President Bush

George W. Bush has published his memoirs. All of this is designed to improve his image. It might do this if we caught a glimpse of a wiser man, who could see that things did not work out as planned. Instead we saw self  justification for a range of bad judgement calls and flawed decisions. People across the world are dismayed at his enthusiasm for torture, or cruelty that he thinks is not torture. The picture revealed is not the one intended. What is revealed is a fool. A fool who cannot even see when the plate is broken, is the biggest fool of all.

The tragedy for George W. Bush is that he became President. Without the dynastic connection to his father and the help of the deluded neo-con lobby he would not have. He is a decent man, a loyal friend and was an effective governor of a conservative and traditionally independent state. The Presidency was way above his pay grade.

It is a tragedy for America that he was in the White House to respond to 9/11. Though a spectacular attack with an appalling death toll, its purpose was to goad. This it did. To thwart the purpose of terrorism is to defeat it. To confront it is to nurture it. What Bush needed to do at that point was to be measured and subtle. He was bombastic and aggressive. He stoked his nation’s anger and played into the hands of AlQaeda. The outcome is three wars, on Afghanistan, Iraq and on Terror. Ten years on, all have failed. None are yet totally lost, though Iraq is pretty close, but none can be won.

If John Kennedy had been in the White House on 9/11 we can only speculate, with some confidence, in a better outcome. If Bush had been President at the time of the Cuban missile crisis we do not have to speculate upon the outcome. We know it. We would not be here. The civilised world would have been obliterated in a massive nuclear exchange. Looked at that way we all got lucky.