De mortuis nihil nisi bonum? Speak nothing but good of the dead? Well, I leave that to the fancy outfits. If you want to read about what a wonderful guy Il Giorgio, aka “Aitch Dubya,” was, well, read the Post or the Times, or whomever. Here at Literature R Us, we mix the good with the bad, just like, you know, God!
There’s no doubt that No. 41 did no little good while in the White House, along with no little harm. Bush deserves a great deal of credit for managing the decline and fall of the Soviet Empire as well as he did, providing a soft landing for an odious regime so corrupt and inefficient that its incompetence even swallowed up its evil–communists around the world were so obsessive in their determination to control every aspect of society that they ground every economic activity (and every other form of social activity) into, well, the ground. Czarist Russia, before World War I, was a leading exporter of grain. Seventy years later, the Soviet Union, despite all the advantages of modern science, was a leading importer, sending its hard-earned rubles to the U.S. Only high oil prices could keep the dysfunctional Soviet Empire afloat, and when they collapsed, the Soviets fell right along with them.
But the collapse of the Soviet Union–very reminiscent of the collapse of the Bourbons under Louis XVI, really–proved far less calamitous, thanks to George H.W. and his “realist” friends. So the world does owe Georgie a big one for that.
And the U.S. owes Georgie for his budget compromise with congressional Democrats in 1990, which set the U.S. on the road to economic recovery from the ill effects of Ronald Reagan’s supply side voodoo–a presage, really, to the similar policies that Bill Clinton would follow (also successfully) when he took office. Unfortunately for George, however, he was forced to renege on his famous (famous and fatuous) promise of “Read my lips: No new taxes” pledge, which enraged the “new” Republican Party, largely created by Newt Gingrich, which had no platform other than “irresponsabilité plus irresponsabilité et puis encore plus irresponsabilité,” the platform that they have pursued with ever-increasing fervor for the past 28 years.
But while Bush’s contributions were sizable, his faults were grievous. Prior to his own presidency, he was an indefatigable cold warrior, blasting the Democrats hip and thigh for “losing” the Vietnam War and forever redefining the notorious “domino theory” to cover up the fact that the dominoes stubbornly refused to fall.1 As vice president, and a former head of the CIA, Bush was well informed about the series of crimes known as “Iran Contra,” about which he frequently perjured himself. On leaving the presidency, he handed out blatantly political pardons to those of his co-conspirators who were so unfortunate as to be actually indicted for their crimes.
Bush’s biggest crime, of course, was “Operation Desert Storm”. Bush deliberately introduced foreign military intervention as a device for creating public support for a triumphalist, flag-waving “American” (read “Republican”) foreign policy that in fact ran directly counter to America’s real foreign policy interests. Before Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, Bush had practiced a ruthlessly “realpolitik” approach to advancing U.S. interests in the Middle East. On March 16, 1988, Saddam launched the worst chemical weapons attack in modern history, slaughtering up to 5,000 helpless Kurdish citizens of his own country in the town of Halabja in a five-hour assault involving a dozen bombers. Shortly thereafter, April Glaspie, U.S. Ambassador to Iraq, met with Saddam, assuring him that the U.S. desired a “deeper, broader” relationship with Iraq and deliberately assured him that the U.S. would not object if Iraq sought a “revision” (my word) of its boundaries with Kuwait, as long as at least a remnant of Kuwait remained. It’s only when Saddam made clear his intention to consume the whole that Bush acted.
When Bush did act, he acted with consummate hypocrisy, denouncing Saddam as “the worst since Hitler” and urging oppressed minorities within Iraq to rebel against him, even while planning to keep Saddam in power after he was forced to retreat from Kuwait. In the aftermath, U.S. forces “stood down” while Saddam massacred thousands of brave men and women who made the mistake of taking the word of the president of the United States.2
Bush and his lieutenants lied endlessly to cover up this ugly record, pretending that they “really” intended to drive Saddam from power, and, once the tonic of our glorious victory wore off, invented the myth of “weapons of mass destruction” to justify the reinvention of a battered, beaten, impotent Saddam Hussein as an existential threat to world peace against which the U.S. (aka the Republican Party) provided the only possible defense. The dominant interventionist wing of the Democratic Party bought into this myth and largely based U.S. policy upon it, keeping the myth alive for eight long years before 9-11 gave George W. Bush the excuse to revisit Iraq, resulting in the massive disaster from which we have yet to recover. The unwillingness of the U.S. establishment to admit how utterly groundless and self-serving our obsession with Saddam Hussein has been, and how disastrous, is a major cause of the worldwide malaise that continues to consume both the United States and a great portion of the rest of the world.
1. After the North Vietnamese unified Vietnam, conservatives noted with horror that Communist Vietnam now possessed “the third largest army in the world”. That fearsome force engaged in a grand total of two wars, one against Communist Cambodia, and one against Communist China. The People’s Republic of Vietnam proved to be nothing more (or less) than a massive millstone around the Soviet Union’s neck, requiring subsidies of 40 billion rubles a year before the U.S.S.R. finally ground to a halt. See Serghii Plokhy’s The Last Empire for details on the immense burden the dysfunctional Soviet “Empire” placed on the U.S.S.R.
2. For more on Bush's hypocrisy in justifying his "crusade" in Iraq, see my review of Jon Meacham's biography of Aitch Dubya.
