George W. Bush without Irony-His Legacy as President

Without Irony: The Caveat being that the one requirement in writing this Affirmative Statement-George W. Bush's Greatest Legacy as President- is from the perspective of the left-leaning moderate. The rebuttal comes from a right- leaning moderate.

Bush’s War:  In the PBS Frontline piece, we discovered that the lead-up to the war was carefully orchestrated by members of the Bush administration, akin to the role out of a new marketing strategy. They wanted to “sell” the American public on the idea of going to war. On the ground, the buzz on the streets was simply that Bush Jr. wanted to “finish the job” that his father had started, by going into Baghdad and taking down a despot.

 

Saddam Hussein was a thorn in the side of the Bush legacy, and W wanted to repair the damage. Indeed, the general consensus seemed to be that the powder keg that was the Middle East would become much less volatile if only Hussein could be driven out of power.

  

Even so, accepting the premise, as writer Tom Friedman and many others did that Saddam Hussein was a bad player and had to go, the aftermath of the invasion was badly botched. Insider jobs replaced those ordinarily given to competent lifetime appointees in the State Dept and other places, and the Baathists who ran the everyday operations were fired from Iraqi government posts and replaced with incompetent and inexperienced personnel.

 

The secret operations in the West Wing of the White House, carried out by Scooter Libby in the name of Dick Cheney, were given credence after the actions on 9/11.As a consequence of the lack of oversight, money fell off trucks, and left unaccounted, billions of dollars were apparently lost to graft and corruption. Incompetent political appointees were in charge of key posts. The surge, led by General David Petraeus, DID restore order from chaos, and served as a last ditch effort on Bush’s part. He then turned to Condoleezza Rice, by now his Secretary of State, to institute and administer less radical policies during the last two years of his administration.

  

The argument FOR invasion was to create freedom & democracies, to sow the seeds for other nations. "We will be greeted as liberators," was predicted by Cheney. "Freedom is messy", said Donald Rumsfeld. Paul Wolfowitz declared, "We will not have to pay for this war, the Iraqi people will pay with oil revenues..."

 

Bush, to his credit, did tout a road map for Middle East Peace. The problem was implementation became impossible with further settlements being built in the West Bank and a lack of participation from the Palestinians and their Hamas-led government.

 

Meanwhile, on the domestic front, we have come to realize the importance of fiscal sanity due in large part to the excesses of the Bush administration. [There were few spending restraints, if not overt acknowledgement of wrong- doing or short sighted, near-term thinking that led much of our economic downturn by both Congress and the Bush Administration]. To be fair, even among the best and brightest such as Alan Greenspan, an acknowledged fiscal "guru", it was conceded that the collapse of the housing market was so great that even Greenspan could not have predicted the enormity. Having acknowledged this, the two wars were not paid for, but instead were part of a “supplemental budget”, therefore they were not acknowledged as part of the general budget. There were several tax cuts given to all Americans without adequate funding to balance the spending on the wars, plus a large chunk of money was allocated to an expensive program for Senior Citizens to have access to prescription drugs. Republicans passed these measures, and in large part, many are the same ones now railing against the present Democratic administration for not having fiscal restraint.

 

We have been living in the wake of the Bush years and historians are now working to assess his legacy. His achievements in Africa stand as a shining example of U.S. largesse and freedom and democracy working in tandem to achieve great things. Thus, for at least the short term, it has been acknowledged that George W Bush’s contributions to the advancement of AIDS relief in Africa and the promotion of freedom on the continent of Africa may well become his greatest legacy as President.

 

In short, in assessing his legacy, we will not know the outcome in Iraq and other places for many years. The invasion and subsequent topple of Hussein read like a textbook of military precision. However, the aftermath of the war was the downfall of much of his credibility in terms of planning and execution.

 

Katrina also proved to be a blight on the legacy of GW Bush. Some of the things that went wrong spoke volumes for the administration. There was lack of planning and detail in the long term picture, and overconfidence in some appointees that did not have the experience and knowledge to handle the task. (“Heckuva job Brownie” comes to mind).

 

Bush was hardly a factor in the next two presidential cycles, with Ronald Reagan more often than not being cited as the role model and standard bearer for the future of the GOP.

 

Thus, in assessing the entire scope of the Bush presidency, the people of Africa seem to hold him in higher regard than do those in his own country. For the near term, Bush’s contributions to Africa remain the high point of his Presidency.