at least take solace from the fact that the man was a dunderhead. If George H.W. Bush could not get himself re-elected in 1992, then what chance did Junior have of securing a second term? Only in the aftermath of 9/11 and the launching of the War on Terror did it occur to the Democrats and the Left in general that Bush (with the assistance of his puppet masters, of course) was positioning himself to purloin yet another four years in power. At the 2002 mid-term elections the GOP picked up new seats in both the Senate and the House of Representatives—an ominous sign.

The left-leaning artists and intellectuals of the world became hysterical. If this sounds like hyperbole, consider the paranoia that permeated Gore Vidal’s 2002 “The Enemies Within” essay. The great oracle solemnly informed his readers that in the year 2000 the US Supreme Court had “replaced a popularly elected President with the oil and gas Bush–Cheney junta”. Sounding uncomfortably akin to old man Lear upon the heath, Vidal went on to remind his readers “the truth about Pearl Harbor is obscured to this day”. How much, exactly, did the Bush junta know about 9/11 in advance, and why did it deliberately choose not to act on this information?

A depressingly long list of literary luminaries followed suit. Kurt Vonnegut found himself so incensed by the War on Terror that he declared Islamist terrorists to be “very brave people” whose slaughter of civilians in the name of a higher good was “sweet and noble”. These pearls of wisdom sprang from the mouth of the very same chap who for four decades had been lecturing us on the immorality of Dresden.

If such pronouncements exhibited the high emotion of minds unravelling, Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 was a more coldly calculating attempt to affect the 2004 general election. The whole project, as Dave Kopel (a registered Democrat) explains in his “Fifty-nine Deceits in Fahrenheit 9/11” (still available on the internet), came straight out of the Joseph Goebbels propaganda primer. While sophisticated critics hailed Fahrenheit 9/11 as “stimulating” and “provocative”, ordinary folk wondered why, if George Bush was so unconscionable, did the case against him have to be built on premeditated lies? In Decision Points Bush gently brushes off Fahrenheit 9/11—surely one of the greatest character assassinations of our times—as a “so-called documentary”.

Dan Rather’s September 8, 2002, 60 Minutes story on Bush’s failure to fulfil his services to the Texas Air National Guard was also meant to be a game changer, and would have been if some alert people had not exposed Rather’s source as a forgery. Overnight the reputation of Dan Rather was in tatters; George Bush, meanwhile, went on to score a handsome victory over John Kerry. In Decision Points Bush acknowledges the ruination of Rather, long-time scourge of the Republican Party, with a majestic offhandedness. It is a little like Hamlet’s cool reaction to the news of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’s demise: “They are not near my conscience; their defeat / Does by their own insinuation grow.”

Not that you will find much in the way of Shakespearean allusion in Decision Points. (If you are looking for a political autobiography filled with authorial devices try Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father, a book that possesses all the imagery and style of Bill Ayers’s memoir, Fugitive Days.) Style-wise, the main strength of Decision Points is its clarity and simplicity, and yet the deft comedic touch throughout should not be overlooked. As long ago as 2002 Frank Bruni, in his Ambling into History, drew a portrait of Bush that characterised him as not only a compulsive reader (of history mainly), but also as witty and pithy, especially in private. Bruni, a journalist for the New York Times, might have been a liberal and no apologist for the Republicans, but his bona fides and the amount of time spent in Bush’s company counted for nothing to those afflicted with BDS.

At the other end of the political spectrum, Bush’s re-election in 2004 seemed proof that here was a modern-day incarnation of Sun Tzu. Bush’s many adversaries, from the Democratic Party to the Taliban, from Dan Rather to Saddam Hussein, had all done their level best to defeat the guy with a Texan twang, who wore boots and cleared brush as a leisure pursuit.

But Bush’s second term stands in stark contrast to the first. By 2005 al Qaeda had co-opted much of the Sunni insurgency in Iraq, particularly in Anbar Province. In early 2006 they destroyed the Golden Mosque in Samarra, the equivalent for the Shia population of St Peter’s in Rome. Civil war loomed, and with it the humiliation of George Bush and the United States. In October 2006 the British medical magazine the Lancet announced that 655,000 Iraqi civilians had been killed by US air and artillery strikes since 2002. Even hawkish commentators on the Fox News Channel began wondering out loud if Iraq might have been a terrible mistake.

