Category | Op Ed

President Bush is not useless

Published on March 25, 2008 by The Sentinel

    I never thought I’d find myself praising President Bush or anything
he’s done, but as I’ve learned we heal through pain, so here goes.

    Thanks to his ill-advised invasion of Iraq and
subsequent occupation, we have painfully learned the limits of military
power.  Future administrations will hopefully rely more on
diplomatic and economic pressure before resorting to such drastic and
intemperate means of resolving problems that displease us.  Iraq
has hopefully disabused Americans from getting involved in nation
building; something Bush opposed himself when running for President in
2000.  Almost one trillion dollars later we’re also hopefully
learning the economic lesson for trying to impose our will on other
nations.  That’s a bill we will be paying for decades to come.

    Thank you also President Bush for pointing out the
wisdom of building coalitions with our allies.  Your father did
that masterfully in the run-up to the First Gulf War and so did many of
your predecessors in their times of crisis.  Your “go it alone”
mentality has truly exposed the limits of our military as they endure
repeated and extended deployments, stop loss orders, and the
like.  Hopefully your successor will be able to rebuild coalitions
to resolve other problems such as North Korea, Iran, and
elsewhere.  Yes, assembling coalitions is “hard work,” a favorite
phrase of yours, but ultimately those coalitions pay dividends. 
One of your predecessors put it best when he said “trust but
verify.”  It is clear you have trust issues, but sometimes you
have to take a leap of faith and work with nations and leaders you
distrust while keeping your powder dry.

    With the Executive and Legislative branches at
gridlock on legislation we come to another point: thank you for
teaching us the importance of compromise.  It would have been nice
to strike some deal on privatizing some Social Security contributions,
but your foolish all-or-nothing gambit slammed shut the door on even
the smallest bit of experimentation.  Ditto for legislation on
stem cell research, extensions of visas for specific foreign workers,
and a raft of other issues most Americans supported.  I’m guessing
your successor will be far more interested in rolling up his or her
sleeves and getting to work rather than clearing brush at their ranch
in Texas.

    And there’s still more.  Your laissez faire
approach towards business has allowed unprecedented conglomerations to
emerge in communications and media, tainted food, drugs and toys to
enter our nation and poison us, and weak oversight of the financial
markets led to the sub-prime meltdown which is now pulling down the
investment community with it. In a desperate bid to ensure liquidity,
the market has been flooded with currency as the printing presses run,
driving the dollar to record lows against world currencies and
threatening inflation while creating massive deficits. The growing lack
of confidence in America as a safe place to invest as well as
questioning our business acumen is probably the worst damage and the
most surprising from someone who has an MBA from Yale University. 
How the next President undoes all of what has happened with our
finances and business oversight is a tough issue to resolve. 
Again, healing will come with pain and it will take considerable time,
effort and the right set of economic circumstances to undo it all.

    You can learn as much from bad leadership examples
as you can from good examples.  Our nation has been blessed with
extraordinary leaders at times of gravest crisis: George Washington,
Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin Roosevelt.  And yet for every
Lincoln there was a Buchanan who ignored addressing a serious issue
facing our nation.  Worse still were Harding and Coolidge who
impassively sat idly by allowing the seeds of the Great Depression to
be sown and flourish.  Yet we’ve learned a great deal from the
errors of Buchanan, Harding, and Coolidge.  Bush likes to say
he’ll let history be his judge.  I have a sense of where it will
fall already.