George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. (photo: Jason Reed/Reuters)
On the Rehabilitation of George W. Bush, Say It Again: The Enemy of Our
Enemy Is Still a War Criminal
By Rebecca Gordon, TomDispatch
23 November 17
Who even remembers that, back in September 2002, Lawrence Lindsey, then
President George W. Bushs chief economic adviser, offered an upper limit
estimate on the cost of a future war in Iraq at $100 billion to $200
billion? He also suggested that the successful prosecution of such a war
would be good for the economy. That December, Mitch Daniels, director of
the Office of Management and Budget, contradicted Lindsey, indicating that
the real costs of such a war might be only $50 billion to $60 billion. And
the top officials of the Bush administration werent particularly worried
about paying for the occupation that was slated to follow since, as Deputy
Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz put it in May 2003 after Baghdad had
been taken by the U.S. military, Iraq was floating on a sea of oil.
Of course, by that pre-invasion September, President Bush and his top
officials had already decided to invade, take out Saddam Hussein, and turn
Iraq into a bastion of American power in the oil heartlands of the Middle
East. It was just a matter of how and when to make the case to the American
people. (As White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card put it that month,
'From a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in
August.)
That was a decade and a half ago. Just recently, the Costs of War project
at Brown Universitys Watson Institute offered a new estimate of what
Americas wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Pakistan will cost the
country through fiscal year 2018 and its a figure -- $5.6 trillion -- that
should make your head spin. It certainly leaves Lindseys and Danielss
estimates in a ditch somewhere on the road to Baghdad. Put another way,
were talking at a bare minimum about a cost per American taxpayer since
September 12, 2001, of more than $23,000. Good for the economy? Hmmm. And
the Costs of War report's estimate doesnt even include interest on the
borrowing thats taken place to pay for those wars, which, it suggests, is
projected to add more than $1 trillion dollars to the national debt by
2023.
Worse yet, these days Americas 16-year-old set of wars only seems to be
expanding and is now regularly referred to in the Pentagon and elsewhere as
a generational struggle. Translation: were still going to be at it in
2027, maybe even in 2037, or 2047, pouring down the black hole of war
trillions more in taxpayer dollars that might have gone into the American
economy and our crumbling infrastructure.
Isnt this, then, an appropriate moment to offer a small tip of the cap to
George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and the rest of the crew for
imagining a world in which such invasions and occupations would lead to the
American domination of this planet until the end of time? Its in this
context that TomDispatch regular Rebecca Gordon, author of American
Nuremberg: The U.S. Officials Who Should Stand Trial for Post-9/11 War
Crimes, considers the favor Donald Trump has done Bush and the rest of his
former administration. Hes made them look good at a moment when they
should look truly terrible. Ah, Donald, how thoroughly big league of you!
-Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch
On the Rehabilitation of George W. Bush
Say It Again: The Enemy of Our Enemy Is Still a War Criminal
He received a prestigious award from the West Point Association of
Graduates. He published a runaway bestselling autobiography. Last
February, a lavishly produced book celebrating his paintings of Americans
who served in the military was, as Time put it, burning up the Amazon
charts.
Still, the liberal media wasnt ready to embrace George W. Bush -- not at
least until he made some oblique criticisms of the current tenant of his old
position, suggesting that, in the present political climate, bigotry seems
emboldened. Seems? Have you been to Charlottesville lately, Mr. Bush?
The former president was less tentative on the main subject of his address
to a conference on democracy hed organized in New York City: the
importance of free trade and the need for a large American footprint in the
world. We see a fading confidence in the value of free markets and
international trade, he said, forgetting that conflict, instability, and
poverty follow in the wake of protectionism. More on that speech later.
Not the First Rehab Job
George W. Bush is hardly the first disgraced Republican president and war
criminal to worm his way back into American esteem. Richard Nixon remains
the leader in that department. He spent his later years being celebrated as
an elder statesman and a master of realpolitik in international relations.
In the process, he managed to shake off the dust of Watergate.
In those years, few even remembered that his was the first administration in
which both the president and vice president resigned. In 1973, that
disgraced vice president, Spiro Agnew, pled guilty to a felony count of tax
evasion, but not before hed bequeathed the English language a few of its
most mellifluous sobriquets, among them the nattering nabobs of negativism
and the effete corps of impudent snobs (aimed at those who opposed the
Vietnam War).
