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Jewish World Review Oct. 30, 2008 / 2 Mar-Cheshvan 5769 Running against Bush By Caroline B. Glick
The American media's pro-Obama bias is also the consequence of their
misrepresentation of outgoing President George W. Bush's record in office.
And that misrepresentation too cannot be ascribed merely to the leftist
sympathies of the media. For the media are not the source of that
misrepresentation. Bush himself is the source of that misrepresentation.
Bush's record in office is the key issue in the campaign. The outgoing
President's abysmal approval ratings in his last two years in power caused
both parties to recognize that to win the election, their candidate had to
distinguish himself as much as possible from the current occupant of the
Oval Office.
In selecting Senator John McCain as their party's nominee, the Republicans
adopted this approach. Throughout his long career in Congress, McCain has
served as the consummate party outsider. Yet, in his own way, and now to his
detriment, he has also been loyal. And so until recently he avoided
attacking Bush outright preferring instead to ignore him.
But by ignoring the President, McCain gave Obama full freedom to define
Bush's presidency in the manner that best advanced his electoral prospects.
And Obama's success in defining Bush has enabled the Democratic nominee to
set the terms of debate on the central issue of the campaign: how America
finds itself in the situation it now finds itself, and what policies should
be adopted to improve its situation.
Obama has successfully cast Bush's presidency as a repeat of Ronald Reagan's
presidency. Obama has portrayed Bush's foreign policy as a reenactment of
Reagan's muscular, pro-American foreign policy which was based on Reagan's
belief in American exceptionalism and his willingness to disregard what
America's enemies and its erstwhile allies thought of America's actions.
Obama has also portrayed Bush's economic policies as a reenactment of
Reagan's policies of free market capitalism characterized by deregulation
and tax cuts.
Obama has claimed that European and Muslim estrangement from the US; the
increased strength of the insurgency in Afghanistan' Russian aggression; the
resilience of the insurgency in Iraq; Iran's unimpeded drive towards nuclear
weapons, and every other major US foreign policy problem are the
consequences of Bush's embrace of Reagan's foreign policy approach. Obama
claims that the financial crisis too, is a consequence of Bush's Reaganesque
tax cuts and his general embrace of supply-side economics and the
conservative preference for limited government.
By so defining Bush's record in office, Obama has been able to make a case
for his own policies, which are diametrically opposed to those he ascribes
to Bush.
There is only one problem with Obama's description of Bush's record in
office. It is utterly false.
During his first term in office, Bush's foreign policy was raft with
internal contradictions and intellectual confusion. Books have been written
about the two competing factions in Bush's inner circle. Vice President
Richard Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld championed a
Reaganesque model of statecraft. And opposing them, Secretary of State Colin
Powell pushed for a UN-centered, European-style foreign policy more similar
to the one adopted by Bush's father.
Throughout his first term, Bush refused to side with one or the other of the
factions. Instead he tried to simultaneously implement two mutually
exclusive foreign policies. His indecisiveness rendered his foreign policy
intellectually incoherent and doomed much that he did to failure. Bush's
speechwriters were evidently more sympathetic to the Cheney-Rumsfeld view
and so many of his speeches during his first term echoed Reagan's soaring
rhetoric. But on the ground, Bush's policies adhered much more closely to
Powell's program.
This intellectual disarray was perhaps nowhere more evident than in Bush's
refusal to define the enemy in the war. The men who attacked the US on
September 11, 2001 were more than simply terrorists. They had a plan and a
cause: They were Muslim jihadists. And they were not the ideological fringe
of the Islamic world. Their beliefs are propagated by the Kingdom of Saudi
Arabia and are advanced in the most prestigious academies in the Islamic
world.
By claiming that the enemy in the war is generic "terror" rather than a
worldview embraced by millions of people throughout the Islamic world, Bush
made it impossible for his advisors to develop a coherent strategy for war.
He also denied the American people the tools necessary for understanding
either the meaning of the struggle or the necessity of fighting it. He
deprived the public the basic intellectual framework for understanding for
instance why he decided to imprison terrorists at Guantanamo Bay.
Bush's two-headed foreign policy made it difficult for the public to
recognize that the war being waged against the US and its allies in Iraq is
not simply an Iraqi struggle, but a battlefield in a regional war fueled by
neighboring regimes. His intellectual confusion blinded him to the fact that
his democracy agenda was harmed, not advanced by holding popular elections
in which jihadists - whose views and aspirations are inimical to the notion
of human freedom - were permitted to participate.
In Bush's second term in office, and particularly since the Republican
defeat in the 2006 Congressional elections, Bush abandoned the intellectual
incoherence of his first term in favor of a full embrace of Powell's policy
preferences now championed by his successor Condoleezza Rice. Throughout his
entire first term in office, and due to his refusal to adjudicate between
two contradictory foreign policy visions, Bush failed to adopt any policy
towards Iran. After the 2006 Congressional elections, Bush embraced the
Powell-Rice policy of European style appeasement. This has been demonstrated
most recently by his stated plan to open a US embassy in Teheran.
