Thanks for the memories, Georgie Boy. You did a heckava' job. Wow. Did you ever. You helped killed the economy, laid the groundwork for the demise of American Hegemony, wasted trillions in a war that was completely unnecessary (Iraq), grew government and its powers to unprecedented levels, broke the laws that our Republic holds sacred as a constitutional democracy, forced Americans to compete with slave labor, let the fox guard the hen house in financial markets, spied on innocent Americans using their own intelligence services without legal cause, eroded civil liberties, failed massively in mitigating the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and left the Israeli-Palestinian relationship in even worse condition than when you inherited it. I could go on. But why? You will always be a miserable failure.
' You coudn't be more wrong. Geroge W. Bush was a great president who inherited a tech crash in 2000, then 911, Katrina, and other problems. I'm completely serial. Bush faced insurmountable challenges in his first four years that few other candidates could have handled as well as he did.
Most of Bush's economic and foreign policies will be carried over by the Obama administration. This is good for the US economy, and Bush deserves credit for laying the groundwork
I think I may have been one the first to make that claim sometime in 2005 or 2006. But let's not quarrel over spilled milk.
If Obama manages some kind of Houdini miracle in solving the multitude of problems that W has left for his successor, the only credit Obama will owe Bush is the old Ivy League polemic, "It's your half of the class that kept my half on top."
Here is what Bush did Secretary of State Rice begins with the broad point that they inherited a terrorism problem that had been ignored for years and allowed to grow until it exploded on 9/11. "Not just that, but we inherited a law enforcement mentality where you punished the crime after it happened, instead of trying to prevent the crime," she says. The new team is in fact getting a national security structure that has, over eight years, been retooled to deal with the terrorism threat. No small thing "What we inherited were the failed Camp David Accords, and as a result the Second Intifada." She recalls Palestinian bombings of clubs and pizza parlors, the shelling of the Bethlehem Church of the Nativity. "Yasser Arafat was in power, stealing people blind and working with terrorists. Ariel Sharon was elected not to bring peace, but to defeat the intifada." "We inherited a Lebanon with Syrian forces there for 30 years. Now, Syrian forces are out. . The Lebanese army is out in the country for the first time. And," she says, "they are friendly to the United States." Iraq. "Then? Saddam Hussein dragged the region into a war and lost over a million lives. It dragged the U.S. into war. He murdered his own people, terrorized his neighbors and sought weapons of mass destruction. Today? You have a multiethnic, multiconfessional democracy that isn't threatening its neighbors." Syrian forces in Lebanon and no democracy. Saddam Hussein in power, threatening his neighbors and us. The Taliban in Afghanistan. The Palestinians and Israelis in an open intifada. That was the better Middle East? And it wasn't as if politics wasn't going on -- it was just going on in radical mosques and the madrassas, whereas now it is going on in the open. And yes, once in a while the Hamases of the world will win, but frankly I'd rather have them out in electoral politics trying to explain how they will fix the sewer system than running the streets with their faces covered, being the glorious resistance." She even argues the Bush administration has succeeded in its goal of fundamentally altering the course of the Middle East. "Is it done? No. But we'd have never gotten on this different path without Iraq. You have to secure the gains, you have to keep working at it, but we are moving in an undeniably different direction in what is, some would say, geostrategically, the most important country in the Arab world." She concedes that "the Iranians have been more insistent than one would have expected given the level of isolation." She nonetheless makes the case that "strategically, the United States is in a stronger position," given its forces in countries that border Iran, and its security relationships throughout the Gulf. She also remembers that "when we came in, people wouldn't accept that Iran might be seeking a nuclear weapon. Now it is international policy that Iran has to stop enriching and processing." This unfortunate point leads Ms. Rice to one more observation, which might say more about the administration's diplomatic roundabouts with Iraq and North Korea than anything else. "Unless you really have a plan for regime change in the short term, then your goal just has to be to do everything you can about their nuclear weapons programs." This blunt assessment of the limits of "diplomacy" is one the new administration has yet to acknowledge. Asia now more than ever means China. Nearly forgotten is that the Bush administration's first international incident, in early 2001, involved a downed spy plane in a China that was far poorer, far more insular, and far touchier about its sphere of influence. Eight years of slow integration into the world community -- from WTO membership to the Olympic Games -- have made a difference. It matters, says Ms. Rice, that "we have been able to say what we want to say about Tibet, about human rights, and still keep a fundamentally sound relationship with China." She argues the administration is also bequeathing a China that is more open to a role in policing the region. Bottom line: "The world is tough, but it's no tougher now than when we came, and some pockets of it are a lot, lot better," she says. With this she pushes away from the table and sweeps off to catch a plane to another part of the world.