George W. Bush is getting ready to open his library on Mission Accomplished Day, so he’s beginning to talk to the press a little bit. I’ve enjoyed his silence since he left office. I think he should stay silent.
Since he left office, Bush has been a punching bag for Obama, Democrats and even some Republicans. But while he said “nobody likes to be criticized all the time,” he brushed aside the constant pummeling.
“I’m comfortable with what I did,” he said. “I’m comfortable with who I am.”
Bush’s confidants said that’s real talk, too.
O’Neill, the childhood friend, said Bush’s “conscience is clear.” Jim Francis, a Dallas businessman and top Bush campaign fundraiser, said the former president has “been pretty immune to what people say or think about him.”
…He likewise reiterated his support for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, saying that he’s “confident the decisions were made the right way.”
I don’t know what he should say. I would go for “Please don’t lock me up, I’m very sorry.” I’d still lock him up, but I’d consider dropping the enhanced interrogation techniques.
I’m joking, of course. I don’t want to torture the former president. I just wonder why we pretend that he shouldn’t be on trial in the Hague.
We shouldn’t “lock him up” because if we were going to prosecute former presidents we’d have to prosecute all of them. Every president since WW2 has pretty well documented crimes that should land them in the Hague. Not a damn one of them is clean. There’s also a pretty clear chain where military/intelligence types took the war crimes of WW2 and imported them into Korea, which then got imported into Nam, then all over South America, and then into Iraq. So nothing has changed.
What made the Bush Administration unique wasn’t the atrocities it committed. It was the flagrant bragging about it on national TV by waving them around as a badge of honor and a sign they were tough. Rather than just covering that shit up and saying “I have no idea what you are talking about”. That and the epic mishandling of everything.
Of course this went on prior to WW2 as well. It’s just back then we really didn’t feel what we did to say the American Indians was all that bad.
Most partisans are only really comfortable locking up or putting on trial people on the other side of the isle. And that’s a can of worms the establishment probably doesn’t want opened because then everybody would be on trial.
The entire concept of war crimes or crimes against humanity is largely bullshit. We say they are illegal so we can pacify people that we aren’t doing that because it’s illegal. Bush just made the mistake of parading it around in public like it was a badge of honor. He could have learned something about not doing that from say his dad, or every other president before him.
Perhaps admitting your crimes is the real crime, then. Or perhaps trying to redefine a crime as legal and losing the legal battle in the courts is the real crime.
When it comes to violating international law, it’s true that all our presidents have done it to some degree or another. Bush is the one who tried to legalize torture which is against American law.
When Ronald Reagan armed the Contras, he broke American law and people went to jail. Other people resigned in disgrace.
That’s quite a bit different from what Obama has done. If Congress doesn’t want drone-strikes, they need to make them illegal.
We still torture along the same lines that Bush did as well. The thing is, we’ve always done that. It’s just that up until W we claimed we didn’t do it because it was illegal. Even when it was right there in our face that we were doing it. Then we classified the crap out of it. So much so that it’s only now the true amount of involvement with the Shah or what really went down in Vietnam is starting to creep out. And of course that was long enough ago nobody cares now and most of the guilty are dead (or still plying their trade as advisers under classified cover and thus largely off the books).
The difference with Bush is that he came out and bragged about it.
Trying to get it prosecuted is silly. Our wealth and quality of life is built off murder and torture full stop. Thus it has always been.
This isn’t to say that Bush shouldn’t legally or morally be prosecuted. Far from that, it’s to say that all of our presidents post WW2 should have been hanged in the Hague if you want to be honest about it. It’s to say that it will never happen, so arguing that it should happen to the one President who was stupid enough to brag about it rings hollow. The rot is complete, and it is not isolated to Bush.
We still torture along the same lines that Bush did as well.
I don’t suppose you’d care to back up that claim.
Because I call bullshit.
I wish Dubya or Cheney would travel more to other countries so that there is a greater chance of them being arrested.
