Bush made the world a safer place

We may jeer him and tell him to go home, but America's allies continue to benefit from some of George Bush's decisions.

Jimmy Carter was cheered when he visited Newcastle with Jim Callaghan. Bill Clinton was lauded in Northern Ireland. But it is more usual, at least with more consequential holders of the office, for American presidents to be told by European demonstrators to go home.

The postwar history of our continent would be different and less benign if the United States had heeded that message. His office, and the system of collective security from which we benefit, would be justification enough to welcome President Bush's visit to London this week. But there is an additional reason peculiar to the Bush presidency. For all Bush's verbal infelicity, diplomatic brusqueness, negligence in planning for post-Saddam Iraq, and insouciance regarding standards of due process when prosecuting the war on terror, the world is a safer place for the influence he has exercised.

When Bush ran for president in 2000 he was an isolationist advocate of scaling back America's overseas commitments. But after 9/11, he was right in not interpreting the attack as confirmation that America was stirring up trouble for itself. The theocratic barbarism responsible for the attack on the Twin Towers was driven not by what America and its allies had done, but by what we represented. In the words of Osama bin Laden, illegitimately appropriating for himself the mantel of Islam, "every Muslim, the minute he can start differentiating, carries hate toward Americans, Jew, and Christians".

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 Gus: woof!!!  For a while I thought this fellow writing this piece was doing it in jest... But sadly, he was not. In the end he wrote: "Whoever succeeds Bush as president will benefit from some decisions well conceived if often badly executed. So will America's allies."

Yep... The successor to this president will have a lot of mopping up and sandbagging to do and will have to pay for the massive breakage in the fine china shop. We're already paying for it anyway. "When Bush ran for president in 2000 he was an isolationist advocate of scaling back America's overseas commitments"... What a lot of poopy-cock!!!... Bush always had — like the presidents before him — the duty of Empire and he, adjunct with Cheney as the VP for oil robberies, was always going to be Julius Dubya, the master of the known universe. You did not believe for one second what he was sprouting before being elected, did you?

And as far as making the world safer, tell that to those who died and those who got refugee-ed... and the many who are worse than ever because of his decisions. The only one better off have been the profiteers, leeching from us all...

Although secrecy and loyalty have been bywords of the Bush White House, its officials have been improbably loose-lipped upon leaving office, particularly in the memoirs they have written. So far, there have been exposés from Paul O’Neill (Bush’s former Treasury secretary), Richard Clarke (his onetime counterterrorism czar), David Kuo (deputy director of the White House’s faith-based initiative), L. Paul Bremer III (the former top civilian in Iraq) and the foreign-policy hands John Bolton and Douglas J. Feith. Each of these books has been a record, to some extent, of disillusionment, and all have excited a good deal of attention. But perhaps none have had the force of “What Happened,” the new memoir by Bush’s former press secretary, Scott McClellan, which has zoomed to the top of the best-seller lists (including the Book Review’s) and brought fresh scrutiny to an administration that had been all but invisible during this election season.

The book’s impact is all the more remarkable given how familiar its revelations are, whether it’s McClellan’s crushingly obvious remarks about the administration’s selling of the Iraq war, Bush’s contempt for the press or Vice President Dick Cheney’s penchant for secrecy. As Joshua Green wrote in The New York Observer, “For all the hype on cable news shows and blogs, ‘What Happened’ adds almost nothing of value to the historical record.”

What may, in fact, be most revealing about McClellan’s book is not what it discloses about the head of state, but what it says about the continuing devaluation of the political memoir as a literary form. Paradoxical though it may seem, even as these books have become more accusatory, they have also become less illuminating. While they were once useful and sometimes absorbing accounts of the inner workings of government at its highest levels, these books now tend to be exercises in apostasy, and their primary purpose seems to be to confer intellectual and moral independence, if not heroism, on their authors. “Forty years ago, publishers had a pretty high standard for who should write books,” the historian Michael Beschloss, who is based in Washington, said in a telephone interview. “There were fewer books published. You had better possess some literary ability.”

