Eight years that changed America. Part I

Exactly two years ago, on the 20^th of January, 2009 the first black American President moved into the White House. Since then everyone’s tenderness with the color of Barack Obama’s skin was replaced with disappointment in the hopes and expectations that he failed to live up to. Then there were apprehends regarding the abrupt drop of his popularity. It was getting worse and worse as it went. Democrats lost the midterm elections and, as a consequence, have lost the House majority. Emergence of a new political power (the Tea Party), deep economic crisis, weakening of American foreign policy positions in the world in general and particularly in Europe — all of that changed America, its public image in the world and it gives us a good reason to think about what’s happened.

Duty released — duty taken

 

In order to understand what Barack Obama had achieved during two years of his residence at 1600, Pennsylvania Avenue we should go two years back and find out what state of things did the 44^th President of the United States inherit from the 43^rd one.

George Bush Jr. got into the history textbooks as the worst U.S. President ever. We’re naturally interested in his foreign policy and the way it changed during the last two years. 

During his 2008 campaign Obama promised to make a U-turn in his deeply unpopular predecessor's activities abroad. The fact that the changes in that area are minimal has already become a cliché amongst the numerous discussions of political analysts. The United States has more troops in Afghanistan than it did at the end of the Bush years, Guantánamo is still open, efforts to engage Iran have failed, and while American soldiers may have begun pulling back from Iraq, they've left plenty of Western defense contractors in their wake.

 Beltway press corps' keeps repeating its favorite "was he really that bad?" mantra. This privileged estate of the journalist fraternity even features some sort of grief for that funny always-a-foot-in-it simpleton who help the top post in the United State for the last eight years. Stephen M. Walt — professor of international affairs at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government — considers the “fact that Obama has largely followed the same course is less a measure of Bush's wisdom than a reminder of the depth of the hole he dug his country into”. Seemingly being unwilling to agree with the brand of a loser and botcher, George W. Bush has written (?) a book entitled “Decision Points”. It has 14 chapters, each one pivoting around a key decision that Bush made in his adult life. Above-mentioned Professor Walt offered his own version of 14 chapters, defining the history of the 43^rd U.S. President — ones that rather remind the charge counts. So what is Harvard Professor willing to charge George W. Bush for? 

1. Listening to Cheney. In 2000, George W. Bush chose Dick Cheney to run his vice presidential candidate search effort. In a supremely self-confident move, Cheney muscled the competition out of the way and nominated himself -- and Bush agreed. This was Bush's ur-blunder, the mistake from which so many subsequent errors flowed. Cheney wasted no time stocking the administration's foreign-policy apparatus with extremists eager to implement the full neoconservative program, and they got their opportunity on Sept. 12, 2001. As Richard Perle -- a central member of the neocon team himself -- later told the New Yorker's George Packer, "if Bush had staffed his administration with a group of people selected by Brent Scowcroft and Jim Baker ... Then it could have been different, because they would not have carried into it the ideas that the people who wound up in important positions brought." Talk about failing to dodge a bullet.

2. Criminal Minded. During his first year as president, Bush took the unusual step of formally removing the U.S. signature from the convention to create an International Criminal Court. Not only was the move unnecessary -- the convention was already dead on arrival in the U.S. Senate -- but it also angered longtime NATO allies who strongly supported the measure. But the administration still wasn't satisfied: It subsequently threatened to withhold foreign aid to a number of smaller U.S. allies if they didn't reject the convention too, a move that further alienated supporters and angered the governments whose arms were being twisted. From the very start, in short, Bush showed little interest in other states' opinions and was all too willing to throw America's weight around.

3. No-Go on Kyoto. The Kyoto Protocol climate treaty was a flawed agreement, and there was little chance that the U.S. Senate would ever ratify it. But instead of acknowledging the need to address global warming and outlining a better approach to the problem, Bush flatly rejected the idea of any such treaty as, in the words of his spokesman Ari Fleischer, "not in the United States' economic best interests." Instead of making the United States look farsighted and generous, Bush's response made the United States appear both myopic and callous. Thanks to Bush's indifference, eight years went by with hardly any progress on one of the world's thorniest problems -- and one that, a decade later, we're still no closer to solving.

4. Bush is personally guilty of 9/11. Bush paid scant attention to terrorism or al Qaeda during the 2000 campaign, and he and his national security team continued that cavalier attitude right up until the 9/11 attacks. National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice downgraded the status of the national coordinator for counterterrorism, Richard Clarke, and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz even told Clarke in early 2001 that he was "giv[ing] bin Laden too much credit." Even worse, intelligence warnings of an impending attack in the summer of 2001 received insufficient attention, and we all know what happened next. Bottom line: 9/11 happened on Bush's watch, and the buck stops at his desk.

5. The "Global War on Terror." It would have been easy enough for Bush to declare war on al Qaeda and its allies after 9/11. Instead, he declared war on the very idea of terrorism -- a decision that theoretically gave the United States a dog in local conflicts from Ireland to Uzbekistan to Sri Lanka, and not always on the side of the good guys. Declaring a "war on terror" also gave Osama bin Laden a loftier status than he deserved. Instead of portraying him as a murderous criminal worthy of international contempt and little else, the rhetoric of global conflict elevated him to the status of a warrior heroically defying the world's sole superpower. It also encouraged Americans to wrongly view terrorism as a military problem, instead of one that is best addressed through patient intelligence efforts, domestic security measures, and quiet collaboration with like-minded governments.

6. Making "Waterboard" a Household Word.Within days of the 9/11 attacks, the Bush administration began preparing to authorize a set of practices -- meticulously documented in Jane Mayer's excellent The Dark Side -- that are normally associated with brutal military dictatorships. These measures included the systematic use of torture, the suspension of habeas corpus, secret renditions of suspected terrorists, targeted assassinations, and indefinite detention without trial at Guantánamo and other overseas facilities. These practices were endorsed and approved by John Yoo, a mid-level official in the Bush Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, and Bush admits in his memoir that he personally approved the waterboarding of captured terrorist suspects. The sordid debacle at Abu Ghraib prison was hardly an isolated incident conducted by poorly supervised subordinates; it was in fact entirely consistent with Bush's post-9/11 approach to human rights and civil liberties. And as Obama's inability to shut down Guatánamo suggests, it may take decades to dismantle these practices and restore America's tarnished international image.

7. The "Axis of Evil." In the months following 9/11, the United States received a surprising degree of help in Afghanistan from Iran, a country which (whatever its history with the United States) was no friend of al Qaeda and a bitter enemy of the Taliban. Intelligence sharing and diplomatic coordination with Tehran helped the United States rout the Taliban and later install Hamid Karzai's government in Kabul.

How did Bush reward Iran for this valuable assistance? By labeling it part of an "Axis of Evil" in his January 2002 State of the Union address, along with Iraq and North Korea. This foolish bit of bombast derailed any possibility of building a better relationship with pre-Ahmadinejad Iran, which may have been precisely what Bush's neoconservative speechwriters intended.