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina (2005), some Americans took the opportunity to denounce their president as not only incompetent but also racist. Rapper Kanye West’s assertion on national television that “George Bush doesn’t care about black people” had a powerful impact. To be fair, the dire state of New Orleans left Kanye West in a precarious emotional state; others, like Jesse Jackson, played the race card with their usual cunning manipulation of the facts. Recalling the grotesque falsehoods of his accusers is one of the few instances in Decision Points where Bush loses his composure: “Five years later, I can barely write those words without feeling disgusted.”  

Bush’s proven commitment to black people, which included the No Child Left Behind Act, not to mention the astonishing $15 billion program to combat HIV/AIDS in Africa, counted for nothing. Had not Colin Powell been the first African-American Secretary of State? And Condoleezza Rice the second? No matter. The accusation that Bush was a racist might have been a low blow, but no less effective for that. The Democratic Party swept to power in both houses of Congress at the mid-term 2006 elections.

It was in this adverse political environment that Bush did some of his best work, not that he received any plaudits at the time. Decision Points shows how he went about “fixing” the problem of Iraq: “I knew the surge would be unpopular in the short term. But while many in Washington had given up on the prospect of victory in Iraq, I had not.” For instance, the current Vice-President, Joe Biden, then a leading Democratic Congressman, was calling for the departure of US forces and the partitioning of Iraq. Barack Obama’s suggestions during this time were even more fallacious. There is, of course, the argument that America should not have been in Iraq in the first place, or Afghanistan, and what about the Weapons of Mass Destruction, but in Decision Points Bush makes a solid argument in all cases. All the same, if the facts were on Bush’s side, no longer was the political tide.     

Even before the arrival of a heavily Democratic Congress in 2006, much of Bush’s political capital had been spent. Bush might have “laid out an ambitious second-term agenda” in early 2005 and yet few of the reforms he sought passed into law, including Social Security and immigration. In these two cases, at least, Bush’s proposals were less conservative than moderately liberal. The notion of George Bush as a (would be) progressive reformer no doubt strikes the typical BDS victim as risible; I worry about the obviously delicate emotional state of such characters when a genuinely conservative politician turns up in the White House. 

With the onset of the global financial crisis in 2008, Bush’s popularity plummeted to a new low. So out of favour was he and the conservatism he (supposedly) came to represent that a liberal maverick, the seventy-two-year-old John McCain, was selected to be the Republican presidential candidate for the 2008 general election. Sarah Palin, McCain’s running mate, gave his campaign a brief boost, but the mainstream media attacked her with a ferocity that made their treatment of Bush over the previous eight years seem benign by comparison.               

The Democratic Party and its supporters were so much in the ascendancy by 2008 that they indulged themselves by nominating a paid-up member of the New Left as their presidential candidate. Given his radical past, Obama could justifiably claim that his election would “make this time different from all the rest”. His soaring rhetoric—“We are the ones we’ve been waiting for!”—promised nothing less than a total break with the legacy of George Bush.          

Despite his folksy and self-deprecating demeanour, one thing Bush prides himself upon in Decision Points is his competency as a decision maker—thus the title of his book. So much so that at times he seems impervious to the axiom that good decisions are a necessary but not in themselves sufficient component of a modern-day presidency. Obama’s eloquence during his presidential campaign, at least while reading from the teleprompter, contrasted sharply with Bush’s variable performance as a communicator, particularly in his second term.

Conversely—and shockingly for the Left—Obama’s time as president has so far vindicated almost every major decision taken by George Bush between 2001 and 2009. For instance, in the shadow of 9/11 Bush decided that Radical Islam had declared war on the United States, and that the USA needed to answer in kind. Bush concluded that a military dimension was required as a part of America’s response to violent jihadists and their enablers. Critics decried Bush’s judgement: he was “BusHitler”. Since 2009 Obama’s program of “overseas contingency operations”—though no longer called the War on Terror—has validated George Bush’s original judgment, validated it as only a true son of the New Left can.

