My discussions on war (and peace) with George Bush

Thursday, 19 June 2008

by Alistair Horne

Last Sunday, to my considerable surprise, I was invited to a dinner at No. 10 in honour of President George W Bush, making his valedictory visit to Europe. I say surprise, because, under Socialist rule, Downing Street has been beyond my reach. On this occasion, the initiative manifestly came from the White House, with the President suggesting that he might like to meet a group of us Brit historians. Present were experts on subjects ranging from the French Revolution to Winston Churchill.
It may have been Whitehall's most expensive banquet ever – given that security precautions are said to have cost us taxpayers £1m – but I have no inhibitions in declaring that I enjoyed the evening quite enormously.
For all his current headaches, our host, the PM, was charmingly courteous – and with a considerable interest in history. I had the honour of being seated on the right of the President. I had first met him, just a year ago, having been invited to the White House, following his reading of my book, A Savage War of Peace; Algeria 1954-1962, which had been recommended to him by Henry Kissinger.
Then – as last Sunday – far from being the wooden, robotic figure as seen on the television screen, I found him relaxed, humorous, and considerably interested in contemporary history. (It seems to have surprised the US media when he declared that he went to bed at 9pm so that he could have time to read. I think I believe that.)
In the Oval Office last year, I was questioned intently on how de Gaulle got out of Algeria; I had to reply, "Mr President, very badly; he lost his shirt." Though it was clearly a disappointing response, Mr Bush replied, with emphasis: "Well, we're not going to get out of Iraq like that." That was shortly after the launch of the "surge". This Sunday we talked almost entirely about the Second World War – its turning-points and "what-ifs" – and the "special relationship", which both leaders toasted reciprocally in generous terms. The President was well-informed, and a flatteringly good listener.
We kept off the Middle East.
Of course, as a critic of Iraq, and current US policy towards Israel and Palestine, I could have wished that the White House had studied the lessons of the Algerian War before rushing in in 2003. One day history itself will doubtless inform us as to whether Bush might have acted more cautiously, had he had the lessons of history at his elbow, rather than the impetuous rashness of hawkish advisors like Vice President Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz.
It all leads one to reflect whether history has its uses to political leaders; and whether denizens of the Oval Office, in general, are more conscious and respectful of historians than their opposite numbers in No. 10. (Were a similar question asked in Paris, whence I have just returned, there would be no doubt about the answer: Frenchmen have always been more aware of history, and culture generally, than their Anglo-saxon counterparts.) Whereas Gordon Brown, given a little peace, might well set a new standard, I have no evidence that Tony Blair (or his consort) ever read anything – except possibly Hansard. John Major had the instinct, but was too beset by troubles to find the time. Margaret Thatcher's interests were focused, but patchy. Winston Churchill, obviously, was the most steeped in history of any recent British PM; had he achieved nothing in politics, he would retain a place as one of our foremost historians.
But probably the best read of any, not only in history, was Harold Macmillan. To fight the "Black Dog" of depression, he would regularly lock himself away for hours at a time to read. He claimed to have re-read the whole of George Eliot during the Suez Crisis of 1956. Critics may claim that, as Chancellor, he should have been doing other things; but his response was "Dear boy, if I hadn't been able to get away and read, I would have been driven stark, staring bonkers...!"
Over in Washington, the ill-starred Richard Nixon was an avid reader of history; and he had at his shoulder the Harvard-trained professional, Dr Henry Kissinger. Its lessons doubtless informed his mould-breaking opening to China.
JFK in his first two years in office committed grievous errors of foreign policy. But by the time of his greatest test, the Cuban Missiles Crisis of October 1962, he was evidently reading Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August, with its gripping account of how Europe blundered disastrously into war in 1914. One would like to think it might have helped him in handling Khrushchev, potentially as rashly explosive a non-thinker as Kaiser Wilhelm II.
If only. If only the Kaiser could have studied the Napoleonic Wars, he could well have paused before letting the Schlieffen Plan march him across neutral Belgium – thereby bringing in Britain and its Empire. Had Hitler known more of history than a corporal on the Western Front, he would surely have trembled before engaging with Anglo-American sea-power. He listened too much to crazy pseudo-historians like the geopolitician, Professor Haushofer.
But then Napoleon himself never learned from the lessons of the limited warfare of the previous century; had he done so, he would have consolidated peace with Russia on the Niemen in 1807. And we would all be speaking French, and sending our children to better schools...
Of course, if we historians urge our leaders to study history more intently, that must be special pleading. We all want to sell books. But if last Sunday's experience at No. 10 is any guide, it was a thoroughly beneficial two-way flow. I certainly learned a lot.

