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    Who's to blame for the Afghanistan chaos? Remember the war's cheerleaders | George Monbiot

    OpinionAfghanistanWho’s to blame for the Afghanistan chaos? Remember the war’s cheerleadersGeorge MonbiotToday the media are looking for scapegoats, but 20 years ago they helped facilitate the disastrous intervention Wed 25 Aug 2021 02.00 EDTLast modified on Wed 25 Aug 2021 05.53 EDTEveryone is to blame for the catastrophe in Afghanistan, except the people who started it. Yes, Joe Biden screwed up by rushing out so chaotically. Yes, Boris Johnson and Dominic Raab failed to make adequate and timely provisions for the evacuation of vulnerable people. But there is a frantic determination in the media to ensure that none of the blame is attached to those who began this open-ended war without realistic aims or an exit plan, then waged it with little concern for the lives and rights of the Afghan people: the then US president, George W Bush, the British prime minister Tony Blair and their entourages.Indeed, Blair’s self-exoneration and transfer of blame to Biden last weekend was front-page news, while those who opposed his disastrous war 20 years ago remain cancelled across most of the media. Why? Because to acknowledge the mistakes of the men who prosecuted this war would be to expose the media’s role in facilitating it.The main lesson from Afghanistan is that the ‘war on terror” does not work | Mary KaldorRead moreAny fair reckoning of what went wrong in Afghanistan, Iraq and the other nations swept up in the “war on terror” should include the disastrous performance of the media. Cheerleading for the war in Afghanistan was almost universal, and dissent was treated as intolerable. After the Northern Alliance stormed into Kabul, torturing and castrating its prisoners, raping women and children, the Telegraph urged us to “just rejoice, rejoice”, while the Sun ran a two-page editorial entitled “Shame of the traitors: wrong, wrong, wrong … the fools who said Allies faced disaster”. In the Guardian, Christopher Hitchens, a convert to US hegemony and war, marked the solemnity of the occasion with the words: “Well, ha ha ha, and yah, boo. It was … obvious that defeat was impossible. The Taliban will soon be history.” The few journalists and public figures who dissented were added to the Telegraph’s daily list of “Osama bin Laden’s useful idiots”, accused of being “anti-American” and “pro-terrorism”, mocked, vilified and de-platformed almost everywhere. In the Independent, David Aaronovitch claimed that if you opposed the ongoing war, you were “indulging yourself in a cosmic whinge”. Everyone I know in the US and the UK who was attacked in the media for opposing the war received death threats. Barbara Lee, the only member of Congress who voted against granting the Bush government an open licence to use military force, needed round-the-clock bodyguards. Amid this McCarthyite fervour, peace campaigners such as Women in Black were listed as “potential terrorists” by the FBI. The then US secretary of state, Colin Powell, sought to persuade the emir of Qatar to censor Al Jazeera, one of the few outlets that consistently challenged the rush to war. After he failed, the US bombed Al Jazeera’s office in Kabul. The broadcast media were almost exclusively reserved for those who supported the adventure. The same thing happened before and during the invasion of Iraq, when the war’s opponents received only 2% of BBC airtime on the subject. Attempts to challenge the lies that justified the invasion – such as Saddam Hussein’s alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction and his supposed refusal to negotiate – were drowned in a surge of patriotic excitement.So why is so much of the media so bloodthirsty? Why do they love bombs and bullets so much, and diplomacy so little? Why do they take such evident delight in striking a pose atop a heap of bodies, before quietly shuffling away when things go wrong?An obvious answer is the old adage that “if it bleeds it leads”, so there’s an inbuilt demand for blood. I remember as if it were yesterday the moment I began to hate the industry I work for. In 1987, I was producing a current affairs programme for the BBC World Service. It was a slow news day, and none of the stories gave us a strong lead for the programme. Ten minutes before transmission, the studio door flew open and the editor strode in. He clapped his hands and shouted: “Great! 110 dead in Sri Lanka!” News is spectacle, and nothing delivers spectacle like war.Another factor in the UK is a continued failure to come to terms with our colonial history. For centuries the interests of the nation have been conflated with the interests of the rich, while the interests of the rich depended to a remarkable degree on colonial loot and the military adventures that supplied it. Supporting overseas wars, however disastrous, became a patriotic duty.For all the current breastbeating about the catastrophic defeat in Afghanistan, nothing has been learned. The media still regale us with comforting lies about the war and occupation. They airbrush the drone strikes in which civilians were massacred and the corruption permitted and encouraged by the occupying forces. They seek to retrofit justifications to the decision to go to war, chief among them securing the rights of women.But this issue, crucial as it was and remains, didn’t feature among the original war aims. Nor, for that matter, did overthrowing the Taliban. Bush’s presidency was