Day after day, drip after drip, MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough wages a low-key but relentless campaign to make us believe that the presidency of George W. Bush wasn’t all that bad. One morning this past week, Scarborough advanced the idea that the Bush presidency could be divided into three sections: the part after 9/11, for which Scarborough says everyone generally give Bush good grades; a second part, from 2003 to 2006, which Scarborough describes, accurately, as a “disaster”; and the final section, highlighted by the success General Petreaus has had with the surge, which has been redemptive. To paraphrase Scarborogh, Bush always wanted to win in Iraq, and he finally found a general who produced.
First, I don’t know if Bush deserves such high grades. I don’t know if 9/11 could have been prevented, but clearly Bush and Cheney and Rice and Rumsfeld ignored Richard Clarke and George Tenent when warmed about the threat from al-quada. Some blame is attached to that. Second, Bush did well after 9/11, but for the most part, he did nothing that almost anyone else wouldn’t have done. Retaliating against the Taliban was an automatic response. What Bush did uniquely was come up with a doctrine of pre-emption and invade Iraq.
Bush, it’s true, did want to win in Iraq. He is the one who pushed his reluctant advisors to go with the surge, which has led to what is, at present, a promising outcome. (Looking on the bright side, Charles Krauthammer writes in the Washington Post: “[T]he ratification of military and strategic cooperation agreements between Iraq and the United States . . . .changes the strategic balance in the region.For the United States, this represents the single most important geopolitical advance in the region since Henry Kissinger turned Egypt from a Soviet client into an American ally. If we don’t blow it with too hasty a withdrawal from Iraq, we will have turned a chronically destabilizing enemy state at the epicenter of the Arab Middle East into an ally.”)
But if winning was Bush’s policy all along, why did he let Rumsfeld undermine the goal of victory by pursuing strategies that advanced his goal of a small, light army? For whatever reason–temperament, personality, lack of confidence, ignorance, inability to lead, Bush allowed Rumsfeld to arrogate all policy functions for the war and diplomacy in Iraq, and then fail, utterly fail, to achieve the goal that Bush had stated was the country’s single most important mission.
Bush was not a Lincoln, looking for a general who would execute his policy. Bush gave responsibility to a subordinate, and cheered on the sidelines as the subordinate ignored his instructions. In the meantime, tens of thousands of people died. If Scarborough and Krauthammer and the other conservatives want to cheer the positive developments in Iraq, then so be it. But to give Bush credit for it? Sorry–as we used to say in high school, that shit won’t flush.