Globalaffairs

Issue 11/October-November 2008
By Kim Young

Not since President Richard Nixon, or perhaps the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal, any President has been more embroiled in controversy. From the outing of CIA former covert spy, Valerie Plame to the most unpopular war in US history, President George W. Bush has been declared the United States worst President ever by some historians, citizens and foreign countries alike. To attempt to compress a presidency of eight years into one article is almost impossible and so I will touch on some issues.

Everything from education to jobs and the current Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac predatory Mortgage lending debacles continue to plague Bush’s Presidency and the economy of the United States. It just seems that President Bush cannot avoid being the butt of major criticism on nearly every issue important to the people of the United States. Even the members of the Republican Party are fed up and the GOP is decidedly hoping that the John McCain/Sarah Palin ticket may steer them from Bush/Cheney era and lead them to a new dispensation in domestic and world politics. Bush is hugely unpopular in Europe.

In an article written by noted historian Sean Wilenz in a Rolling Stone Magazine article comments, “yet recently, just short of three years after Bush buoyantly declared “mission accomplished” in Iraq, his disapproval ratings have been running considerably higher than Johnson’s, at about sixty percent. More than half the country now considers Bush dishonest and untrustworthy, and a decisive plurality consider him less trustworthy than his predecessor, Bill Clinton — a figure still attacked by conservative zealots as “Slick Willie.” (1).

Bush has been unable to paddle up from the tide of plummeting ratings. According to GALLUP, (2) President Bush’s job approval rating has sunk to 28%, even lower than President Richard Nixon during Watergate,(3) a new record low for his administration and one of the lowest presidential approval ratings in Gallup history.

There are numerous factors that contributed to this dismal report card and chief among them is the Iraq war. American disapproval for the War in Iraq is at an all time high. Just months into his Presidency into 2001, on an otherwise normal day in New York City, the unthinkable happened. Three American Airlines aircraft plucked from various airports across the US, were hijacked by radical Islamic members of Al Qaeda and flew into the “Twin Towers” on September 11.(4) The World Trade Centre crumbled to burning ash while over at the Pentagon another airplane had veered into the building. When the death toll was done over 3000 people had died in the worst ever attack on US soil. AA Flight 93 was stormed by passengers and crash in Pittsburg. These noble citizens thought that the pilots were headed to the White House.

Yet many, including filmmaker Michael Moore of Fahrenheit 9/11 fame, and many others continue to examine the possibility to that the US may have had some involvement in the events of that sad day.

Bush afterward accused the then dictator of Iraq, Saddam Hussein of having weapons of mass destruction and harbouring radical Islamics allied with the Taliban and Al Qaeda and by-passing the Geneva Convention, stormed United States troops into Baghdad and Afghanistan, in a pre-emptive strike against the administrations there. Ironically, Americans began to see this war as a war for oil, the unfinished business of President George Herbert W. Bush who had invaded Kuwait years earlier but failed to kill Saddam Hussein and his lieutenants. The region then saw a change of the guard with the President of Afghanistan becoming pro-democracy, Musharraf (now resigned) espousing the benefits of democracy and Prime Minister Malaki of Iraq still facing opposition and contention.

In the interim, Iraq made billions in profits from oil while the US is trillions in debt due to the very same war in Iraq. What gives? Many people believe that the Bush/Cheney administration has a vested interest in oil producing Nations which may account for the strained relationship between oil rich Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez and Bush. There is still no sign of Osama Bin Laden who Bush declared is “wanted, dead or alive”.

Nevertheless, initially Americans gathered together to avenge their country symbolically and in fact, for attacks which claimed the lives of their citizens. They supported Bush and his new administration’s plan to free the US and indeed the world of the scourge of Hussein and indeed anyone who attacked the ideology and sovereignty of the Free world.

Yellow ribbons were wrapped around trees; movies were made, documentaries and newscasts and the media, by large, supported the war. That was until it became “obvious” that they were no weapons of mass destruction and that some five years later and even after declaring victory, over 4100 hundred men and women in US uniform have returned home dead. A war-weary public has now given up on Bush and are asking for a stop to the war. Yet he “surges” onward. Back in 2004 The Kerry/Edwards ticket was fighting the incumbent in an effort to win the presidency for the Democrats.

This excerpt from the debate:
“DAHLE: Mr. President, yesterday in a statement you admitted that Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction, but justified the invasion by stating, I quote, “He retained the knowledge, the materials, the means and the intent to produce weapons of mass destruction and could have passed this knowledge to our terrorist enemies.”
Do you sincerely believe this to be a reasonable justification for invasion when this statement applies to so many other countries, including North Korea?