Nixons rehabilitation not only reduced the Watergate scandal in American
memory, but also essentially obliterated his greater crimes, among which
were these:
* while still a presidential candidate in 1968, he opened a secret back
channel to the South Vietnamese government to keep it out of peace talks
with the North that might have benefited his Democratic opponent;
* in the war itself, he oversaw the expansion of the CIAs Phoenix Program
of torture and assassination in which, as historian Alfred McCoy has
described it, the formalities of prosecution of suspected Viet Cong were
replaced with pump and dump -- pumping suspects of information by torture
and then dumping the bodies, more than 20,000 of them between 1968 and
1971;
* he also oversaw an expansive, illegal, and undeclared war in Cambodia
(which, when it was about to come to light, he described as a brief
incursion into that country);
* he oversaw the saturation or carpet bombing of the North Vietnamese
capital, Hanoi, and that countrys major port, Haiphong;
* and he presided over the first 9/11, the 1973 military coup that
murdered Chiles elected president, Salvador Allende, ushering in years of
terror and torture under General Augusto Pinochet.
And dont think that Richard Nixon is the only other example of such a
post-presidential rehabilitation. Ronald Reagan is now remembered by friend
and foe alike as a kind, folksy president and a wily strategist who ended
the Cold War by forcing a cash-strapped Soviet Union to keep up with U.S.
defense spending and then negotiated directly with Russian leader Mikhail
Gorbachev. When he died in June 2004, the New York Times was typical in the
largely fawning obituary it ran, describing him as the man who restored
popular faith in the presidency and the American government.
That obituary did at least mention the Iran-Contra conspiracy in which
President Reagan approved the (illegal) sale of arms to Iran to fund his
(illegal) support of the Nicaraguan Contras, the murderous rebel force that
sought to overthrow that countrys leftist Sandinista government. The
deception and disdain for the law, commented the obituary, invited
comparisons to Watergate, undermined Mr. Reagan's credibility, and severely
weakened his powers of persuasion with Congress. An odd set of observations
about a man being hailed for restoring faith in the presidency, but
consistent with the contradictions inherent in any lionization of Reagan.
Lest we forget, he was also the president who began his first term by
attacking unions, starting with the Professional Air Traffic Controllers
Organization, a move which so many years later still results in regular
flight delays, thanks to a 27-year low in the number of air controllers.
Reagan also inaugurated the mania for deregulation that led to the savings
and loan crisis of the 1980s and ultimately to the subprime mortgage crisis
and financial meltdown of 2007-2008. His presidency reinforced what would
become a never-ending slide in the value of real wages and his tax policies
were the starting point for what has, in our own time, become not an
inequality gap but an inequality chasm that has now left three men with the
same amount of wealth as 160 million Americans. (Not surprisingly, depending
on whos calculating it, the United States either has the worlds highest or
perhaps fourth-highest Gini score, a measurement of economic inequality.)
Nixon had to wait many years for his rehabilitation and Reagans was largely
posthumous. At a vigorous 71, however, Bush seems to be slipping
effortlessly back onto the national stage only nine years after leaving
office essentially in disgrace. He will evidently have plenty of time to
bask in historys glow before the first of those nostalgic obituaries are
written. And for that, he can thank Donald Trump.
W. Redux?
During that October 17th speech in which he criticized Trump without
mentioning his name, George W. Bush touted the Spirit of Liberty: At Home,
in the World." There, he bemoaned the degradation of political discourse by
casual cruelty, noting that bullying and prejudice in our public life
sets a national tone, provides permission for cruelty and bigotry, and
compromises the moral education of children. Like the rest of his family,
Bush does not share Trumps aversion to immigrants, so he added that this
country seems to be forgetting the dynamism that immigration has always
brought to America.
Articles in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and even the Guardian
eagerly reported Bushs implicit criticisms of the president as a hopeful
sign of resistance to Trumpism from the responsible Republican right.
Politico simply labeled the event a George W. Bush speech on Trumpism,
although much of it was about the decline of democracy in Europe and the
value of free trade.
Its certainly true that his speech included oblique critiques of the man
who repeatedly insulted his brother Jeb as a very low-energy kind of guy
and knocked him out of the race to be the third Bush to sit in the Oval
Office, but its worth reading the whole address. Its vintage W. -- that
is, vintage W. as a war criminal. He began, for instance, by reprising the
lie that since World War II, America has encouraged and benefited from the
global advance of free markets, from the strength of democratic alliances,
and from the advance of free societies.