Alistair Horne has just finished an authorised biography of Henry Kissinger in the year 1973 and is the author of a series of books on French history

courtesy The Independent

The Bush Presidency

Wednesday, Dec. 31, 2008

By Michael Kinsley

"We will reopen Pennsylvania Avenue in front of the White House." —the 2000 Republican platform

But they never did. Eight years later, the barricades remain. It was a phony issue, of course — just another stick with which to beat Bill Clinton, who closed the road at the insistence of the Secret Service. In an interview with PBS a month after Sept. 11, 2001, Vice President Dick Cheney stated the obvious: "Pennsylvania Avenue ought to stay closed because, as a fact, if somebody were to detonate a truck bomb in front of the White House, it would probably level the White House, and that is unacceptable."

Sept. 11 is the excuse for many of the Bush Administration's failures and disappointments. It is also the basis for the one great claim made on George W. Bush's behalf: At least he has protected us from terrorism. In the seven years since that day, there has not been another foreign-terrorist attack on the American homeland. The trouble is that there were no foreign-terrorist attacks on the American homeland in the seven years before 9/11 either. The risk of another terrorist attack didn't increase on 9/11 — only our awareness of the risk. The Bush Administration took office mocking the concern that someone might blow up the White House but soon enough was echoing that concern.

The platform on which Bush entered the presidency eight years ago comes from a lost world, in which even the party out of power saw an America of unthreatened prosperity and security. "Yesterday's wildest dreams are today's realities, and there is no limit on the promise of tomorrow," the GOP said. The biggest foreign policy challenge America faced in 2000, according to this party document, was to avoid misusing our enormous power. "Earlier generations defended America through great trials," the platform declared. Then it quoted the Republican nominee, Bush, on the importance of showing the "modesty of true strength. The humility of real greatness." Even enthusiasts of Bush's foreign policy would not describe it as displaying the humility of true greatness. More like the pugnacity of lost greatness. All that talk of one superpower — us — bestriding a "unipolar" world seems as dated as Seinfeld reruns.

The measure of Bush's failure as President is not his broken promises or unmet goals. All politicians break their promises, and none achieve the goals of their soaring rhetoric. But Bush stands out for abandoning the promises and goals that got him elected, taking up the opposite ones and then failing to keep or meet those.

In 2000 Bush excoriated his predecessor for launching wars without an "exit strategy." In 2008 he leaves his successor a war that has already lasted for years longer than America's involvement in World War II, with no exit in sight. Bush got elected warning against using U.S. troops for "nation-building" — meaning any goal beyond immediate military necessity. Then once in office, he promised to bring democracy to the entire Middle East and ended up destroying Iraq as a nation in the name of saving it.

Bush leaves the stage still justifying his Iraq disaster on the grounds that prewar intelligence showed that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. He acknowledges that this intelligence was wrong but maintains he relied on it in good faith. Who cares? What matters is whether there were WMD, not how sincerely he believed there were. WMD were how he justified the war. How do you explain to families of the war dead why a war must go on for years after even the man who started it thinks starting it was based on a mistake?

The current economic calamity was a bolt from the blue to many who should have known better, but only one of them had been in charge for the previous eight years. Only one spent much of that time bragging about how swell everything was, thanks to him. Many shared the heedless assumption that there was no limit on how much government or individuals could borrow, but only one turned record surpluses into record deficits. And only one lectured us, Reagan-style, about burdensome government and then, almost casually, expanded government's role in the economy more than any President since F.D.R.: taking over banks and bailing out the auto companies.

O.K., but didn't he do anything right? Well, he came up with serious money to treat AIDS and malaria in Africa. He used the bully pulpit to embrace Muslims in the great post-9/11 American bear hug, when there was real danger of the opposite reaction. And you could say that Bush's disastrous presidency vindicates democracy. Let's not forget that, in 2000, more people voted for the other guy.

courtesy Time weekly, January 12, 2009

Bush’s legacy

Tuesday, January 20, 2009

By Michael Tomasky

Artists and geniuses, and titans of commerce and global affairs, actively leave legacies. Beethoven reinvented the symphony, Picasso jolted us into abstraction. Gandhi taught us nonviolent resistance, and Bill Gates came up with the chip. Towering figures all. Legacies, immutable and eternal.

But we use “legacy” in a second sense, do we not? Chernobyl, for instance, has a legacy: UN-led efforts to reduce nuclear fallout. Here in the US, a notable example is that of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in Manhattan in 1911, in which 146 garment workers either died in the flames or jumped to their deaths, which helped propel certain reforms and the broader American trade union movement.

Tragedies don’t actively leave legacies, but rather legacies are created out of their ashes. And this is the context – the only context – in which we must think about the legacy of blessedly exiting administration of George W Bush.

