A Tragic Legacy: How a Good vs. Evil Mentality Destroyed the Bush Presidency Read Free

which it declared beyond the reach of any law, and the image of its orange-clad, bowed, and shackled prisoners became a symbol of anti-American resentment around the world. The president’s lawyers engaged in a series of legal battles to defend unprecedented theories of virtually limitless presidential power, which the president applied not only to foreign nationals but also to American citizens, including those on U.S. soil. Immediately prior to being voted out of office, the Republicans who controlled Congress enacted a law vesting in the president sweeping new powers of indefinite detention and coercive interrogation.
    Throughout the Bush tenure, the U.S. military and intelligence agencies sent terrorist suspects to secret prisons, so-called black sites, throughout Eastern Europe. They abducted citizens off the streets of other nations—including those of America’s own allies—and sent them for interrogation to countries notorious for the use of torture. World opinion toward America underwent a fundamental shift as anti-American sentiment reached an all-time high, spreading throughout most countries and on every continent.
    Multiple bombing campaigns and other U.S. military assaults have undoubtedly killed scores of Al Qaeda members, along with tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of innocents. Al Qaeda’s ability to operate freely in Afghanistan has surely been impeded, and—other than the now-forgotten though still-unsolved series of deadly anthrax attacks in 2001 aimed at political leaders and prominent journalists—there have been no further terrorist attacks on U.S. soil, nor any convincing evidence of a serious, formidable plot to perpetrate one. However, the leader of Al Qaeda at the time of the 9/11 attacks, Osama bin Laden, has been neither apprehended nor killed, at least to the administration’s knowledge. By all accounts, Al Qaeda’s Taliban allies are resurgent, and Al Qaeda has exploited the chaos caused by the removal of Iraq’s government to operate within a portion of Western Iraq. As the president entered lame-duck status, his vows to prosecute the “war”—encompassing not only Iraq but a whole host of other nations and groups—transformed into threats to escalate it further still.
    Even without further increases in military spending, and even though the United States is the world’s sole superpower, military spending has skyrocketed under the Bush presidency. In early 2007, the Bush Pentagon sent to Congress a request for a $622 billion defense budget, only $141 billion of which was to be devoted to Iraq and Afghanistan. Even with inflation adjustments, and as the U.S. continues to swelter under massive budget deficits, that proposed amount for defense spending is the highest since World War II. The amount of “peacetime” defense spending, and the overall expenditures for defense, has increased every year during the Bush administration. The U.S., by itself, accounts for more than 50 percent of total worldwide military spending. The U.S. military budget is larger than the total spending of the next twenty largest spenders combined, and its military budget under Bush is six times larger than that of China, the country with the second-highest defense budget. The seemingly endless expansion of American military spending reflects an intent not merely to defend America from attacks but also to occupy and rule large parts of the world—particularly the Middle East—as an imperial power.
    It is difficult to argue with the conclusion of Bush admirer John Podhoretz, who contended—in his 2004 literary homage to Bush’s greatness entitled Bush Country: How Dubya Became a Great President While Driving Liberals Insane —that the president has “constructed one of the most consequential presidencies in the nation’s history.” In an article highly critical of the president’s governance, former Reagan and Bush 41 speechwriter Peggy Noonan observed in a September 2006 Wall Street