secured, and his wars promoted, by American ultra-conservative religious fundamentalists who had more in common with the Taliban than with the brave women seeking liberation. In 2001, the newspapers now backcasting themselves as champions of human rights mocked and impeded women at every opportunity. The Sun was running photos of topless teenagers on Page 3; the Daily Mail ruined women’s lives with its Sidebar of Shame; extreme sexism, body shaming and attacks on feminism were endemic.Those of us who argued against the war possessed no prophetic powers. I asked the following questions in the Guardian not because I had any special information or insight, but because they were bleeding obvious. “At what point do we stop fighting? At what point does withdrawal become either honourable or responsible? Having once engaged its forces, are we then obliged to reduce Afghanistan to a permanent protectorate? Or will we jettison responsibility as soon as military power becomes impossible to sustain?” But even asking such things puts you beyond the pale of acceptable opinion.You can get away with a lot in the media, but not, in most outlets, with opposing a war waged by your own nation – unless your reasons are solely practical. If your motives are humanitarian, you are marked from that point on as a fanatic. Those who make their arguments with bombs and missiles are “moderates” and “centrists”; those who oppose them with words are “extremists”. The inconvenient fact that the “extremists” were right and the “centrists” were wrong is today being strenuously forgotten.
    George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist
    TopicsAfghanistanOpinionSouth and Central AsiaUS politicsTony BlairGeorge BushcommentReuse this content More

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    Donald Rumsfeld obituary

    Donald Rumsfeld, who has died aged 88, arguably did more damage to the US’s military reputation than any previous secretary of defence. An unbendingly ideological approach to international affairs, and a conviction that he could micromanage the vast resources of the Pentagon like those of a private company, ensured not only that the US became enmeshed in a disastrous and costly campaign in Iraq from 2003 but that it would be vilified for its harsh treatment of the country’s citizens.As the war dragged on with little sign of progress and pressure grew for him to be replaced, President George W Bush initially declared that Rumsfeld would hold his post until the end of the presidency in January 2009. But in November 2006, in the aftermath of the scandal of torture and abuse of prisoners at the Abu Ghraib military detention centre in Baghdad, the Army Times, voice of an outraged military, roundly declared that “Rumsfeld has lost credibility with the uniformed leadership, with the troops, with Congress and with the public at large. His strategy has failed, and his ability to lead is compromised.”A few days later, voters in that year’s midterm elections endorsed this blast with an electoral drubbing for the Bush administration. Rumsfeld was immediately sacked, and largely disappeared from public life. In 2011 he published a memoir, Known and Unknown, in which he defended his handling of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq – and used to lay into any member of the Bush administration who had dared to dissent from his views. He took the title of the book from the celebrated remark he had made in 2002, when asked about the lack of evidence to support the White House’s assertion that Iraq was supplying terrorist groups with weapons of mass destruction: “As we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say, we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns, the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”Rumsfeld was the only politician to have taken charge of the Pentagon twice. In 1975, at 43, he became its youngest-ever head under President Gerald Ford, holding the post for just over a year, and then, at 68, its second oldest, when Bush junior brought him back in 2001.In his second period in the role, he was at first was compared to his 1960s predecessor Robert McNamara, who had effectively outwitted a bloated military bureaucracy to rationalise America’s defence posture. But McNamara had stuck to broad strategy and left the fighting to the generals (disastrously, as it turned out in Vietnam). Rumsfeld, a successful businessman with an unrivalled understanding of Washington’s bureaucratic maze, believed he could tear the whole structure up by the roots and drag it, totally reformed, into the new century.His abrasive administrative style became notorious, taking the form of a blizzard of short, unsigned notes, which questioned anything and everything about equipment and doctrine. But he had barely settled in to his Pentagon office when his wide-ranging plans were brought sharply to earth by 19 men wielding Stanley knives.The terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 not only made members of the new Bush administration realise that there was no such thing as Fortress America, but also had an immediate personal impact on Rumsfeld. He was at his desk being briefed by CIA officials when the hijacked American Airlines Boeing 757 crashed into the south-west wing of the building. He rushed to help in the rescue work before moving into the military command centre to deal with the wider crisis. His then became the most resolute voice at the cabinet table and he acted as the administration’s hardline front man