Am I being unfair? Is there not even one positive thing to say? OK. It was nice the other day, in fact quite nice, that Bush announced new protections for 195,280 square miles of American-controlled Pacific islands, reefs, surface waters and sea floor. That was well done. Bully.

But the world the Bushies tried to create – the legacy, that is, they attempted to leave has virtually nothing to recommend it. Even they know it. Vice-President Dick Cheney, in an exit interview with one of the last remaining friendly media outlets in the US (the Reverend Moon-owned Washington Times), said: “I’m personally persuaded that this president and this administration will look very good 20 or 30 years down the road in light of what we’ve been able to accomplish.”

Now, let’s parse why he said that. He knew he couldn’t say with a straight face: “We’ve been incredibly successful and leave office with our heads held high.” Even the man who said in May 2005 that the Iraqi insurgency was in its “last throes” couldn’t pull that one off. At the same time, Cheney and other defenders can’t say: “Well, we blew it, we screwed a lot of things up.” The admission would be refreshing of course, but it isn’t done.

So they are left with this stab in the dark. Bush’s defenders surely know that even this scenario is bloody unlikely. But, you know, it could happen. So it’s worth putting the spin on the record, just in case it does.

A list of grievances from the likes of me would be, I confess, a bit predictable and tedious, so there’s no point in doing much besides briskly enumerating the lowlights, notorious and somewhat lesser known. The lies about the war. The phony Saddam–al-Qaida link. The use of one of our greatest national tragedy for partisan political purposes. The smearing of political opponents as unpatriotic. And in the face of all that, the temerity to botch of the prosecution of the war.

The corruption of the justice department. The torture, the waterboarding, Abu Ghraib. The domestic surveillance of only God yet knows who and what. Guantánamo. The intimidation of scientists, the doctoring of governmental reports on global warming. The utter inaction, also, on global warming. The utter inaction on healthcare. The utter inaction on the economy. The utter indifference – no, hostility – to any regulation of the mortgage market.

I promised I’d be brisk, but there’s a little more. The phony “compromise” on stem-cell research. Katrina – ah, yes, New Orleans. Can’t forget that. It, in turn, opens up an entirely fresh Pandora’s box peopled with unqualified incompetents and unyielding ideologues who were given their government jobs merely, or at least chiefly, because they swore a mafioso-like fealty to capo Bush and consigliere Karl Rove.

One more and I’ll stop. In 2003, the bookstore at the Grand Canyon mysteriously started carrying a book giving a “creation science” interpretation of the canyon, positing not that it is 4-5m years old, as rational people believe, but fewer than 6,000. After all, it couldn’t be older than the Garden of Eden, right?

The wreckage – intellectual, ethical, moral, and physical, in terms of the lives lost by our soldiers and Lord knows how many Iraqis – is everywhere. The shame, even if Americans prefer not to admit it to Europeans, is immense. We know what we have done. We know how bad it is. If you watch US television news, you will see roughly half the people presented defending Bush. But that’s only because TV has to strive for balance. Believe me, the real percentages are more like 80%:20%. Four out of five of my fellow citizens know we have erred.

For that reason, we can turn our attention now to Bush’s legacies-from-the-ashes, positive and wholly unintended. Without his failures and, crucially, our collective acknowledgment of them, we would not have elected last autumn a man who is both a history maker and (seemingly) an intelligent and competent empiricist who believes in considering actual evidence (!) before making decisions. Without his failures and our collective acknowledgment of them, we would not be resolved as we are – some of us are merely resigned, but that’s good enough – to start addressing our festering problems and proto-crises: our energy woes, our over-consumption of everything, our healthcare mess, our global condition.

The incoming president has a mandate to move on all these fronts. It is an astonishing and exhilarating thing to see; for the liberally inclined, an invigorating and, indeed, joyous time to be alive, as Wordsworth wrote à propos the French Revolution. Whether he will succeed, well, we shall see what we shall see. Without question, some hopes are too high. Human nature is human nature, despite what Marx and his inheritors thought. The communists couldn’t change it, and Barack Obama won’t change it either. He will succeed here and fail there.

But that isn’t the question for today. We will have four or eight years to delve into all that. The question for today is, does the opportunity exist, at this historical moment, for a reordering of national and global priorities on a scale greater than anything seen since the Great Depression and the aftermath of the first world war? Yes, it does.

And for this, paradoxically, we have Bush to thank. Speaking of Marx, you know how the Marxists used to say “the worse, the better”? The dialectic hasn’t always worked out the way they said it would, to put it mildly. But in the current case, it’s playing out pretty perfectly, no? Bush made things so much worse, made it so evident to almost all of us, that things can only get better. Maybe in all that heavy reading he’s allegedly been doing the last three years, Bush has a) become a secret liberal and b) dipped into enough Hegel to have learned how to set the dialectic in motion.

