The Test of Time
What do fifteen of the smartest people in the room—presidential scholars, best-selling biographers, and White House veterans of both parties—think history will say about the legacy of George W. Bush? And is there anything he can still do to change it?
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ELSPETH ROSTOW
WE’RE DEEP IN THE AGE of what one scholar calls “intermesticity.” This is the twinning of the domestic and foreign agendas so closely that you can’t make a significant impact on one side without having a comparable impact on the other. George Bush is caught in this age of intermestics. He has moved in the direction of making a successful outcome in Iraq, his mantra, as an illustration that in that part of the world it is possible to achieve freedom and liberty. He is now in the stage when his legacy will include, quite possibly, Iraq as an example for the neighborhood, yes, but also as a seedbed for intransigence, insurgency, terrorism—precisely the opposite of what he’d hoped. The story is not over yet; we don’t know how the surge will play out. We don’t know whether Bush will be able to buy time between now and the election next year.
Irrespective of what happens between now and the end of his term, what Bush will leave as his legacy is a diminution of support for the United States abroad. This is not measured just in the decline of the U.N., it’s not measured just in the number of countries that have distanced themselves from the hegemonic position of the U.S., but it’s measured by the change in international attitudes toward the United States immediately in the aftermath of 9/11 and by the sour mood of 2007. This is a real cost, because support is going to be of the essence to Bush’s hope that the United States model is the one that will be replicated in the Middle East. I see very few countries that are anxious to follow in Bush’s footsteps. The costs of Bush’s policies are obvious: the blood and treasure being expended in Iraq, the reduction of collective security as a concept, the alienation of former allies, as well as the possibility of a permanent hostility between Muslim and Judeo-Christian worlds. There are other aspects, in terms of energy and oil dependency, that have not been given attention by the Bush administration. All of this is at a cost that can be measured in dollars but can also be measured in historical trends, and these are not going favorably for the Bush administration.
Because of this notion of intermesticity, so much attention and coin of the realm have been dedicated to Iraq that we have impoverished our domestic programs. Think of global warming. Think of environmental decisions that have been counter to at least a significant part of the thinking of the scientific and public policy communities. There’s a range of activities that has detached us from international agreements and from working in the international context with deliberation as opposed to hegemony and unilateralism. All of this is a matter of record, and I would classify it as part of the conventional wisdom.
The first thing I would do, if I were advising Bush, is say that it is not too late to reverse some aspects of the neglected domestic agenda. I’d isolate a few things, as he did when he was governor, and stick to them. I’d think of some overarching cliché—for example, the “New Community”—and give it three elements: education, health care, and the environment. He should call for a series of national meetings and bring together the best minds in the country to improve education from kindergarten through higher education and to revive research. Do the same thing for health care. Call for a national town meeting. See what we can do on the issues of cost and access. In other words, direct the nation’s attention away from its obsession with Iraq and talk about something new and promising in which he will be the leader—a leader who can listen as well as talk, who is willing to be experimental and flexible in contrast to the rigidity of the Bush administration so far.
H. W. BRANDS
WHAT GEORGE W. BUSH has done is institutionalize unbalanced budgets. He inherited the most favorable budget condition of any president probably since Andrew Jackson. The budget was in surplus, and there was an opportunity to address the two issues that have been hanging over the heads of American administrations for the past thirty years—namely, what do we do about health care and Social Security? Bush has not only kicked those two issues down the road, he’s made them much larger by cutting taxes, and at a time when there was no pressure whatsoever to cut taxes. But he had an ideologically driven insistence that taxes must be cut regardless of the consequences. Well, what has happened is the budget has spun out of balance. It’s going to take decades to bring it back, and as long as it’s so far out of balance, there’s going to be almost no hope of dealing with these legacy issues. And this at the time when baby boomers are starting to retire, when the strain on those two systems is going to be greater than it’s ever been.
Just as cutting taxes was a decision that didn’t have to be made, the same can be said of his foreign policy: There was no groundswell of demand for a war against Iraq. Sure, there was all sorts of support for a war on terror, and a lot of people thought there was a logical connection between the attack of 9/11 and an attempt to clean the Taliban and Al Qaeda out of Afghanistan, but there was no grassroots support in the United States, no large political opinion, pushing him to go to war against Iraq. It was something he decided to do on his own, an utterly elective war. And it’s going to take a long time to undo the negative consequences. A lot of presidents when they come into office are faced with decisions that they have to make. These were two decisions that Bush didn’t have to make at all. And I happen to think in both cases he got it wrong.
I don’t know if the situation in Iraq is salvageable. I’m one who believes that there was a reason that Saddam Hussein ran Iraq as long as he did. Iraqi society was so unstable because Iraq itself is this fiction of a country; there’s no coherence. The only thing that held it together was the strongman at the helm. So maybe the administration will come up with somebody who’s not quite the thug that Saddam was but nonetheless is able to impose a measure of order. Maybe it can get what in Vietnam was called the decent interval, a time where we can pull out and allow six months, eighteen months, two years to lapse before the sky falls in. Then you can more credibly blame it on the Iraqis than on the United States.
Those people who want to say that George W. Bush is the worst president in history have to deal with the comparison to James Buchanan, the president at the time of secession, the one who essentially let the South leave, but I think that in certain respects, if one doesn’t like Bush’s policies, Bush is more culpable than Buchanan. Buchanan didn’t bring secession on. He may have made mistakes in dealing with it, but it wasn’t as though he chose to make this thing happen. I think that’s going to be the biggest criticism of George W. Bush: The things that he chose to have happen—cutting taxes and going to war in Iraq—were not decisions he had to make at all. He decided to do these things utterly on his own. The fact that he got them both wrong is going to really tell against his historical reputation.
DONALD L. EVANS
PEOPLE’S PERCEPTIONS TODAY are not necessarily what they’ll be years from now. Historians will see the president’s achievements more clearly in the future. When they look at what this president has been all about—what dramatically, in the early days of his presidency, changed the course of the world—they’ll see that he has done extraordinarily well at protecting America and extraordinarily well at planting the seeds of democracy and freedom in the Middle East and beyond.
I think he’ll get great credit for understanding the challenge that America all of a sudden faced after 9/11. Yes, terrorism was out there and people knew about it and they knew about Osama bin Laden. But it wasn’t until our country was attacked on its own soil that we recognized the seriousness of it, that it would require not just a U.S. response but a global response. He quickly realized that it was a defining moment and understood the responsibility that he had as a leader, that America had as a leader, to take the battle to the terrorists—to begin, in earnest, the war against terrorism. It begins with the security of America. We haven’t, knock on wood, been attacked since 9/11, but not for lack of effort by our enemies. They’re still out there. Their desire is to attack America, to take us down. The president understands that. And to a great degree, that has shaped his presidency.
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