A Current History Lesson

It is interesting to read the posts on social networking sites, from democrats, libertarians, and republicans blasting President Bush. What is truly interesting is how much of the conversation by all of them is the regurgitation of media and democrat talking points that people on both sides have embraced and parrot. I will be the first to admit that President Bush was anything but a conservative, but once this current fever dies down and history is written on these years, it will be very kind to George W.

After the 1996 election and before the impeachment process had gained momentum, Bill Clinton stood atop the political world. He successfully claimed credit for reforming welfare and for getting NAFTA passed; and he had mastered the new political art of triangulation. Pockets of hard-core liberalism on the West coast and in New England especially, but Clinton thrived largely by taking credit for conservative legislation, such as welfare reform, passed by the republicans. Most of all, he pointed to the apparently healthy economy. All of these benefits fell on the obvious democrat nominee, incumbent VP Al Gore, who had easily won the democrat nomination. Seldom in American history had a sitting vice president lost during times of peace and prosperity.

In late 1999 a new star appeared on the GOP horizon, when popular Texas Governor George W. Bush threw his hat into the ring. The son of a former president, Bush or Dubya, as he was called to differentiate him from his father, had gone to Midland, TX, to Andover and Yale, where he admittedly achieved mediocrity. A typical frat-boy, Bush graduated and served as a lieutenant in the air national guard, where he flew F-102 fighter planes. He received his MBA from Harvard, the first president to do so, where he began to take his education more seriously. Returning to Midland, he attempted to make a career in the oil business, but it went badly, Bush and other investors had started a small company just as oil prices plunged worldwide. When his father ran for president in 88, Dubya worked on his campaign as a speechwriter and made enough contacts to put together a partnership to purchase the Texas Rangers baseball team in 89. Running the team as managing general partner, Bush later joked that his only noteworthy accomplishment had been trading home run star Sammy Sosa to the Chicago Cubs. In fact, he did an excellent job restoring the team to competitiveness on the field and solvency on the books.

After a wild youth in which he gained a reputation as a regular partygoer, Bush experienced a religious conversion in 88, later becoming the first modern presidential candidate to specifically name Jesus Christ as the chief influence on his life. During the debates with Gore, Bush handled the pressure by fingering a tiny cross in his pocket. Time and again, whether in the post election recount turmoil, Bush’s religious faith was front and center. He had become, easily, the most publicly religious president since Lincoln.

Bush and Gore finished a historically close election, with recounts, law suits, and finally going to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court ruled 7-2 that the hand counting process that Gore’s team was pushing for violated federal equal protection clauses because of the absence of objective standards on the dimpled chads and other ballots. Gore conceded, Polls showed that most people believed the Court had reached its opinion on merits of the case, not partisan leanings. Numerous media-sponsored recounts occurred in the wake of the election, well into may 2001. Most concluded that Bush would have won under any standard. A more ominous overtone emerged from the election. It revealed a divided America identified by the colors on a countrywide map. The counties Bush carried were colored red and Gore’s blue. Gore carried only 677 counties in the United States, whereas Bush won 2,434, encompassing more than 2.4 million square miles to the blue states of just 580,000 square miles. Most striking, with few exceptions, from New York to California, the entire map is red. Gore won some border areas, the coasts, and a thin line stretching from Minnesota down the Mississippi River. The visual representation of the election was stunning, with virtually all of the interior United States, or as the elites call fly over country, voting for Bush. It appeared that the democrats had been isolated into a few urban coastal cities, increasingly divorced from middle America.

Although, the transition was delayed by the Gore election challenge, Bush had his cabinet lined up even before the election. Colin Powell, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was secretary of State, and Donald Rumsfield, a former secretary of defense in the Ford administration, was tapped to be secretary of defense. Not only did Bush appoint the highest ranking African American in American history in Powell, but he also named black Stanford professor Condi Rice as his National Security advisor, making her the highest ranking black woman in the United States, and the first woman named to a national security position. Rod Paige, Bush’s secretary of education, became the first African American in that post. By the time Bush finished his appointments, he had more African Americans, women, and minorities in positions of power than any other administration in history.

Bush’s agenda of programs included a tax cut, partial privatization of Social Security, education reform, and deployment of the Strategic Defense Initiative, (SDI), Pressing ahead with his agenda, Bush advanced a broad tax cut plan to revive the economy that had started to stall during the last year under Clinton. The tax cuts involved a tax rebate for every American as well as longer term tax reductions. With support from several Senate democrats the package passed. An education reform bill also emerged from Congress, emphasizing teacher accountability and test scores. The democrats stalled Bush’s judicial nominations, effectively blocked any discussion of Social Security reform, and nipped at the edges of the tax cuts.

