Bush’s Biggest Mistakes

During today’s press conference, Bush was asked what his biggest mistakes and regrets were with respect to Iraq. Of course, even I wouldn’t fantazise that he say “Going there in the first place” or “Lying to the United Nations” or (to be more charitable) “Not vetting our intelligence better”. I was surprised that he actually was willing to admit some errors at all since in the past he has refused to do so. This time he said he regretted saying things like “Bring it on” and “Wanted dead or alive” and he regretted what had happened at Abu Ghraib. I suppose if you were George Bush, it might be hard to come up with a short answer to the question “What are some mistakes you regret from your administration.” First off, though I don’t think the mistakes Bush mentioned even scratch the surface, but I do appreciate the fact that at least he answered the question straight up and picked some pretty serious mistakes. The things he chose to mention say something about Bush, though I’m not sure ecactly what. A few things come to mind though. First off, he sees what happened in Abu Ghraib as a mistake made by his administration. That’s not an unreasonable accusation, but it would also be reasonable for a politician to shirk responsibility for that and say that it wasn’t really an error on the part of the administration. It is also a bit different from being asked whether the administration takes responsibility for Abu Ghraib and responding in the affirmative. In this case it was picked more or less out of thin air and it does show that Bush takes responsibility for mistakes that were not directly his fault. Though it’s obvious to some of us that Abu Ghraib was indirectly Bush’s fault on so many levels, it surprised me that Bush sees it that way.

Bush did not elaborate on why he picked Abu Ghraib as one of the most regrettable mistakes, but one has to ask whether he thinks it was so bad for the US image abroad or whether he regrets the acts themselves. It was obviously bad for our image, but that could be said of almost every single thing that George Bush has done, so why pick that? I suspect that it is actually because he found what happened in Abu Ghraib personally distasteful. Bush is an ideological conservative who has no trouble putting ideology before people or good policy when considered in the abstract, but he has more trouble separating out the personal when he can attach names and faces to the people. I think Abu Ghraib forced him to confront what the US was doing in Iraq in real terms, not just an ideological screed about freeing the Iraqi people, and he saw that there was… er… room for improvement.

Meanwhile, as for his regrets about his swaggering tough talk, he weaseled out of that a bit saying that in certain parts of the world those remarks were misunderstood. I suppose by “certain parts of the world” he means Blue states? It certainly played poorly with all the bleeding heart liberals I know. Of course, in Europe it was a disaster. Somehow, though, Bush thinks those statements only played poorly in the Middle East or something. I would say that shows Bush at his dillusional best, but realistically, he is not Bill Clinton and he does not think carefully before he speaks and doesn’t ponder the meaning of “is” and “sexual relations” and believe that there is wide room for interpretation of those terms. If not speaking extemporaneously, I think at this point Bush would realize that the Europeans and the Democrats didn’t find those terms comforting either. The one positive aspect of his first choice of mistake is that it is something that in fact leaves no room for interpretation — it was Bush’s fault, not the result of a confused signal with an underling.

The other interesting aspect of his admissions is that they all concern actions that negatively impacted the perception of the US among our allies and enemies. In the 1940s, the United States saved democracy in Europe. It’s that simple. The British fought bravely and the Soveits spent more lives than anyone else, bleeding the Germans dry in a war of attrition. But American industry provided the weapons that let the British and the Soviets hang on and then we provided the troops that dealt the final blow. After the war, we drew the line in the sand that stopped the Soviets from taking all of Germany and perhaps eventually more. The Berlin airlift kept Berlin free. For a time, all Europeans understood this. My first trip to France, I was surprised how many monuments to American soldiers were erected by the French in gratitude for the American actions. Robert Kennedy Jr has talked about how, as a child touring Europe with his father and presidential uncle, you could feel the good will and gratitude directed towards Americans. As late as the 1980s, I was picked up hitch-hiking by an older French man who said he stopped because I was American, explaining that he would never forget what the Americans had done for France. American presidents, despite inadvertent blunders like Reagan going to Bitburg, American presidents since Truman have done their best to treat that political capital from the 1940s as a long-term investment to manage carefully. Not Bush. In the course of his first term, he managed to pretty much expend that. Bush effectively wiped out what remained of the savings account that we built up in World War II at the expense of hundreds of thousands of US soldiers and a hefty debt, especially when you add in what we spent keeping the Soviets out of western Europe even as European countries had the resources to offer medical care and good schools to their citizens. It is hard to imagine that we can ever recover that good will without saving Europe again, and I don’t believe that America will ever be in a position to do that again (let’s certainly hope not!).
It made me start to wonder what to nominate for Bush’s Greatest Errors. I don’t even know where to start, but other than the war in Iraq itself, the first things that come to mind are the first things he did, such as:

• Beginning his term by repealing every environmental measure passed in the last days of the Clinton administration, even though most were recommended by experts in the field after years of study.
• Obstructing any action to reverse global warming or even paying lip service to our allies who see this as important (and there are good arguments, given the “progress” Europeans have made, to believe that lip service is all anybody is paying)
• Obstructing any action to promote alternative fuels
• Illegal detention in secret prisons and Gitmo
• Possibly legal but nevertheless imprudent surveillance and wiretapping of peaceful Americans
• Fiscal policy that has added to the debt faster than any other president in history, even more so than Johnson, the bête noir of the right.
• Prescription drug benefit that we simply cannot pay for which panders to the drug companies (agreement not to bargain to lower prices through collective buying) and to the AARP and their constituency (why do wealthy older people get the government to buy their drugs?)

These items may come to haunt us for as long as the war itself, perhaps longer. They have weakened America both by putting us in an even worse financial position than we already were and by making our energy supply even less secure. They have destroyed our image abroad. They have polluted our planet and will continue to do so. Furthermore, if the money spent on the war had been spent on more promising methods of keeping oil cheap, we would be immeasurably better off. We might even be able to afford prescription drugs to those who can afford them anyway.

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