Today the decisions of George W. Bush are being proved correct on so many fronts that it is hard to keep up with them. Guantanamo Bay remains open, presumably because Obama and those brilliant legal advisers of his are yet to come up with a workable alternative. The concept of the Patriot Act, according to Bush, was to allow government officials to track suspected terrorists with powers commensurate to those already in existence for shadowing drug traffickers and mob bosses. Democratic Congressmen overwhelmingly supported the Patriot Act in 2001, even if in subsequent years many came to condemn it. In Decision Points Bush matter-of-factly notes that during 2010 “key provisions of the Patriot Act were authorised by the heavily Democratic Congress”. George Bush is too magnanimous to point out that President Obama duly signed this extension of the Patriot Act into law.     

Whenever Obama tries a different route from George Bush, as in affording foreign terrorists the full constitutional protection of an American citizen, he invariably comes a cropper. Bush had already thought the problem through (perhaps while clearing brush on his ranch) and decided that a military commission was the fairest option. A fairer option—at least from the perspective of the jihadist—than being obliterated by a missile from an unmanned Predator strike aircraft. After all, this procedure makes the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize winner the judge, jury and executioner of Islamist fellows who will never be in a position to appraise the accommodation offered at Guantanamo Bay.                               

A boost to Bush’s standing has come from other unlikely quarters as well. In October 2010 WikiLeaks disclosed that the number of deaths arising from the USA’s intervention in Iraq was not 655,000 but 109,032, a figure that includes 23,984 enemy combatants and 15,196 Iraqi government forces. Most civilian fatalities, needless to say, have been the result of Islamist militias rather than American air and artillery strikes. The Lancet’s cover as an apolitical entity has been blown. Most observers would accept that the “surge” that Bush ordered back in 2007—and which Senator Obama vehemently opposed—was a success. At the end of 2010 even the Washington Post conceded (albeit through gritted teeth) that a “rough version of Mr Bush’s dream may yet come true”. A booming economy, the flourishing of democracy, and a dwindling of violence throughout Iraq is too extraordinary a story to be totally ignored, notwithstanding the ongoing persecution of Christians in the non-Kurdish regions of the country.       

There is, furthermore, a growing appreciation that the global financial crisis had its origins in events that preceded George W. Bush’s incumbency. For example, BDS sufferers make much of the lack of regulatory oversight in the financial market between 2001 and 2008, and yet state-sponsored institutions such as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were given a licence to implode as far back as the 1990s by Democratic Congressmen, egged on by “community organisers” like Bill Ayers and a young Barack Obama. Bill Clinton said as much before the 2008 general election, but nobody was listening—admittedly his wife had just lost the Democratic presidential nomination to the junior Senator from Illinois. If the US government lacked fiscal restraint under Bush’s stewardship (which it often did), one year of Obama’s reckless spending was frightening enough to spawn a whole new people’s movement, the Tea Party.

The ongoing rehabilitation of George Bush sometimes takes the most unexpected turns. In November 2010, the same month the Democrats lost control of the House of Representatives, Kanye West was apologising to George Bush for his outburst at the time of Hurricane Katrina: “I didn’t have the grounds to call him a racist.” The former President responded to West’s act of contrition with a polite and dignified “I appreciate that”. Kanye West’s gesture involved genuine courage since he had nothing to gain—and a lot to lose—by offering an olive branch to a man normally demonised by his industry.                       

None of this is to suggest that Bush’s presidency was without fault. He left the problem of Iran to be solved by his successor: someone, as it turns out, who has all the goofy prejudices of an American college professor. The redeeming feature of President Obama is that he possesses the rat cunning of a Bill Clinton—pace his abrupt turnabout in December 2010 on the long-despised Bush tax cuts—and so the audacity of hope we must cling to is that Obama’s survival skills triumph over his adolescent ideology.

At the end of Decision Points, Bush notes how “commentators who once denounced President Reagan as a dunce and a warmonger talk about how the Great Communicator … won the Cold War”. Bush will never earn the accolade of Great Communicator, and the War on Terror is still to be won. On the other hand, the soundness of George W. Bush’s wide-ranging response to Western civilisation’s Day of Infamy has been confirmed not only by subsequent events, but also by the decisions of his successor. A warmonger? Only if FDR were to be included under such a moniker, and today few other than those with a tenuous grip on reality would entertain such a notion. A dunce? Inconceivable.                           

Daryl McCann reviewed the memoirs of Tony Blair in the January-February issue.