in America’s call for a worldwide coalition against terrorism.Between October and December 2001 the administration, with British support, launched retaliatory attacks on the Afghan Taliban regime for sheltering Osama bin Laden. The regime, though not its resistance, collapsed, but the seemingly irrelevant issue of attacking Iraq had also been proposed by Rumsfeld and such administration hawks as the vice-president, Dick Cheney. The two had earlier served together under presidents Richard Nixon and Ford; when Rumsfeld became Ford’s chief of staff at the White House in 1974, Cheney was originally his deputy and later took over the job when Rumsfeld went to the Pentagon.During the Ronald Reagan years, Rumsfeld – by then running a highly profitable business – was sent to meet Saddam Hussein in the US’s effort to counter the Khomeini regime in Iran by re-establishing diplomatic relations with Iraq. His briefing for the visit included intelligence reports on Saddam’s use of chemical weapons both in the war with Iran and against his own people.In 2001 Rumsfeld was still obsessed with the issue and cited it as one of the reasons to justify an attack, a proposition strongly resisted by the secretary of state, Colin Powell. When Powell was eventually won over, the US’s international campaign against Iraq’s reputed weapons of mass destruction got under way, culminating in the military assault opened by the US and its coalition partners in March 2003.Underlying the chaos of the subsequent occupation had been Rumsfeld’s unshakeable belief that the Iraqi population would greet the invading coalition forces with jubilation and that everyday life in the ensuing secular democracy would resume within weeks. This view was constantly reinforced by one of his own key appointees, Douglas Feith, whom he put in charge of defence policy planning.Feith launched a fierce bureaucratic struggle with the CIA and the state department. On Rumsfeld’s orders, and in some secrecy, he established an intelligence operation, dubbed the Office of Special Plans, devoted to collating reports of Saddam’s continued production of weapons of mass destruction.Moreover, Feith (and therefore Rumsfeld) was encouraged by the exiled leader of the Iraqi national congress, Ahmed Chalabi, to believe that the Iraqi people would rise in their millions to greet their liberators and that America’s military presence could rapidly be reduced once the actual fighting was over. (It was a view firmly rejected by the State Department, which had produced an enormous set of briefings about the complexities of running Iraq after Saddam’s fall.)This increased Rumsfeld’s resistance to the army’s assessment of the forces needed to conquer Iraq. The initial version of Operations Plan 1003-98 for Iraq, which had been regularly tested in Pentagon war games, envisaged the deployment of 500,000 troops, which Rumsfeld immediately dismissed as absurd. When the army argued that, having needed 40,000 peacekeepers to control 2 million inhabitants in Kosovo, it would clearly need at least 480,000 to cope with 24 million Iraqis, Rumsfeld dismissed this as “old thinking” and set the absolute maximum at 125,000.This was based on what turned out to be two critical fallacies. The first was that Iraqi army units would defect en masse and fight alongside coalition forces (the Pentagon had even printed special “Articles of Capitulation” for Iraqi force commanders to sign). The second was that there would be only a limited need for US involvement in any postwar civilian administration.Once Rumsfeld had accepted these propositions, what followed was almost inevitable. Central to the Pentagon’s planning for any major military excursion is a vast computerised project known as the time-phased force and deployment list, or TPFDL (colloquially called the “tip-fiddle”), used to work out in minute detail the order in which equipment, troops and supplies must be assembled and dispatched to any field of operations.The Iraq tip-fiddle covered everything from tanks to soap, and generated some 40 pages of dates, times, ships, combat troops and support staff. It represented all that Rumsfeld hated about the lumbering military bureaucracy he had sworn to reform. He not only rejected the number of troops and the gear they would need, but decreed that the whole plan should be junked so that the size, composition and deployment of the invading force could be tightly controlled by him.The abysmal consequences of this decision became apparent as the war evolved and the compromise total of 140,000 American soldiers began their advance on Baghdad. There had, of course, been none of the anticipated Iraqi defections: instead, the advancing US troops met stiff resistance and needed rapid reinforcement.The obvious source in the original tip-fiddle deployment was the 4th Infantry Division, the army’s most technologically advanced unit. But all its tanks and equipment were still aboard 30 vessels that had been cruising around the Mediterranean for weeks while Washington vainly tried to persuade Ankara to let them land in Turkey and attack Iraq from the north (a diplomatic negotiation that the cancelled tip-fiddle would have triggered). In the end, a squadron of the 2nd Armoured Cavalry Regiment and all its equipment had to be scrambled into an emergency airlift from its US base.In his 2011 memoir, Rumsfeld wrote that the cause of the mistreatment of detainees at Abu Ghraib by their American guards was partly “a lack of training. Part of it was a lack of discipline and