Apologia pro George W. Bush

Andrew Roberts summarizes the case for the defense. Power Line offers a balanced assessment. National Review recently devoted a fine special issue, and today a symposium, to evaluating Bush’s presidency. NR puts Bush in “the middle ranks” of American presidents. Power Line judges him “reasonably good.” That’s about my take, though how history remembers him will depend to a great extent on how both Iraq and the economic crisis ultimately turn out. If Iraq remains a stable and reasonably just country (Western-style liberal democracy ain’t gonna happen, but something much much better than Saddam certainly could), and if the economic crisis is resolved over the next couple of years, then Bush could ultimately find his way closer to the top ranks. If Iraq reverts to chaos and the economic crisis turns into a prolonged depression, then he might be stuck forever in the company of Herbert Hoover (though since in both cases much depends on what Obama does, we cannot predict for certain how much blame would placed by historians on Bush).

In any event, the “worst president ever” mantra is (like most criticism of Bush over the last eight years) disconnected from reality. Conservatives are right to lament Bush’s record on spending, his naïveté regarding illegal immigration, the folly of the Harriet Miers nomination, and his lack of realism vis-à-vis exporting liberal democracy to the Middle East. They are also right to be very wary of the measures he took over the last several months in dealing with the financial crisis (though I’m not myself convinced that anyone has really put forward a better solution, and he did at least try to head it off some time back over the obstructions of the likes of Barney Frank).

At the same time, they are living in a fantasy world if they believe any conservative president could have done much better on the first two issues. Sad to say, the majority of voters simply do not want smaller government, and never have. (Newt Gingrich attempted the first serious, if small, effort in this direction and the result was Bill Clinton’s reelection.) Nor will the state of the culture permit any serious attempt to deal with immigration. True, voters often say they want smaller government and enforcement of immigration laws, but the minute any conservative makes an effort in either direction, they are sure to turn on him, half-believing as they do the propaganda shoveled at them in the schools and by the media. Overall, on these issues, Bush’s record does not seem significantly worse than that of Reagan.

The Miers nomination was a failure of judgment rather than a betrayal of conservative principle, and the error was in any case corrected and amply made up for by the Roberts and Alito nominations. Though promoting liberal democracy per se in the Middle East was never realistic, removing Saddam and replacing his regime with a better one was justified, as I have argued at length elsewhere (here, here, and here). Moreover, Bush did real good in advancing the pro-life cause, cutting taxes, and destroying terrorist networks. He made a more serious effort to enact conservative reforms of Social Security than any previous president dared, and his failure here reflects the will of the electorate rather than any lack of principle on his part. And it cannot be emphasized too much that he succeeded admirably in preventing any further terrorist attacks on American soil after 9/11.

The standard leftist criticisms of the president are without merit. We are assured that President Bush “damaged America’s standing in the world.” People who say this apparently think “the world” means “Western Europe,” since Bush hardly made the U.S less popular in Muslim countries (where we have long been hated), maintained good relations with India, Pakistan, China, Japan, South Korea, most Eastern European countries and most South American countries, and is personally popular in Africa because of the enormous amounts of aid the U.S. has sent there at his direction. Even in Western Europe, Bush left America on good terms with Brown’s UK, Sarkozy’s France, Merkel’s Germany, and Berlusconi’s Italy. It is true that he was not popular with the likes of Jacques Chirac, Gerhard Schroeder, or Hugo Chavez. But no one who values the opinions of such men is worth taking seriously.

The demonization of Bush as a promoter of “torture” is especially disgraceful, resting entirely on a refusal to use language carefully or report facts honestly. Relentlessly to describe even the harshest interrogation methods used by American operatives on known terrorists (e.g. waterboarding) as if they were remotely on a moral par with the sort of thing Saddam’s regime inflicted on innocents, is outrageous in the extreme, and itself a grave injustice. Nor do the president’s critics ever bother to offer an argument to show how exactly a man like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, known to be guilty of mass murder and thus himself already meriting the death penalty (at least on any sound moral philosophy, such as classical natural law theory), suffered an injustice in being subjected to methods which, while extremely unpleasant, are simply not comparable to the Quentin Tarantino-ish clichés most people have in mind when they hear the word “torture.” Nor do they deal honestly in implying that the harshest methods were employed at all frequently (waterboarding, it seems, was used on no more than three prisoners), that the disgraceful actions at Abu Ghraib were the implementation of Bush policy (a claim rejected by a bipartisan panel), or that the administration violated the Geneva convention (which does not apply to irregular combatants like al-Qaeda fighters or to those who have already violated the laws of war, but which the administration largely applied to them anyway).

Then there are the ridiculous charges that Bush was a “racist” and stirred up animus against Muslims – the sort of slanderous charges leftists always make a priori against any Republican, whatever the actual evidence. Even Michael Kinsley, in an otherwise unfair and ungracious retrospective in Time a few weeks ago, conceded that Bush “came up with serious money to treat AIDS and malaria in Africa. He used the bully pulpit to embrace Muslims in the great post-9/11 American bear hug, when there was real danger of the opposite reaction.” Some racist.

The main reason Bush is hated by the left, everyone knows, and it is the same reason Sarah Palin is hated by them. He was hated above all for his adherence to Christian morality, and in particular his opposition to abortion and “same-sex marriage,” his insistence on describing the actions of bin Laden, Saddam, and other mass murderers as “evil,” and his open acknowledgement that he was answerable to God for how he used his office. (To be sure, this is not the make-it-up-as-you-feel-like-it liberalism-in-religious-drag pseudo-Christian “morality” of Obama, but it is the sort of morality all Christians historically, up to about 40 or 50 years ago, would have regarded as obvious.) They hated him for this from the get-go, before he had a chance to cut taxes, send troops into Iraq, or indeed even to take the oath of office. It was, you might say, a “pre-emptive” hatred, and every criticism that followed was simply a rationalization of this original, irrational, primal loathing.

And then there was the matter of payback. As Andrew Breitbart writes:

The demonization of President George W. Bush was a fait accompli before he was even inaugurated. The rage and hatred against Bush developed before his election and before his political enemies got to know him. The Democratic party facing the 2000 election was not just determined to get Democrats elected. It was also determined to rehabilitate the newly impeached Bill Clinton and to help create Hillary Clinton’s future. Part of the mandate was to send the message to Republicans that the Democrats could do to ‘their guy’ what the Republicans had done to theirs—but on a much larger scale, with the majority of the media in tow.

The former president can take comfort in the words of Jesus Christ: “If the world hate you, know ye that it hated me before you.” (John 15:18)

A “reasonably good” president, and a good man. Thank you for your service to our country, President Bush, and God bless you.