2008 Woodie Awards
Defining failure
Joe Caporoso
Issue date: 4/17/08 Section: Op/Ed
Various historians have claimed that George W. Bush's presidency will go down as one of the worst. A recent poll by the History News Network asked one hundred and nine professional historians to rank his presidency as a success or failure. Ninety eight percent characterized it as a failure, while sixty one percent ranked him as the worst president ever. Ouch.
How do you define failure for George W. Bush and is that an accurate characterization of his eight years in office?
Bush didn't pay enough attention to the evidence about the dangers of Osama Bin Laden before September 11. Yet, both the Clinton and Bush administration deserve blame for ignoring the mounting evidence presented by the CIA. After the attacks, Bush invaded Afghanistan but instead chose to make Iraq the primary front for the war, dedicating more troops to the preemptive war he declared in Iraq.
Bush told America we needed to invade Iraq because we were in danger of them attacking us with weapons of mass destruction, except in reality there were no weapons. Bush told America that Saddam Hussein and Iraq had a connection to September 11, but in reality there was no connection. Bush should have looked for a connection with his best buddies in Saudi Arabia, where fifteen of the nineteen hijackers came from.
In reality, the primary two reasons we invaded Iraq were incorrect. If you want to claim we invaded them because of the human rights abuses suffered by their people, then why not invade the Sudan or Saudi Arabia? Regardless, we invaded Iraq and within months Bush was declaring "Mission Accomplished." Unfortunately, nobody told the President how complicated a true victory in Iraq would be. Maybe he should have taken a time machine to 1992 and listened to Dick Cheney, who had things to say about war with Iraq then, when defending Bush's father's decision not to remove Saddam from power:
"The question in my mind is how many additional American casualties is Saddam worth? And the answer is not very damned many. So I think we got it right, both when we decided to expel him from Kuwait, but also when the President made the decision that we'd achieved our objectives and we were not going to go get bogged down in the problems of trying to take over and govern Iraq."
How do you define failure for George W. Bush and is that an accurate characterization of his eight years in office?
Bush didn't pay enough attention to the evidence about the dangers of Osama Bin Laden before September 11. Yet, both the Clinton and Bush administration deserve blame for ignoring the mounting evidence presented by the CIA. After the attacks, Bush invaded Afghanistan but instead chose to make Iraq the primary front for the war, dedicating more troops to the preemptive war he declared in Iraq.
Bush told America we needed to invade Iraq because we were in danger of them attacking us with weapons of mass destruction, except in reality there were no weapons. Bush told America that Saddam Hussein and Iraq had a connection to September 11, but in reality there was no connection. Bush should have looked for a connection with his best buddies in Saudi Arabia, where fifteen of the nineteen hijackers came from.
In reality, the primary two reasons we invaded Iraq were incorrect. If you want to claim we invaded them because of the human rights abuses suffered by their people, then why not invade the Sudan or Saudi Arabia? Regardless, we invaded Iraq and within months Bush was declaring "Mission Accomplished." Unfortunately, nobody told the President how complicated a true victory in Iraq would be. Maybe he should have taken a time machine to 1992 and listened to Dick Cheney, who had things to say about war with Iraq then, when defending Bush's father's decision not to remove Saddam from power:
"The question in my mind is how many additional American casualties is Saddam worth? And the answer is not very damned many. So I think we got it right, both when we decided to expel him from Kuwait, but also when the President made the decision that we'd achieved our objectives and we were not going to go get bogged down in the problems of trying to take over and govern Iraq."