Bush’s Legacy

September 4, 2007 at 10:25 am | Posted in American politics, Bush Administration, George W Bush, Iraq, King George, Middle East, Republicans, Revising History, secret combinations | Leave a comment

If you have paid close attention these past six years to President Bush, you’ll learn one very important thing. He doesn’t like leaving behind a recorded trail that ties him to the bungling mess that was his creation. He wishes to remain accountable-free of all the messes he created. It is the only way he can justify that his actions are “right.” Most importantly, it is the only way he sees that his legacy will not be tarnished by his mistakes. He can’t have a recorded account of him admitting to anything bad. Abu Ghraib? Not his problem—those were the grunts’ fault. Torture? Certainly not his call. That’s the CIA’s baby. Losing Iraq? No way was it his fault. No, that’s the Democrats for not backing him fully. Every mistake is someone else’s fault in Bush’s eyes. Nothing can touch him.

So just this past week, when interviewed for the New York Times, Bush was asked about the policy of letting the Iraqi Army go free and unemployed, probably the worst decision of the war. What was Bush’s reply?

In an interview with Robert Draper, author of the new book, “Dead Certain,” Mr. Bush sounded as if he had been taken aback by the decision, or at least by the need to abandon the original plan to keep the army together.

“The policy had been to keep the army intact; didn’t happen,” Mr. Bush told the interviewer. When Mr. Draper asked the president how he had reacted when he learned that the policy was being reversed, Mr. Bush replied, “Yeah, I can’t remember, I’m sure I said, “This is the policy, what happened?’ ”

He can’t remember? The biggest, most important decision of post-war Iraq and he can’t remember? Or is it that he doesn’t want a recorded account of him actually saying that it really was his decision. Well, Paul Bremer, who is the man who executed that policy doesn’t apparently want to be Bush’s fall guy. He reveals that indeed, Bush KNEW.

A previously undisclosed exchange of letters shows that President Bush was told in advance by his top Iraq envoy in May 2003 of a plan to “dissolve Saddam’s military and intelligence structures,” a plan that the envoy, L. Paul Bremer, said referred to dismantling the Iraqi Army.

Mr. Bremer provided the letters to The New York Times on Monday after reading that Mr. Bush was quoted in a new book as saying that American policy had been “to keep the army intact” but that it “didn’t happen.”

The dismantling of the Iraqi Army in the aftermath of the American invasion is now widely regarded as a mistake that stoked rebellion among hundreds of thousands of former Iraqi soldiers and made it more difficult to reduce sectarian bloodshed and attacks by insurgents. In releasing the letters, Mr. Bremer said he wanted to refute the suggestion in Mr. Bush’s comment that Mr. Bremer had acted to disband the army without the knowledge and concurrence of the White House.

“We must make it clear to everyone that we mean business: that Saddam and the Baathists are finished,” Mr. Bremer wrote in a letter that was drafted on May 20, 2003, and sent to the president on May 22 through Donald H. Rumsfeld, then secretary of defense.

After recounting American efforts to remove members of the Baath Party of Saddam Hussein from civilian agencies, Mr. Bremer told Mr. Bush that he would “parallel this step with an even more robust measure” to dismantle the Iraq military.

One day later, Mr. Bush wrote back a short thank you letter. “Your leadership is apparent,” the president wrote. “You have quickly made a positive and significant impact. You have my full support and confidence.”

Kinda sucks for Bush when not all his players play the same game. Don’t they all know the rules of chess? The knight is supposed to fall and die for his king!

Let history judge correctly that Bush is at the heart of all the bad policies to have come out of our government these past six years. The buck does indeed stop with him and none other. His legacy is a failed Iraq. His legacy is a failed Afghanistan. His legacy is legalizing torture. His legacy is secret spying on Americans. That is the legacy of George W. Bush. His legacy is not peace. His legacy is not a stabilized Middle East. His legacy is not success. It is failure.