BUSH: Each situation is different, Robin.
And obviously we hope that diplomacy works before you ever use force. The hardest decision a president makes is ever to use force.
After 9/11, we had to look at the world differently. After 9/11, we had to recognize that when we saw a threat, we must take it seriously before it comes to hurt us.
In the old days we’d see a threat, and we could deal with it if we felt like it or not. But 9/11 changed it all.
I vowed to our countrymen that I would do everything I could to protect the American people. That’s why we’re bringing Al Qaida to justice. Seventy five percent of them have been brought to justice.
That’s why I said to Afghanistan: If you harbor a terrorist, you’re just as guilty as the terrorist. And the Taliban is no longer in power, and Al Qaida no longer has a place to plan.
And I saw a unique threat in Saddam Hussein, as did my opponent, because we thought he had weapons of mass destruction.
And the unique threat was that he could give weapons of mass destruction to an organization like Al Qaida, and the harm they inflicted on us with airplanes would be multiplied greatly by weapons of mass destruction. And that was the serious, serious threat.
So I tried diplomacy, went to the United Nations. But as we learned in the same report I quoted, Saddam Hussein was gaming the oil-for-food program to get rid of sanctions. He was trying to get rid of sanctions for a reason: He wanted to restart his weapons programs.
We all thought there were weapons there, Robin. My opponent thought there were weapons there. That’s why he called him a grave threat.
I wasn’t happy when we found out there weren’t weapons, and we’ve got an intelligence group together to figure out why.
But Saddam Hussein was a unique threat. And the world is better off without him in power.
And my opponent’s plans lead me to conclude that Saddam Hussein would still be in power, and the world would be more dangerous.”

The trouble is, no one believes or trusts Bush anymore. They particularly did not trust the former Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld who eventually resigned. Indeed, this year’s Presidential Campaign between Senator Barack Obama and Senator John McCain, a war veteran and former P.O.W. while noting that the economy is the number one issue, Obama has gone a step further to refer to the war in Iraq as the “wrong war, at he wrong time, for the wrong reasons.” Obama did not vote for the war and since the war against Saddam Hussein and his alleged henchmen, over 4,100 hundred body bags of American troops have returned to grieving families back in the United States in flag draped caskets. With over 30,000 injured veterans returning to the Walter Reid Veteran’s Hospital, Bush also found himself embroiled in a disastrous scandal concerning the care and conditions at that hospital which were described as sub-standard.

Bush’s woes do not end there.

A number of scandals have plagued the Bush administration. As aforementioned the Bush Administration, including the administration’s chief architect for elections’ Karl Rove, were named by Valerie Plame’s husband for her undoing as a covert spy for the CIA as backlash for Joseph Wilson’s book. The leaking of Valerie Plame’s identity started a chain of events that now has the White House at the center of a political firestorm as some Democrats demand President Bush fire close aide Karl Rove. Rove discussed Plame’s CIA connection with Time reporter Matthew Cooper in 2003, though without naming her, according to Rove’s attorney. Eventually Scooter Libby was the fall guy while Rove avoided prosecution.

Joseph Wilson would not say whether his wife was stationed overseas again after 1997, and he said she would not speak to a reporter. But, he said, “the CIA obviously believes there was reason to believe a crime had been committed” because it referred the case to the Justice Department.

Spokesmen for both the CIA and federal prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, who was investigating whether a crime was committed, also would not comment.

Though that key law may not have been broken in leaking the name, Fitzgerald must still be pursuing evidence of some type of wrongdoing, said Victoria Toensing, another of the attorneys who helped draft the 1982 act. Like Sanford, she doubts Valerie Wilson, as she now refers to herself, qualified as a “covert agent” under that law. She and Sanford also doubt Fitzgerald has enough evidence to prosecute anyone under the Espionage Act. That law makes it a crime to divulge “information relating to the national defense” that “the possessor has reason to believe could be used to the injury” of the nation. (6)

War and spies aside, the Bush presidency has been plagued with a failed No Child Left Behind Act, a mortgage crisis of biblical proportions, trillions of dollars in debt and recession, the highest job losses ever at 6.1 unemployment and over 84,000 jobs lost within weeks, a populace without adequate health care and allegedly no alternative plan for energy and America’s dependence on oil. The complaints are dizzying. Numerous books have been written about the Bush/Cheney administration, most of them negative while the socialist/conservative republicans continue to rally behind Bush despite their weariness with the war.

In celebrated journalist Bob Woodward’ book “The War Within”, Woodward interviews Bush.

In Woodword’s latest interview on Larry King Live of CNN, September 9, 2008, Woodword said that the new administration to be inaugurated in January 2009 needs to repair its relationship with the Military and also restore its relationship with the rest of the world. Bush has not lost his confidence but has lost some of his bravado which is perhaps weary and even looking forward to the end of his tenure as President of the US.

Woodword blames Bush’s woes on deep feelings on the war and poor communication between and among civilians, citizens, the world and the military.

“I am not shocked by anything in Washington anymore” he declared in an interview in May 2008 between Bob Woodward and George W. Bush. Woodward sees the branches of government as dysfunctional. Is Bush therefore entirely to be blamed? Perhaps not. However Woodward says in his book that despite a brutal presidency, Bush just did not do enough; but if only he could have made the Bush dynasty proud.

Kim Young
Director of Communication, MA in Mass Communication from the University of Leicester, England.

Notes

1. http://www.rollingstone.com/news/profile/story/9961300/the_worst_president_in_history
2. http://www.gallup.com/home.aspx

3. http://www.watergate.info/

4 http://edition.cnn.com/2001/US/09/11/chronology.attack/index.html

5 http://www.whitehouse.gov/nsc/nss.html

6. http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2005-07-14-cia-wilson_x.htm

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