supervision. And part of it was the failure from the outset of the department of the army and joint staff to provide the appropriate and agreed-upon staff and support to General Sanchez’s headquarters in Iraq.”Notably absent from this list was the name of the official who had overruled the military deployment plan – Rumsfeld himself. An official inquiry into the mistreatment, chaired by James Schlesinger, blamed a failure of leadership in the Pentagon and painted an extraordinary picture. Published in August 2004, the report stated that one of the brigade commanders had told the inquiry panel that the loss of the tip-fiddle ensured that “anything that could go wrong went wrong”.The 800th Military Police (MP) Brigade, a reserve unit of civilian volunteers, had been assigned to handle detainees. During initial preparation for the war, the part-time military police had been separated from their equipment for so long that they had not been able to train before deployment. When they arrived in Iraq, their equipment still did not follow them. “Brigade commanders did not know who would be deployed next … A recently arrived battalion HQ would be assigned the next arriving MP companies, regardless of their capabilities or any other prior command and training relationships.”This eventually meant that poorly trained civilian volunteers became responsible for guarding around 7,000 rebellious prisoners at Abu Ghraib, many of whom had no idea why they had been arrested. The guards often could not communicate with one another because they had the wrong sort of radio, and therefore had little idea of what was happening elsewhere in the prison. Most did not know who was authorised to give them orders, or whether such orders were legal. The upshot of this chapter of Rumsfeld’s war on bureaucracy was the torture and abuse of prisoners revealed in a series of shocking photographs that were published around the world.Rumsfeld’s miscalculation of Iraqi citizens’ response to the invasion compounded the widespread chaos which followed Saddam’s fall in April 2003. (He defended the looting of Baghdad as an inevitable part of the transition process, with the notorious remark “stuff happens”.) Rumsfeld had originally asked a retired general, Jay Garner, to establish a postwar civil administration, but he had been given few resources. The general also blotted his political copybook with Rumsfeld by falling out with Chalabi and by recruiting State Department Arabists to help him out. Within three weeks Rumsfeld arbitrarily replaced Garner with Paul Bremer, a former diplomat and long-time associate of Henry Kissinger. Bremer insisted he could only do the job with powers analogous to those of an imperial viceroy. Rumsfeld persuaded President Bush to agree and so set the scene for the most egregious misjudgments of the whole Iraqi adventure.Even Kissinger described Bremer as a control freak and his record in Baghdad confirmed it. He created the Coalition Provisional Authority and its first executive order, issued within days of his arrival, barred the first four levels of Ba’ath party members from official employment. This immediately stripped 30,000 of the most knowledgable Iraqi civil servants and teachers of their jobs and salaries.A week later, Bremer’s second executive order disbanded the Iraqi army and its associated organisations, throwing a further 300,000 people into penury, causing widespread rioting, and removing the only organisation which might have abated the increasing anarchy. Many of the affected troops inevitably joined the armed opposition. This disbandment was in total contravention of official US policy, as Bush himself later publicly acknowledged, but Bremer’s boss at the Pentagon neither countermanded the order nor undid what was acknowledged as the worst political mistake of the Iraq campaign.After 13 disastrous months Bremer quit, signing over sovereignty to the Iraqi interim government, leaving Baghdad to the suicide bombers and to its own squabbling politicians. Rumsfeld admitted that the rise of Islamic State was ‘something that, generally, people had not anticipated’In later years, Rumsfeld continued to defend his handling of the war, showing no remorse for the mess he had created, nor for his erroneous claims about Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction. He did later admit that the subsequent disorder in Iraq and Syria, including the rise of Islamic State, was “something that, generally, people had not anticipated”.Born in Chicago, Donald was the son of George Rumsfeld, an estate agent, and his wife, Jeannette (nee Husted). He was educated at New Trier high school, in Winnetka, Illinois, and then won a scholarship to Princeton. In 1954, he graduated, married Joyce Pierson and signed on for three years as a naval pilot. Determined that politics would be his preferred career, he moved to Washington as a congressional administrative assistant and then, after a brief period in merchant banking, ran for Congress in his home suburb on Chicago’s North Side, winning the first of three terms in the House of Representatives (1963-69). He quickly established his reputation as a vigorous rightwinger, organising a group of reform-minded young legislators, known as Rumsfeld’s Raiders, with policies including massive increases in defence spending and reductions in the anti-poverty programmes of the time. His energy attracted the notice of Nixon, then positioning himself for the 1968 election.As president, Nixon brought Rumsfeld into his first cabinet to run the