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Gus: "McClellan’s crushingly obvious remarks about the administration’s selling of the Iraq war"...

I find this cute ... written in a paper that took the hook, line and sinker from GWB in 2002, and eventually apologised to its readers for doing so — a few years later... The early battle of information versus disinformation was left in the hands of a few rabid loonies like us who were exposing, sometimes in details, the way the con was being played out.

In the blog above, I meant to say, as I have mentioned many times, there were other options than going to war and kill people in Iraq. We knew there was never any threats of WMDs in Iraq, just a beat-up by GWB to achieve a "purpose" (which McClellan still can't see...). Diplomacy is difficult and skill-full, while war, such as the Iraq war, is nothing more than a bad pub brawl between thugs, at international level. In this case the bouncer searched for trouble with intent to steal the wallet of the customer.

As this other article (below) suggests, a terrorist responded far better to "conversation" rather than to "torture" which the USA under GWB grandiosely lying leadership "does not do"...

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WASHINGTON — In a makeshift prison in the north of Poland, Al Qaeda’s engineer of mass murder faced off against his Central Intelligence Agency interrogator. It was 18 months after the 9/11 attacks, and the invasion of Iraq was giving Muslim extremists new motives for havoc. If anyone knew about the next plot, it was Khalid Shaikh Mohammed.

The interrogator, Deuce Martinez, a soft-spoken analyst who spoke no Arabic, had turned down a C.I.A. offer to be trained in waterboarding. He chose to leave the infliction of pain and panic to others, the gung-ho paramilitary types whom the more cerebral interrogators called “knuckledraggers.”

Mr. Martinez came in after the rough stuff, the ultimate good cop with the classic skills: an unimposing presence, inexhaustible patience and a willingness to listen to the gripes and musings of a pitiless killer in rambling, imperfect English. He achieved a rapport with Mr. Mohammed that astonished his fellow C.I.A. officers.

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So diplomatic "conversation" does far better than bamboos under the nails... It brings an acknowledgement that despite their despicable acts,"terrorists" such as Khalid Shaikh Mohammed are people with a "purpose" too, whether we like it or not. An interview with real empathy will do far more than sticks... It does not mean we have to "buy" all that is said but amongst the rubbish, there will be gems that we would not get otherwise.

Sometimes you see interviewers on the box cutting in or trying to put their own viewpoint on the talent they are interviewing (this can come from signals relayed by the floor manager from the director instructing to go for the jugular). The result is mostly a slanging match in which the viewers learn nothing. Nothing more than two uncivilised thugs brawling. Some TV executive may call this "great TV" but it regresses the "purpose" of debates and obtains no valuables, except scandalous tit-bits. It does not help democracy nor civilisation...

Now, Mr McClellan was instrumental is making sure the porkies from the White House were disseminated. He knew they were inflated like hot air balloons. He knew he was part of the propaganda... He smoked the stuff but appears he did not inhale... or so little...

Well good for him for doing whatever, but really he was only a small underling doing his job. I would believe he never knew of the deeper manipulation from within the White House, although McClellan had a whiff of the bad smells... He was paid to turn them into roses. Prickly roses. For me, he did his job with no exercised ethics then and he is now full of guilt. He probably was full of guilt then... but sinning is so exciting for you, especially when the devil pats you on the back with great praise and makes you an offer you should but "cannot" refuse.

San Francisco to vote on naming sewer after George Bush

By Guy Adams in Los Angeles
Friday, 27 June 2008
 
Some presidents get carved into Mt Rushmore; others have airports, motorways, and even entire cities named in their honour. But when George Bush leaves office, his most visible memorial may be a mouldering patch of human effluent.

In November, alongside casting their ballot for the next president, the people of San Francisco will also vote on a measure to rename one of the city's largest sewage works the George W Bush Sewage Plant, to provide a "fitting monument" to the outgoing commander-in-chief's achievements.