September 11th , 2001 the world changed. One of the worst days in American history, once again showed the metal that is in the back bone of Americans. I am not going to write the history and stories from that day, here, they deserve full attention and not to be lost in this study on George W. Bush as president, even though they are now as much a part of him as his own DNA.

As soon as the second tower was hit, and it was then known that this was a concerted terrorist effort and not an accident Bush and the Joint Chiefs of Staff immediately ordered a massive manhunt for those responsible. “We’re going to find who did this. They’re not going to like me as president,” he said. Bush was more blunt to Cheney, We’re going to find out who did this and we’re going to kick their asses.” That evening the president went on television to address the nation. “These acts of mass murder were intended to frighten our nation into chaos and retreat, but they have failed. Terrorist attacks can shake the foundations of our biggest buildings, but they cannot touch the foundation of America.”

Six months after the attacks, FBI agents, diplomats, and reporters produced shards of evidence that the United States had had warning about 9/11. Yet a memo here and a report of suspicious activity there, dropped into the massive pile of more than three million pieces of intelligence information accumulated per day by the CIA and NSA alone, constituted no warning at all. If anything, Congress learned that much of the information that intelligence agencies had accumulated had crashed into bureaucratic walls. The separation of the CIA and FBI prompted by the democrats in the wake of Watergate and exacerbated by a directive in the Clinton administration (referred to as the Wall Memo) now returned to plague the U.S. Intelligence services. Over the next several months, the Bush administration studied the breakdown in intelligence, proposing the massive reorganization of the government since the New Deal, highlighted by the creation of the Dept. of Homeland Security, which would facilitate information flow between the FBI, the CIA, and NSA.

Immediately after 9/11, the president still had to rally the nation, displaying the proper balance of defiance, sympathy, compassion, and resolution. Arguably his best speech, and one of the most moving presidential speeches since Reagan’s ode to the Challenger crew in 86, it was delivered on 9/14/01, designated by Bush as a national day of prayer and remembrance. One of the first things that the president did was to request that all Americans pray, and pray often, not only for the victims and their families, but also for the nation.

“On Tuesday, our country was attacked with deliberate and massive cruelty. We have seen the images of fire and ashes, and bent steel. Now comes the names, the list of casualties we are only beginning to read. They are the names of people who faced death, and in their last moments called home to say, “Be brave, and I love you.” War has been waged against us by stealth and deceit and murder. This conflict was begun on the timing and terms of others. It will end in a way, and at an hour, of our choosing.”

After Bush spoke to a room bursting with emotion, he flew to Ground Zero. He walked in amid the firemen and rescue workers he took the only public address system available, a bullhorn and began to address the crowd. The bullhorn cut out during the president’s remarks and someone shouted, “We can’t hear you.” Bush tried again, an again the shout came, “We can’t hear you,” at which point the president reacted on instinct, responding, “I can hear you, the rest of the world hears you, and” (pointing to the spot where the buildings stood, he shouted, “and the people who knocked these buildings down will hear from all of us soon!”

“It starts today!”

On 9/17/01, Bush met with the war cabinet, presenting the members with an unequivocal task. “It starts today,” he said. “The purpose of this meeting in to assign tasks for the first wave of the war against terrorism.” Bush had already solicited advice: “I want the CIA to be the first on the ground” in Afghanistan, he instructed: “We’ll attack with missiles, bombers and boots on the ground,” he concluded. As for Bin Laden, Bush told the press he wanted the terrorist “dead or alive.”

On 10/7/01, a massive series of air strikes in Afghanistan smashed mainline Taliban forces, allowing the special forces and regular military, who bad been airlifted in, to join forces with the Northern Alliance of anti-Taliban fighters, Code-named Operation Enduring Freedom, this was Bush’s “new kind of war,” lacking long clear battle lines and instead of using selected air power, highly trained commando and special forces units, and above all, electronic and human intelligence to identify and destroy Al Queda and Taliban strongholds. The UK Telegraph reported that a handful of U.S. Green Beret teams, directing air power before finishing the job on the ground, had killed more than 1,300 Taliban and Al Queda fighters. “You bomb one side of a hill and push them over and push guys the other way. Then, when they’re all bunched up, you drop right on them.”

