Thought Theater

Jonathan Rauch On The Bush Legacy genre: Polispeak & Six Degrees of Speculation

Presidents don't often talk at length about their legacy although one would be naive to believe that they don't spend ample time thinking about how they will be remembered and how history will judge their actions once they leave office. Historians differ on the amount of time it takes to sort out the impact and imprint of each presidency. Nonetheless, a vast amount of time is spent analyzing and discussing these legacies. In a new article, Jonathan Rauch offers some insight on the potential Bush legacy.

History judges good presidents by what they do, bad ones by how long they take to undo. Although history hasn't yet caught up with President George W. Bush, midterm elections are about to-and those are often a referendum on presidential performance. Now is therefore as good a time as any to jump to a conclusion: the question history will ask is whether Bush's presidency was as bad as Richard Nixon's or only as bad as Jimmy Carter's.

Bush's partisans are still holding out for misunderestimated greatness, to be vindicated in the end. They think Bush will be to the war on jihadism what Truman was to the Cold War: the guy who established the course that will see the country through decades of peril.

Even many conservatives have lost faith; in a recent interview with CBS News, no less a conservative luminary than William F. Buckley declared, "There will be no legacy for Mr. Bush." For the disenchanted-again, including me-the relevant points of reference now are not Churchill or Truman but Nixon and Carter.

My own estimation is that Bush may have been accurate in identifying the potential for a clash of civilizations with religious beliefs at the core. However, I'm inclined to believe that history will judge his response to the situation as fully misguided. In fact, history may well conclude that his actions post 9/11 threw fuel on an otherwise smoldering fire such that it ignited an escalation that required years of measured calculations and strategic statesmanship by future presidents and world leaders to extinguish. The failed Bush Presidency will provide the opportunity for greatness to future and yet unidentified leaders as they struggle to quell the tempest.

Bush will leave a legacy, in the form of four headaches.

The fiscal mess. Bush's tax cuts and spending increases turned a $236 billion federal surplus in fiscal 2000 into a deficit of more than $400 billion four years later, an astonishing reversal. That the current year's deficit may come in at something like $300 billion is little cause for comfort; with Baby Boomers due to retire and an expensive Medicare drug benefit kicking in, the country's fiscal position is weak.

The Iraq mess. The invasion was a gamble; the failure to scrub the prewar intelligence and properly manage the postwar occupation were mistakes. The gamble might still pay off, but the mistakes have astronomically raised the gamble's cost in lives, money, prestige, and U.S. strategic focus and position (Iran has been the invasion's signal beneficiary).

International opprobrium. The Iraq adventure fueled a precipitous decline in America's image abroad, and Bush's pugnacious style during his first term and his tin ear for foreign opinion made a bad situation worse. This is more than just a public-relations problem. National prestige is diplomatic capital; the more unpopular America becomes, the higher the price of foreign support.

An extralegal terrorism war. If the country seriously intends to prevent terrorism, then spying at home, detaining terror suspects, and conducting tough interrogations are practices that the government will need to engage in for many years to come. Instead of making proper legal provisions for those practices, Bush has run the war against jihadism out of his back pocket, as a permanent state of emergency. He engages in legal ad-hockery and trickery, treats Congress as a nuisance rather than a partner, and circumvents outmoded laws and treaties when he should be creating new ones. Of all Bush's failings, his refusal to build durable underpinnings for what promises to be a long struggle is the most surprising, the most gratuitous, and potentially the most damaging, both to the sustainability of the antiterrorism effort and to the constitutional order.

Rauch's last paragraph cannot be overstated. In simplistic terms, the actions of George Bush to defeat terrorism and his belief that this goal is best achieved through the exportation of freedom (democracy) were carried out with disregard for the very principles he sought to champion. In so doing, he simply illuminated the hypocrisy that sustains the rising anti-American sentiment around the world.

The imposition of democracy is antithetical to its origin and Iraq and Afghanistan may prove this point for years to come. Perhaps in time, the populations of both countries will conclude that democracy can function as the logical vehicle of intervene in order to halt the conflicts between religious and ideological enemies and establish a society that allows varying beliefs to live together...but that moment may be at least a generation away.

When given the opportunity to lead by example, George Bush chose the path that says "do as I say not as I do" and in that fundamental election, his potential to be a Churchill or a Truman crumbled under the weight of his own disregard for the constitutionally mandated democratic process. It should come as no surprise that even though Iraq has a constitution, the Bush administration's disregard for our own constitution simply served to demonstrate to the Iraqi people that the platitudes of the written word hold little value when one understands the reality that a stroll to the market may close upon the shoulders of mourners in a wooden box.

Our forefathers agreed to die for the democracy that they conceived in order to alter the then existing realities...Iraqi's die each day fully unaware of the promise of democracy and woefully absent its existence. In that reality, the Bush Doctrine has failed