Or maybe he’s just a really lousy president. Who was in over his head to begin with. I wonder how it feels, how it really feels, to know that, outside of the obvious mass murderers, you were one of the worst leaders in the history of modern world. Because he knows it. He’ll never say it, but he knows it. I say, let him live with it, every day. And let the rest of us thank him for failing so colossally and then get on with the rebuilding.

courtesy The Guardian and The News

This is what they said about…..

1. Hey, hey, L.B.J., how many kids did you kill today? – Graffiti [At period of Vietnam War, Quoted in Robert Reisner, Graffiti]

2. The wrong war, at the wrong place, at the wrong time, and with the wrong enemy – General Omar Bradley (1893-1981) [at the Senate inquiry over General MacArthur’s proposal to carry the Korean Conflict into Chine, 15 May 1951]

3. When I invented the phrase ‘His Majesty’s Opposition’ [Canning] paid me a compliment on the fortunate hit- John Cam Hobhouse, Baron Broughton (1786-1869) [Recollections of a long life, ii Ch.12]

4. So?- Dick Cheney former US vice-president, when told that two-thirds of Americans did not support the war in Iraq.

5. If I had been present at the creation, I would have given some useful hints for the better arrangement of the universe- Alfonso the wise, king of Castile (1221-1284) [in W.R Inge, the End of an Age]

6. So too Plato was, in my view, a very unreliable Platonist. He was too much of a philosopher to think that anything he had said was the last word- Gilbert Ryle (1900-1976)

7. I cannot forgive Descartes; in all his philosophy he did his best to dispense with God. But he could not avoid making Him set the world in motion with a flip of His thumb; after that he had no more use of God- Blaise Pascal (1623-1662)

8. I don’t really feel like I need to respond to people that view it that way- Laura Bush, former First Lady, on critics who say that her husband’s presidency was a failure.

9. Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamp-post how it feels about dogs- Christopher Hampton (1946-) [Quoted in the Sunday Times Magazine, 16 Oct. 1977)

10. It’s been a long time coming, but tonight, because of what we did on this day, in this election, at this defining moment, change has come to America- Barack Obama [U.S. President, during his victory speech in Chicago’s Grant Park after winning the 2008 presidential election]

11. I have called this principle, by which slight variation, if useful, is preserved, by the term of ‘natural selection’- Charles Darwin (1809-1882) [On the origin of species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the struggle for life]

12. How can anyone govern a nation that has two hundred and forty-six kinds of cheese- Charles de Gaulle.

13. What is not clear is not French- Antoine De Rivarol (1753-1801)

14. Chatfield, there seems to be something wrong with our bloody ships today – Vice-Admiral Earl Beatty (1871-1936), [Attr. On sinking of battle-cruisers at Battle of Jutland, 30 May 1916, according to Winston Churchill]

15. ‘Why, what the D---l,’ cried the Captain, ‘do you come to the play, without knowing what it is?’
‘O yes, Sir, yes, very frequently; I have no time to read the play-bills; one merely comes to meet one’s friends, and show that one’s alive - Fanny Burney (1752-1840) [MME D’ARBLAY]

16. We could have saved six pence. We have saved fivepence (Pause) But at what cost? – Samuel Beckett (1906-1989) [All that Fall]

17. You won’t have Nixon to kick around any more, gentlemen. This is my last Press Conference- President Richard Nixon (1913-1994) [Press conference for governorship of California, 7 Nov. 1962]

18. You will find it very good practice always to verify your references, sir- Martin Routh (1755-1854) [Attr. By Burgon in Quarterly Review, July 1878]

19. The pyramids themselves, doting with age have forgotten the names of their founders- Thomas Fuller (1608-1661)

20. All of the great leaders have had one characteristic in common: it was the willingness to confront unequivocally the major anxiety of their people in their time. This, and not much else, is the essence of leadership- John Kenneth Galbraith (1908-) [The age of uncertainty]

21. He intended, he said, to devote the rest of his life to learning the remaining twenty-two letters of the alphabet- George Orwell (1903-1950)

22. What is hateful to you don’t do to another. This is the whole Torah [i.e. Law]; the rest is commentary- Hillel (A.D. 1st-6th cent) Rabbinical writings

23. To be alone is the fate of all great minds- a fate deplored at times, but still always chosen as the less grievous of two evils- Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860)

24. A leader does not deserve the name unless he is willing occasionally to stand alone- Henry A. Kissinger (1923-) [White House Years]

25. There will be no end to the troubles of states, or indeed , my dear Glaucon, of humanity itself, till philosophers become kings in this world, or till those we now call kings and rulers really and truly become philosophers- Plato (428-347 B.C.)