Slightly related…
John Yoo and others are banned from entering Russia.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/apr/13/russia-bans-18-americans-visa-sanctions
It’s interesting that the corporate media think this is a problem in Russia-US relations. I don’t see the downside for the US.
I found that story about Yoo, Addington, etc very interesting. Or rather, the way NPR reported it was interesting: they managed to do it without naming names.
And here I thought Bush’s silence was because they don’t allow reporters in Gitmo. Silly me.
Also, too: A presidential library? For the least literate president ever? I hope it contains a copy of “My Pet Goat.” And public readings of it. Dramatic readings.
Re: “My Pet Goat”:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pet_Goat
My bad. Somehow I’d forgotten that most reports got the name wrong.
Yes, I’m bitter. The commenter above is correct that all US presidents since WWII have been war criminals – with the possible exception of the guy who died 30 days into his term, it’s probably true going back to the founders, though it was only in the last 130 years or so that we exported our crimes outside North America. But in addition to his audacity,smugness, and dishonesty, the sheer number of victims of Bush – probably a million deaths in Iraq alone in a completely capricious war, along with all the other various wars – set him apart from everyone except Nixon and perhaps Johnson for sheer scale of atrocities. And they didn’t manage to also crash the economy, something that shouldn’t even be possible when you’re spending that much money on war.
Also, I understand that in US politics, the deaths of brown people are irrelevant, but I’ve never understood why there wasn’t more conservative blowback against Bush for unnecessarily putting US soldiers in harm’s way (and getting some of them killed, too). It used to be that our soldiers were politically sacrosanct. But now that the enlisted ranks are volunteers and thus largely poor people’s kids, they seem to be a lot more disposable, both during and after their service.
Make that “outside the Western Hemisphere.” Monroe Doctrine, and all.
Nixon and Johnson, while fools, at least informed part of their decisions on the need to avoid WWIII and the end of human kind.
Put another way, if you accept that some espionage and torture and killing is acceptable to avoid wide wars and death then it surely must b acceptable that some “crimes” are not war crimes if they avoided wars.
My only point is that when Bush unapologetically flaunts behaviors we only accept rarely and with great regrets then be deserves what he gets .
In my humble, there are probably more similarities in the FP of Bush and Johnson than not. Their policies deserve to be discussed almost in tandem.
Two ignorant, ill-educated Texans, both with a highly simplistic and uninformed grasp of FP, both determined to show their manhood by showing the flag in unnecessary far-off places, at great detriment to both countries involved, as both lied about the need to go in with highly orchestrated congressional votes. The economies suffered too. In Johnson’s case, he deliberately delayed asking for a tax hike to pay for VN, at least in the early years, in order to keep voices in opposition to his war to a minimum, and arguably thereby stuck a poison pill of looming inflation into the system which would emerge in the 1970s (according to economists and historians I recall reading).
Texas, well-known for its cost-cutting measures with things having to do with D.C., ought to merge Junior’s and Lyndon’s libraries into one, save a few bucks on building construction and display panels.
Okay, a bit over the top, but the Bush = LBJ (FP) part I stand by.
But now that the enlisted ranks are volunteers and thus largely poor people’s kids, they seem to be a lot more disposable, both during and after their service.
Wow. No, not even close.
Have you never read about World War 1, World War 2, Korea, Vietnam, or the Civil War? The U.S. military has never been as careful with the lives of enlistedmen as it is today. They used to throw crowds of poorly-trained men onto beaches under withering fire in the hope that some of them would make it out of the water with some useful equipment before they died.
As it turns out, needing to get people’s consent instead of being able to conscript them is an incentive to treat them better, and to be more careful with them.
Nothing different here. He could not reassess, recalibrate, redirect or admit even the slightest error while in office. He is not going to now.
It is a tough job and no matter what I would not want a former president to be too consumed with regrets, but any former president, as a patriot and as a natural leader, I would like to see some humility and genuine advice to current leaders. Why not? They have nothing to risk except to be honest with themselves.