In this time of economic anxiety and cultural sloth, perhaps it is tempting to look back, even a few years, with nostalgic awe. George Bush's autobiography, "Decision Points," tries to explain that eight-year era which this blogger is convinced will be looked on by historians decades from now as especially ruinous. Indeed, it already us: Bush presided over the ruin of Iraq, the flooding of New Orleans, the collapse of our economy, and the echo of that failure across the planet, an effect of which has been accelerated development in the global South, and stagnation in the global North.
But that is another conversation. Let me leave it at this summation: I am especially amused that Bush describes decisions as "points" -- not processes, not discussions, conversations, or even arguments, but tiny, minute, finite dots on a chart, which perhaps reveals, however unintentionally, how little effort went into them -- and how much negative blowback they produced. Lest we be too enthusiastic for the past, Eliot Weinberger has produced a wonderfully crushing review. For example:
Bush is not particularly racist. He never portrayed Hispanics as hordes of scary invaders; Condi was his workout buddy and virtually his second wife; he was in awe of Colin Powell; and he was most comfortable in the two most integrated sectors of American society, the military and professional sports. It wasn’t that he didn’t care about black people. Outside of his family, he didn’t care about people, and Billy Graham taught him that ‘we cannot earn God’s love through good deeds’ – only through His grace, which Bush knew he had already received.
And at the New Yorker, George Packer reminds us that some history must be learned from:
The war came—and then looting, chaos, state collapse, insurgency, sectarian war, and no weapons of mass destruction. This last development left Bush “shocked” and “angry,” a recurring state of mind in “Decision Points”: the objections of Justice Department officials to warrantless wiretapping also “stunned” him, Abu Ghraib “blindsided” him, and the looting of Baghdad prompted him to demand, “What the hell is happening?” But Bush was undaunted. He writes, at one point, “In later years, some critics would charge that we failed to prepare for the postwar period. That sure isn’t how I remember it”; and, at another, “The absence of WMD stockpiles did not change the fact that Saddam was a threat.” All these years and lives later, the blitheness of such statements is breathtaking. It would be impossible for Bush still to claim, as he did at a press conference in 2004, that he couldn’t think of any mistakes regarding Iraq. Among the ones he lists are two P.R. disasters (the “Mission Accomplished” banner, and his challenge to insurgents to “bring ’em on”), and two substantive failures: the lack of sufficient troops to impose security at the start, and the “intelligence failure on Iraq’s WMD.” The first he ascribes to a desire not to look like occupiers, the second to the C.I.A.
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