Nevertheless, it took the press only a few weeks to flip from patriotic to harsh, with journalists invoking the shopworn “Vietnam” and “quagmire” lines less than a month into combat. Newsweek’s Evan Thomas prophesied that the United States would need 250,000 troops on the ground, the real total was 20,000. Terry Moran, the White House correspondent for ABC, dourly asserted, “I think the bad guys are winning.” ABC’s Cokie Roberts grilled Rumsfeld, claiming, “There have been stories that give the perception that this war, after three weeks, is not going very well.” In fact, the journalists missed the evidence in front of their faces. Once the war on terror had been engaged, it played out along the same lines as most other western versus nonwestern conflicts. American air power utterly dominated the battlefield, and as in the Gulf War, the “combination of the information revolution and precision munitions produced a quantum leap in lethality.” Small units of special ops troops on the ground guiding the bombing with laser targeting, provided pinpoint targeting to enable the smart weapons to shatter Taliban forces on the ground. War analyst Victor Hanson summed up the combat situation; “Glad we are not fighting us.”

The U.S. military employed dynamic, not static, tactics. An armored division might be used for one purpose, a smart bomb for another; Green Berets and Delta Force for certain tasks; air power for yet others. In many ways, Operation Enduring Freedom was even more successful than Desert Storm, routing the Taliban and Al Queda and searching them out in Tora Bora Mountains, where Bin Ladin was thought to be holed up, either injuring him or at least driving him further underground where he made no verifiable appearance in two years. The more subtle American financial attacks were shutting down much of the worldwide financial network supporting Al Queda and establishing a civilian functioning government in Afghanistan. One year after the attacks, it was thought that close to half of Al Queda’s leaders were dead or in custody.

Bush has promised to carry the war not only to the terrorists but also to “those who harbor them,” a clear threat to such Muslim states as Iran, Iraq, Sudan, and Yemen. Bush made matters even plainer in his January 2002 State of the Union Speech in which he referred to Iraq, Iran, and North Korea and other “states like these” as an “axis of evil” that had allied themselves with terrorists. It was abundantly clear which rogue states were next on the 9/11 hit list. Evidence that Saddam Hussein had links to Al Queda terrorists, combined with continued reports that Iraq had violated United Nations resolutions requiring the nation to allow in weapons inspectors, made Hussein the next obvious target in the terror war. Soon, other nations were reminded that 9/11 was an attack on all nations that embraced freedom and democracy.

The results of the first year and a half of the war on terror were impressive but difficult to fully evaluate, given the secretive nature of man of the important accomplishments. At minimum:

Several hundred Al Queda were captured and interrogated.
Approximately two dozen of bin Ladin’s top Al Queda leaders were dead or in custody.
The Taliban were eradicated as the governing force in Afghanistan, and a new democratic government was installed. Schools previously closed to women were opened, and a spirit of liberty spread through a land that had known little before.
The FBI and CIA and allied intelligence agencies had successfully prevented another attack. Riady and Jose’ Padilla (the dirty bomber) had both been arrested before perpetrating any terrorist acts; several Al Queda cells (in Buffalo, Detroit, and the Pacific North West) were captured. In addition, British Spanish, Moroccan, German, and other foreign intelligence networks had bagged several dozen Al Queda suspects.
Millions of dollars in assets tied to Al Queda worldwide were frozen in U.S. and friendly banks.
Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, Ramzi Yousef’s uncle and the tactical mastermind behind the 9/11 plot was captured.
In 2004, a raid in Pakistan captured one of Al Queda’s top computer nerds, Muhammed Khan, whose treasure trove of information threw the doors open to capturing dozens of cell members and breaking up a planned attack on the United States.

Many analysts suggested that the Bali bombings, the multiple attacks in Africa on Israeli embassies in late 2003, the Spanish train bombings in 04, and bombings in Turkey and Saudi Arabia in 04 indicated that Al Queda could no longer get through U.S. security and was therefore forced to strike softer targets. Of course no one in the Bush administration or in the security agencies of America’s allies believed the war on terror was over, but important inroads had been made into enemy geographical and financial strongholds.


Going into the summer of 2002, the Democrat controlled Senate, thanks to it’s one-vote margin provided by the defection of Jim Jeffords, had elevated South Dakota’s Senator Tom Daschle to majority leader position. With his slim margin, Daschle successfully blocked Bush’s judicial nominees, held up drilling for oil in the Artic National Wildlife Refuge, (ANWR), and stifled any attempt to cut taxes or otherwise stimulate the economy. Going into the 2002 mid-term elections historically would go to the opposition and the democrats believed that they would pick up two dozen seats in the House and two in the Senate. However, the republicans actually gained seats in both houses of Congress and increased their state legislature gains by some 200 seats. The results was an unprecedented midterm elections. This feat was even more impressive historically because of the timing of the Senate seats, the republicans had to defend twenty, but the democrats only had to defend fourteen. In the fall Bush brought a war resolution to Congress forcing the democrats, including John Kerry, to put themselves on record as supporting it. Bush then took his case to the UN in a powerful speech in which he offered not one shred of new evidence against Saddam Hussein, quite the contrary, he outlined eleven years of Iraqi violations of the UN’s own resolutions. It was a masterful performance to the extent that it forced the UN to either act against Iraq or admit impotence and become completely irrelevant. The UN gave the administration a new resolution, and even Syria voted yes.

