The 'Decider': Can
anything save George W. Bush's legacy?
Le
Figaro, France
The Hope of Bush's Legacy: Amnesia
"If he has the lucidity to recognize that he had
something to do with the election of Barack Obama, George W. Bush must know
that he has a long way to go to regain the esteem of his contemporaries. That will
require time to pass and amnesia to do its work."
When asked to comment on how history will judge his decision
to declare war on Iraq, George W. Bush likes to reply: “History? How can one
know? We'll all be dead … ” Considering the dozens of interviews he has
recently granted the press, the 43rd president of the United States is not
indifferent to the image he will leave to his contemporaries.
George W. Bush leaves the White House on January 20th
with a sorry record: he is the most unpopular president the United States has
known for a very long time.
Overseas, such opprobrium is widely shared. The shoes that
failed to hit him in the face during a press conference in Baghdad testify to
the extremely negative reaction he often elicits. In the era of the Internet,
this type of incident leaves a mark on history and could, in non-stop televised
re-runs on YouTube, summarize his entire presidency.
George W. Bush’s supporters have found a
precedent in the person of Harry Truman. Before the passage of time
rehabilitated him, the successor to Franklin D. Roosevelt left the scene in
1953 amid widespread disapproval. Credited with having resisted Stalin and
consolidated the Atlantic Alliance [NATO] that would win the Cold War, Truman
is today thought better of than a number of his successors.
It’s a tempting parallel. Like Truman with
communism, will history record that Bush stood up to the barrage of Islamist
terrorism? That, in any case, is the legacy the president of September 11 would
like to leave, even if the doctrine of “war against terrorism” doesn't survive
him.
In his many declarations in the form of confidence
about the result, the outgoing president is attempting to gain the upper hand
over his detractors by giving his vision of history where, more often than not,
he is the figure most often accused.
Clumsily, George W. Bush acknowledges to
having made some mistakes. On the television Channel ABC, he confided that he
was not “prepared for war .”
The absence in Iraq of weapons of mass
destruction was the turning point of his presidency, reducing to nothing the
arguments offered to justify the invasion. The outgoing president’s “biggest
regret” will be, logically, “the intelligence failure in Iraq. … That's not a
do-over, but I wish the intelligence had been different, I guess."
Bush doesn't feel responsible for the
bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers and the banking debacle that followed. He prefers
to discuss the 52 months of growth that preceded these and declares that the
trend to deregulate the economy preceded his arrival at the White House.
Posted by WORLDMEETS.US
If he has the lucidity to recognize that
he had something to do with the election of Barack Obama, George W. Bush must
know that he has a long way to go to regain the esteem of his contemporaries. That
will require time to pass and amnesia to do its work.