As Alfred McCoy demonstrates in his recent book, In the Shadows of the
American Century, that is a particularly disingenuous description of a
70-year history in which Washington supported and, in a remarkable number of
cases was directly involved in, the destruction of free societies. A list of
examples would perhaps begin with the 1953 British and U.S.-backed coup
against the democratically elected Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh
that would install the despotic Shah in power in that country. It would
certainly continue with the 1954 U.S. and United Fruit Company coup against
Jacobo Arbenz, the democratically elected president of Guatemala (an early
instance of Washingtons post-World War II encouragement of
anything-but-free-trade); the 1960 CIA-backed coup against, and the murder
of, Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba; and the 1973 military coup in
Chile. An honest history would also include the active encouragement of
societies that were anything but free, including those run by juntas,
dictators, or military governments in Greece, Brazil, Argentina, the
Philippines, Indonesia, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Honduras, Uruguay, Iraq, and
South Korea, to name just a few.
Of course, George W. Bush is hardly the first president to lie about the
post-World War II record of the United States. Nor is he the first to
suggest that American security is directly threatened by the chaos and
despair of distant places, which he attributed in his speech to the lack of
the democracy Washington put so much effort into destroying in more than 70
countries across the planet.
And dont forget that it was precisely the pretext of a direct threat to
American security that led to the most criminal lie of his career: the
insistence that Iraqi autocrat Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass
destruction and that the U.S. invasion of his country was justified by a
(legally questionable) case of preemptive self-defense. By initiating a war
of aggression, by loosing shock and awe on the capital of a nation that
had not attacked ours, President Bush committed a war crime. Indeed, it was
the first in the list of crimes for which the leaders of Nazi Germany were
indicted at Nuremberg after World War II: the ultimate crime against peace.
Few Americans have ever heard of the Kellogg-Briand Pact, but in 1928 the
United States signed it and the Senate ratified it by a vote of 85-1. The 50
signatories of that treaty renounced war as a means of settling
international disputes and, as the authors of The Internationalists: How a
Radical Plan to Outlaw War Remade the World have argued, by implication made
aggressive war a violation of international law. The U.S. Constitution
states in Article 6 that all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under
the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land.
By invading Iraq, Bush broke both international and U.S. law.
In addition to his crimes against peace, Bush and his administration were
also the authors of such traditionally recognized war crimes as torture and
the use of chemical weapons. One of the uglier aspects of the U.S.
militarys battle for the Iraqi city of Fallujah was its use of white
phosphorus, an incendiary munition. Phosphorus ignites spontaneously when
exposed to air. If bits of the chemical attach to human beings, skin and
flesh burn away. The burning continues as long as there is oxygen available,
sometimes right into the bone.
In short, isnt it a little early to begin rehabilitating the man
responsible for indefinite detention at Guantánamo, enhanced interrogation
techniques, and the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and at least
150,000 Afghans -- not to mention the trillions of U.S. dollars shoved down
the memory hole in pursuit of the futile wars that followed?
Leda and the Swan
The same year that the Kellogg-Briand Pact was signed, William Butler Yeats
published a collection of poems called The Tower. It contains what many
consider his masterpiece, the harrowing sonnet Leda and the Swan. In it,
Yeats recreates the moment in Greek myth when Zeus, the ruling god of
Olympus, having taken the form of a swan, rapes the helpless human woman
Leda, leaving her pregnant with a daughter. That daughter became Helen of
Troy, whose abduction was the casus belli for the Trojan War.
The poet begins with the victims shock and awe:
A sudden blow: the great wings beating still
Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed
By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,
He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.
In the final stanza, Yeats writes:
A shudder in the loins engenders there
The broken wall, the burning roof and tower
And Agamemnon dead.
In those brief words can be read an entire history of war and death,
recounted more fully in the 15,693 lines of the Iliad, all somehow
encapsulated in that first act of violence.
In his poem, Yeats implies that Zeus knows full well the final outcome of
his act. Similarly perhaps, the swans of Washington in 2003, which was at
that time the planet's own imperial Olympus, had more than an inkling of the
broken walls, the burning roofs and towers their invasion of Iraq might
engender. As early as 1996, future Vice President Dick Cheneys fellow hawks
Richard Perle and Douglas Feith -- who would later join the Bush
administration as adviser on the Defense Policy Board and under secretary of
defense for policy -- helped write a report for Benjamin Netanyahu, who was
then running the Israeli government for the first time. Titled A Clean
Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm, it urged the leaders of
Israels right-wing Likud party to leave behind the nations previous
geopolitical strategy by abandoning peace negotiations with the Palestinians
and using military means to actively restructure the Middle East in their
favor.