Unlike Reagan, Bush used his majority to push big government programs such as a prescription drug bill and education reform, signing the single biggest entitlement since the Great Society, the Medicaid prescription drug bill. He rolled back some traditionally liberal bastions, such as in the area of abortion, where his executive orders actually restricted abortions on federal property and with federal funds. In 03 he signed into law a ban on partial birth abortion, where the abortionist delivers the late term baby feet first leaving only the head in the birth canal and then drive a tube into the back of it’s head and suck out the babies brains. Later Obama came out on record that it was a terrible day in America that this procedure was no longer legal. What a creep.

Since 9/11, the administration had received information tying Saddam Hussein’s Iraq to Osama bin Laden’s terror network. Salman Pak, a training facility in Iraq, featured 737 jetliner fuselages that served no other purpose except to give terrorists practice at taking over aircraft. The Iraqi foreign minister paid a visit to Czechoslovakia prior to 9/11, where, according to Czech sources, he met with hijacker Mohammad Atta. There were numerous other connections. Bush and his team decided that it was too dangerous to allow Al Queda to obtain chemical or biological weapons that virtually all nations had conceded were in Iraq. Clinton and Gore both had warned of the dangers of WMD’s in Iraq. Iraqi dictator, Saddam Hussein, however, refused to allow United Nations inspection teams to search his facilities, and he defied 14 UN resolutions. Bush gave him one last chance.

Behind the scenes, France, Germany, and Russia, all with powerful economic stakes in maintaining Saddam in power, sought to derail American and British attempts to establish a final enforcement date of Resolution 1441. Building a larger alliance of nations than even his father had in 91, Bush termed it “the coalition of the willing” on 3/17/03, Bush gave Saddam and his sons 48 hours to leave Iraq or face war.

Bush launched a single intensive air strike against a location where informants had said Saddam and his sons were. Saddam wasn’t killed but instantly the Iraqi army began to behave as though it has lost all command and control. Coalition forces tore through Iraqi resistance. Never had so many prognosticators and journalists been so wrong about so much, the elite Republican Guard, which supposedly would fight for every inch of Baghdad, collapsed without a fight. On April 9th, in just over two weeks of fighting, mostly against irregular troops, American armor swept through the desert and into the center of Baghdad. Once local residents realized Saddam was indeed gone, large celebrations began, with Iraqis throwing flowers and cheering American soldiers with “Bush, Bush, Bush,” and “We love America!” That day, in what was sure to be one of the most memorable scenes in the new century, Iraqi civilians, aided by American trucks, tore down a massive statue of Saddam in the center of Baghdad, then proceeded to drag the head around town as people beat it with their shoes and spat on it.

Nothing less that a complete transformation of war had been witnessed by the world, which saw 20th Century mass tactics with ancillary large casualties replaced by a techno war of unparallel proportions. The United States and allied militaries added a new element of unprecedented levels of special ops forces used laser targeting devices to focus precision bombs so finely that there was virtually no collateral damage to civilian buildings or noncombatants. Yet the precise targeting was so perfect that tanks hiding underneath bridges were blown up without damaging the bridge above them, and Saddam’s main command and control buildings were obliterated while shops next door remained open for business.

Iraq was a demonstration on the “western way of war” at it’s pinnacle, or what one Middle Eastern commentator glumly labeled an example of “Mesopotamian show and tell.” The message was not lost on other regimes in the region or around the world. Libyan dictator Muammar al Qaddafi soon announced he was giving up his arsenal of WMDs. It was unstated that he didn’t want the United States to have a Libyan version of show and tell. On June 28th , an interim free Iraqi government took official control of the nation and Hussein entered pleas before a judge within a week. Within a period of two years, Bush had effectively cleaned out two major terrorist harbors, neutralized a third, and prompted internal democratic change in Saudi Arabia.

We won the wars but once again as we had in previous conflicts screwed up the after game just like we did in Afghanistan in the 80s while supporting the Afghans against the Soviets. Now once again we are paying the price for not finishing what we started well. If you read this to this point, you will see that though many on both sides of the political aisle like to beat up on President Bush, much of what he accomplished was quite impressive and history will treat him very kindly.