Bush's wholesale adoption of the Powell-Rice appeasement policy is also
reflected in his policies towards North Korea and the Palestinians. And this
week, according to statements by White House officials, he stands ready to
apply it towards the Taliban with whom he is considering opening ties.
In Bush's last two years in office, the only surviving remnant of the
Cheney-Rumseld Reaganesque foreign policy has been Bush's counterinsurgency
strategy in Iraq. And in spite of its military success, the fact that this
policy is contradicted by the President's policy everywhere else casts doubt
on the durability of America's victories on the ground.
Bush's acceptance of the Powell-Rice foreign policy doctrine has not been
widely recognized. In large part this has been due to Bush's own refusal to
tell the public that he has in fact embraced appeasement. Moreover, Bush's
reluctance to come clean with the public has been exacerbated by the media's
denial of the change.
Whether due to blindness fed by an underlying hostility towards the
President, or to ignorance of the significance of Bush's policies, the media
have failed to report that Bush's policies today are a repudiation of the
ideals and policies Bush gave voice to in his speeches during his first
term. Those effectively repudiated speeches were the embodiment of Reagan's
foreign policy doctrine.
The same pattern has been followed in popular characterizations of Bush's
economic policies. Aside from his tax cuts in his first term - tax cuts that
include a "sunset" provision rendering them temporary measures rather than
enduring tax reforms - Bush's economic policies during his two terms have
been anything but Reaganesque. Bush has vastly increased the size of the
federal government. And he has introduced massive new regulation into the US
economy.
Emblematic of Bush's eschewal of Reagan's legacy on both foreign policy and
economic levels is his newly created Office of the Director of National
Intelligence. The establishment of this new position - and the large
bureaucracy supporting it - was how Bush chose to contend with US
intelligence agencies' failure to foresee and prevent the Sept. 11 attacks.
But like most failures in governance, the failure to anticipate, uncover and
prevent those attacks was not due to an absence bureaucracy. Rather, the
failure stemmed from the ideologically-driven unwillingness of the directors
of the FBI and the CIA to recognize the threat of al Qaida and focus their
efforts on tracking and capturing al Qaida members and sympathizers. The
proper response to that failure would have been to fire the heads of those
agencies and replace them with people who understood the nature of the
threat and were capable of contending with it.
Instead Bush decided to increase the size of the government, add a new layer
of bureaucracy to the failed intelligence community and staff it with people
of the same mind as those who had failed to anticipate, expose and prevent
the September 11 attacks. Not surprisingly, the newly appointed,
ideologically uniform bureaucrats continued to underestimate the threats of
jihadists or pay attention to any new significant trends in other areas.
It was this failed bureaucratic groupthink that produced the National
Intelligence Estimate on Iran's nuclear weapons program last year. That
report, with its demonstrably false assertion that Iran ended its nuclear
weapons program in 2003, scuttled all of Bush's efforts to use economic
sanctions to dissuade Iran from building nuclear bombs and pulled the rug
out from under any plan to take military action against Iran's nuclear
installations in the event of the sanctions' failure.
So too, led by officials of limited intellectual curiosity and blinding
ideological cowardice now sitting atop a new bureaucracy, US intelligence
agencies failed to anticipate or prevent Russia's invasion of Georgia.
Bush's establishment of the behemoth Department of Homeland Security was yet
another attempt to solve a personnel problem by creating yet another
department. And just as the National Intelligence Directorate has failed to
solve the problems it was created to contend with, so the Department of
Homeland Security has simply continued the same failed immigration policies
and domestic intelligence policies that caused the INS and the FBI to fail
to identify and arrest the Sept. 11 hijackers.
In short then, both in foreign and domestic affairs, Bush's record is
completely at odds with Reagan's record in office. Indeed, his policies have
been far more similar to those that Obama - who runs as the anti-Reagan --
promises to advance than those that Reagan adopted.
And this is the great irony of the campaign season. By failing to accurately
represent his policies to the public, Bush invited Obama to misrepresent his
record and so wrongly ascribe Bush's failures to policies he never adopted -
much less implemented. By failing to correct Obama's misrepresentation of
Bush's actual record, McCain has allowed Obama to characterize him as the
candidate who would continue the Bush presidency when the fact is that the
small government policies and the relatively more robust foreign policy
positions that McCain has adopted render him the candidate most unlike the
sitting president.
If Obama wins the elections on Tuesday, his victory will find its roots not
in media bias, but in Bush's insistent misrepresentation of his record as
president.
JWR contributor Caroline B. Glick is the senior Middle East Fellow at the Center for Security Policy in Washington, DC and the deputy managing editor of The Jerusalem Post. Comment by clicking here.
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