Time has come for Bush era to end
The view being promulgated by much of the media, and especially TV, is that the Bush brothers' dramatic staged appearance in South Carolina last week was a successful political stroke, a final answer to the terrors of Trumpism, maybe even a presidential tour de force.
George W., after all, was funny - he always was a charming rascal. Jeb! followed him, seemingly invigorated by siblings' unspoken bonds, and gave the best speech of his until-now hapless presidential run.
But when you look a little deeper, last week's reunion wasn't such a success at all. In fact, except for those folks who don't remember the facts of our disturbed nation's history over the last 15 to 30 years, Americans wouldn't be wrong to say it was a moment that personified the failures this nation has endured.
Indeed, for historians, the brothers' Southern strategy may come to represent not only the downward decline of the admirable Bush family's part in America's story, but also the decline in the power and influence of the Eastern Establishment that this family personified.
Remember that some months ago, Barbara Bush, a remarkable woman not given to foolhardy dreams of adventure beyond our shores, declared publicly that Jeb! should not run for the presidency this year. In effect, she said, enough of the Bushes! She was right.
Her incredible husband, the often-underestimated George H.W. Bush, had been, by any fair account, one of the finest presidents of our lifetimes. He ushered out the Cold War with style, brought the Middle East together at the Madrid Conference, defeated Saddam Hussein in the Gulf War and billed the Arab states, and gave the world a vision of America as a nation of style, civility and hope. One tragedy of our times is that this President Bush was not given a second term by the voters.
Many Americans doubtless thought his son, George W. Bush, would provide a rerun of his dad - me included. As a journalist, I should have known. I was privileged to spend 11 hours with him when he was running for president, and one could not help but like him. Yet he talked only about things like "compassionate conservatism" and "cottage industries" - ideas that never were heard of again once he was president. When I asked him about foreign policy, he admitted he didn't know much, but that he was a "fast learner."
He wasn't. When 9/11 happened, he and his pliable ambitions were already in the hands of Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld and the whole crowd of "neo-cons," who were primarily pro-Israel, men like Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith. When the chance to enter the Middle East militarily came after 9/11, Cheney and the neo-cons wanted to invade Iraq largely as a supposed security measure for Israel, while Rumsfeld was more taken with the adventure of a "quick war." The word "empire" kept bobbing up in their talks about a future American role in the world.
We know what happened then. Iraq was not one mistake, not even just THE mistake of invading it. Iraq - it now has become a noun representing ALL the mistakes a great nation can make out of uncontrolled hubris - was a series of blunders, each one so serious that the entire fiasco/adventure/disaster has for now resulted in a world of uncontrolled terrorism.
Coleen Rowley is a former FBI special agent whose May 2002 memo to the FBI director exposed some of the agency's intelligence failures prior to 9/11. She recently blogged about that era:
"For Bush to have seized on the neoconservatives' dream of a 'new Pearl Harbor,' and turned his administration's massive failure into a deceitful argument to launch war on Iraq, a country that had nothing to do with 9/11 and even served as a secular bulwark against the Saudis' Wahhabi-style terrorism, is the epitome of a foreign policy blunder that only continues to magnify in disastrous blowback."
At this point, we must ask - as, indeed, Donald Trump has repeatedly done - what Jeb! would do, were he suddenly tasked with the ultimate responsibility for the world his brother would so lovingly hand to him. The answer is hardly gratifying.
Little known to the electorate, although they may sense it, is the fact that Jeb! has already hired most of the neo-cons who gave us the Iraq War, the Afghan war, the disintegration of the Iraqi army and thus the ISIS leadership, the removal of Baathist (secular) power in the Middle East and in turn the Syrian war. There they all are, lined up loyally behind Jeb! and telling us we will never escape them.
As for Dick Cheney, he's right out there. In an interview on Fox News the day before the South Carolina dual presentation, the former vice president said that Trump was doing a "disservice" to those who served in the wars in the Middle East. What a crowd! Cheney got five - count them, FIVE! - deferments for military duty during the Vietnam War. Said he had better things to do.
Thus, it would seem that we can, without tears, write Jeb! off as a genuine presidential hopeful this year. The family doesn't seem to understand what George W.'s presidency did to us as a moral people, as a great nation and as the leader of the world. But voters understand.
One writes this neither casually nor out of anger, but simply out of honesty. We simply cannot bear another presidency filled with George W.'s people.
Email Georgie Anne Geyer at gigi_geyer@juno.com.
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