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I am trying as hard as I can to “think of the good things [President Bush] did for our country,” as Jonathan Zappala instructed in his Jan. 22 piece, “As time goes on, history will be kind to President Bush.” I’m finding it an extraordinarily difficult task. George W. Bush was not legitimately elected president in 2000 but rather installed by the right-leaning Supreme Court, and ample – though underreported – evidence suggests he may not have won the 2004 election justly either.
“Cutting taxes, fighting for morality and American values and leading the nation through its darkest hour are a few of his achievements,” Zappala claims. Those tax cuts were only for the wealthiest one percent of the nation; leaving the poor and middle classes continuing to struggle to make ends meet. Meanwhile the “morality and American values” he insists Bush fought for include invading and occupying a sovereign nation based on lies – United States death toll: 4,230; Iraqi death toll: 151,000 – eroding civil liberties and instituting a policy of torture, which constitutes the gravest of crimes against humanity.
“President Bush was always honest with Americans,” Zappala continues, “and admitted when he was genuinely wrong.” Mr. Zappala and I must be remembering different presidencies. Bush falsely claimed Iraq possessed “weapons of mass destruction” and wrongly insisted Saddam Hussein was linked with al-Qaeda in order to sell the illegitimate Iraq war. According to the now-infamous Downing Street memo, Bush and his associates were aware this information was false. “Bush wanted to remove Saddam through military action,” the report finds, with the British head of the Secret Intelligence Service revealing, “The intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.”
While Zappala recites the conservative argument that Iraq is, “A nation freer now than before the war,” which ignores the fact that the country remains under U.S. occupation, with oil companies like Shell and BP laying claim to Iraq’s vast oil reserves.
Author Naomi Klein’s revelatory account, “The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism,” chronicles the Bush administration’s authoritarian campaign to quell Iraqi citizens’ early attempts at forming a democratic government. Klein writes of U.S. envoy to Iraq Paul Bremer’s first steps in “securing the peace,” saying that “Within his first six months in the job, he had canceled a constituent assembly, nixed the idea of electing the drafters of the constitution, annulled and called off dozens of local and provincial elections and then vanquished the beast of national elections – hardly the actions of an idealistic democrat.”
Finally, Zappala maintains Bush will experience a historical about-face similar to that of Ronald Reagan. Yet the notion that the mainstream media “hounded” Reagan throughout the ’80s is absurd. Reagan escaped any accountability from his involvement in the illegal Iran-Contra affair largely because the corporate media – which began its hyper-consolidation under Reagan’s watch – preferred to practice “jelly bean journalism” rather than expose the president’s crimes. Incidentally, the fact that Reagan was never impeached for his transgressions opened the door for Bush and his associates to similarly bypass the rule of law, albeit in far greater and more destructive instances, and get away with it.
If history is kind to Bush it will be due only to Americans’ collective historical amnesia. Pre-emptive war based on lies, suppression of free-speech and civil liberties, vast expansion of executive power, rampant environmental destruction and the heinous use of torture – these are the things history will remember George W. Bush for.
Adam Marletta is a graduate communications student.
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