The Political Inquirer

The past eight years have been interesting ones. We have seen an attack on the United States by radicalized Muslims, we have seen one large recession and the beginning of what could be a major depression, we have seen our military send troops to two different countries in large numbers and we have seen China and Iran rise to be power players in world politics. But there is one man we can look to for the blame on much of our current problems: the President of the United States.

I will bluntly say that I believe George W. Bush to be one of the three worst presidents in history. The other two are Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt.  They all had horrible domestic affairs, but their biggest blunder changed not just the future of our country, but of the world at large–forever. These three can be considered our three greatest “wartime” presidents, the three that had influence throughout the world and tried to reshape governments and nations for democracy.

Woodrow Wilson destroyed the stable European systems of government that had sound money, some individual freedom, and free trade. The world was changed forever after the Great War, but not for the better. The war created an economic condition that made Italy ripe for fascism and Germany for the rise of Hitler. It was at this point FDR made many blunders–perhaps the biggest being his absolute love of Josef Stalin and the alliance with the Soviet Union, a government that committed evils that dwarf that of Hitler. Half the world was controlled by the Soviet Union due to this unholy alliance. I would go into more detail on these two presidents, but the subject is George W. Bush this time.

Our modern foreign policy is in a world where the United States has crushed Europe, the Soviet Union is defeated, and the Republican opposition to Clinton’s Balkan wars has won. Bush’s election was ran on a foreign policy of humility:

“I think the United States must be humble,” Bush said during a televised presidential debate last October [2000]. “We must be proud and confident of our values, but humble in how we treat nations that are figuring out how to chart their own course.”

It is too bad he did not listen to his own advice. Bush’s cabinet and advisors was made up of members of the Project for a New American Century, a group of self admitted neoconservatives that hoped for a terrible event to spark a reason to wage war to bring about democracy and regime change around the world.

“The process of transformation is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event—like a new Pearl Harbor.”

Our past president has given foreign money to countries that did not deserve it, he has violated our Constitution on all foreign matters, he has tortured prisoners and is responsible for the deaths of many that needed not die.  How did all this come about? He did not listen to his own advice nor to that of the last president that was the son of a president. John Quincy Adams wrote a famous statement on American foreign policy (entirety here):

Wherever the standard of freedom and Independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.

Our president did not choose to obey the words of President Adams. Our foreign policy is one searching for monsters to destroy. Some will object, saying that we were fighting for the freedom of individuals in Iraq and Afghanistan after chasing out the terrorists–Adams called this one more than a hundred years ago, too:

She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom. The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force…. She might become the dictatress of the world. She would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit….

Our foreign policy has become one of force and not of liberty. It is dictated by idealogues and economic interests that do not care for the rule of law or liberty but only for their own selfish gain. It is romantic to try to justify George Bush as a great president or one that did the best he could under difficult circumstances, but anyone who does so is simply fooling themselves. I was a diehard Republican conservative in 2000 and I stayed that way until late 2005. It was by this time I began to see that the excuses for the war in Iraq were not legitimate. A study of colonial history showed that we were making the exact same mistakes as every other Empire from the British to the French to the Roman. We had not learned from history, we were repeating it.

And it was, this time, George W. Bush’s fault.

Every president makes their own decisions and cannot be responsible for the ones made by past presidents. Bush, however, chose to go a direction that would exacerbate the problems of our past presidents and create a world that is not only hostile to the United States but lead the country into economic ruin and prepare the way for a possibly worse tyrannical leader, Barack Obama.

In the name of fighting terrorism Bush has neglected to look at the root causes of terrorism. You cannot wipe out an entire religion, you can only fight ideas with ideas. By fighting terrorists on the basis of force, we have only given reason for terrorists to believe they are fighting a noble fight to the death. This does not mean we should not have punished the terrorists responsible for attacking us–but our expeditions into Afghanistan and Iraq were not for these reasons, no matter what our government wants us to believe. It was a colonial expedition fueled by economic and ideological reasons. The terrorists have, in one sense, won. They are crippled, but our increased foreign aid to tyrannical governments like Egypt, Tunisia, and Saudi Arabia as well as our occupation into central Asia and the Middle East have only thrown fuel on the fire of terrorism–it just hasn’t started burning yet. We may very well have started a “century long war” as John McCain wanted. But it will not be one of us destroying the terrorists, but of our neoconservative leaders destroying us.

I do believe that here on the domestic front things will get worse. George Bush has wrecked the economy by putting faith in the Federal Reserve Chairman and by abandoning “free market principles” (not that he ever had any to begin with). Bush was Woodrow Wilson on the foreign policy front and Herbert Hoover on the domestic front*. Both believed in government being the solution to a problem. Their errors made the population ready for Franklin D. Roosevelt, who changed the world again and not for the better as we’ve been told to believe. Barack Obama is this new FDR, and it is Bush’s complete fault for his election.

A humble foreign policy, a true belief in free markets, and immediately ending aid to foreign countries would probably have prevented those terrorist attacks in September of 2001. It is too bad Bush did not act sooner on his campaign promises or we could have avoided eight years of tiresome politics and maybe had an “era of Good Feelings”. Farewell to Bush, the one who accelerated the End of America.

*Contrary to popular opinion Herbert Hoover actually instituted “New Deal-lite” policies that FDR later copied, only at a greater extent. I believe the same will be true with the Obama-Bush economic situation.