Israel, the authors argued, can shape its strategic environment, in
cooperation with Turkey and Jordan, by weakening, containing, and even
rolling back Syria. Such a campaign would begin by removing Saddam Hussein
from power in Iraq -- an important Israeli strategic objective in its own
right -- as a means of foiling Syrias regional ambitions. The ultimate
goal was a realignment of power in the region, with Syria destabilized, a
monarchy in Iraq, and a new regional alliance among Turkey, Jordan, and
Israel.
It would prove to be the geopolitical equivalent of a movie preview. In the
wake of 9/11, the same cast of characters would take a similar path in
Washington and, in the end, that rolling back operation would shake or
destroy country after country from Afghanistan and Iraq to Libya and Yemen.
Since the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Syria has certainly been destabilized in
ways almost impossible to imagine, through the rise of ISIS (born in an
American military prison) and a vicious, multi-sided civil war that, by
early 2016, had left more than a tenth of its population killed or injured.
In the process, more than 10 million people, including untold numbers of
children, were turned into internal or external refugees.
Netanyahu, in fact, would reject the clean break proposal (perhaps because
it also suggested that Israel make a clean break with its dependence on U.S.
aid), but the neocons were undeterred. In 1998, they resurrected the plan as
part of a new pressure group they formed, the Project for a New American
Century (PNAC), and presented it to Bill Clinton in a letter encouraging him
to direct a full complement of diplomatic, political, and military efforts
to remove Saddam Hussein from power.
Nor were they overly concerned about the legality of such a move, writing
that American policy cannot continue to be crippled by a misguided
insistence on unanimity in the U.N. Security Council. In other words, the
country should not be crippled by adherence to the U.N. Charter, whose
Article 51 prohibits unilateral war making without Security Council
approval, except in cases of immediate individual or collective
self-defense if an armed attack occurs against a Member of the United
Nations.
Like Netanyahu, Clinton ignored their suggestion. However, the signatories
of the letter included many figures who would become key players in the Bush
administration, among them Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense
Donald Rumsfeld, Undersecretaries of State John Bolton and Richard Armitage,
Reagan hold-over Elliott Abrams, and Zalmay Khalilzad, who among other roles
served as Bushs special envoy and ambassador at large for free Iraqis. And
it included, of course, Cheney adviser and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul
Wolfowitz, who had prepared a draft of a 1992 Defense Planning Guidance
document for President George H.W. Bush in which he argued for the
importance of U.S. readiness to take unilateral military action, whether
approved by the United Nations or not.
In other words, the top officials of the Bush administration took office
already planning to attack Iraq. It only awaited 19 mostly Saudi terrorists
hijacking four American commercial airliners on September 11, 2001. That
would be the pretext to launch what has become a generational struggle
that would eventually destroy Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Yemen (and almost as a
side dish, Afghanistan), and which now threatens to engulf the entire
Greater Middle East, North Africa, and parts of Asia, from Afghanistan to
the Philippines, in a set of never-ending wars and spreading terror
movements.
All that suffering sprang from the actions of one feckless president and his
crew. So what if -- after 16 years of fruitless war, 16 years of
disintegrating American infrastructure, 16 years of almost unprecedented
inequality -- George W. Bush does find Trumps rhetorical style distasteful?
Is that really any reason to turn a presidential war criminal into a liberal
hero?
Rebecca Gordon, a TomDispatch regular, teaches in the philosophy department
at the University of San Francisco. She is the author of American Nuremberg:
The U.S. Officials Who Should Stand Trial for Post-9/11 War Crimes. Her
previous books include Mainstreaming Torture: Ethical Approaches in the
Post-9/11 United States and Letters from Nicaragua.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest
Dispatch Book, Alfred McCoy's In the Shadows of the American Century: The
Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power, as well as John Dower's The Violent
American Century: War and Terror Since World War II, John Feffer's dystopian
novel Splinterlands, Nick Turses Next Time Theyll Come to Count the Dead,
and Tom Engelhardt's Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a
Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.
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