Office of Economic Opportunity. The implicit brief was to cut back on the Democratic extravagance of the Kennedy-Johnson years, but Rumsfeld’s principal achievement was, in fact, to make the office far more efficient and its anti-poverty programmes therefore more effective.When the 1972 economic crisis obliged Nixon to impose a wage and price freeze, abandon the dollar’s fixed convertibility, and impose import surcharges, Rumsfeld was put in charge of the ensuing “economic stabilisation programme”. It proved a political bed of nails on which he was rapidly skewered by enraged business leaders, trade unionists and America’s international trading partners.After Nixon’s re-election in 1972, Rumsfeld moved to Brussels as US ambassador to Nato, remaining there until brought back to head the team preparing for the imminent change of presidency, with the clouds gathering over the Watergate scandal. When vice-president Ford took over in August 1974, Rumsfeld became White House chief of staff.The following year, when Schlesinger was unexpectedly turfed out of the Pentagon, Rumsfeld took over. At 43, it made him the youngest defence secretary in US history. In office, Rumsfeld confirmed his brisk administrative skills and continued the hawkish stance he had displayed as a congressman. He increased the defence budget and accelerated the development of the B-1 bomber, the Trident submarine missile and the land-based MX missile. He also embarked on an aggressive sales drive for US weaponry and staged a resolute campaign against the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT), then under negotiation with the Soviet Union.With the accession of Jimmy Carter, Rumsfeld had a spell as lecturer at Princeton before being recruited as chief executive of the international pharmaceutical company GD Searle, then in serious financial trouble. Within eight years its fortunes were transformed and Rumsfeld was lauded as a remarkable company doctor.In 1985 he resigned from Searle’s to go into business for himself, and in 1990, he was again asked to rescue an ailing business, the General Instrument Corporation, making it sufficiently profitable for a successful stock-market flotation within three years.Meanwhile, he was assiduous in maintaining his political contacts, and when George HW Bush took office Rumsfeld served as a presidential adviser on economic policy. During the Clinton years he chaired a commission to assess the potential threat from ballistic missiles (1998), and a similar probe into the security problems of space (2000). This networking paid off and in 2001 George W Bush gave him the second term at the Pentagon that provided the platform for him to apply business principles to military operations.He is survived by Joyce and their three children, Valerie, Marcy and Nick. Donald Henry Rumsfeld, politician and businessman, born 9 July 1932; died 29 June 2021 More

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    Bush: ‘Anglo-Saxon’ ideals show pro-Trump Republicans ‘want to be extinct’

    Ahead of a special election on Saturday to replace a Texas congressman who died after contracting Covid-19, former president George W Bush said the ascendancy of supporters of Donald Trump suggest Republicans “want to be extinct”.The special election is in the sixth district, whose Republican representative, Ron Wright, died in February. Twenty-three candidates will compete: all but one of the 11 Republicans are tied to the apron strings of Trump, the former president who still dominates the party.One candidate, the former wrestler Dan Rodimer, promises to “make America Texas again” and has said “commies in DC are ruining America”.Trump has endorsed another – Susan Wright, the former congressman’s widow who the former president said on Saturday “will be strong on the border, crime, pro-life, our brave military and vets, and will always protect your second amendment”.The one Republican not expressing fealty to Trump, former marine Michael Wood, told CNN he was “afraid for the future of the country”, given his party’s adherence to Trump’s lie that the election was stolen, its reluctance to condemn those who rioted at the Capitol on 6 January in support of that lie, and the prevalence of conspiracy theories such as QAnon.“I felt like I had to stand up,” Wood said. “Somebody needed to stand up and say this isn’t what the Republican party should be.”Nonetheless, it is. In a CNN poll released on Friday, 70% of Republicans said Biden did not legitimately win enough votes to be named president. Biden won more than 7m more votes than Trump and took the electoral college 306-232, the same score by which Trump beat Hillary Clinton in 2016.Bush is promoting a new book, a collection of portraits and stories of immigrants. In an interview released on Friday by the Dispatch, an anti-Trump conservative podcast, he was asked about recent moves by pro-Trump extremists to form a congressional caucus promoting “Anglo-Saxon traditions”.“To me that basically says that we want to be extinct,” he said.If such trends continued, Bush said, in three to five years “there’s not going to be a party. I mean I read about that and I’m saying to myself, ‘Wow, these people need to read my book.’ And I mean, it’s like saying when I was running for governor of Texas, you’ll never get any Latino votes because you’re Republican. And I said you watch. And I worked hard.“And the key thing was to let them know that I could hear their voice. I mean, democracy is great in that sense. And the idea of kind of saying you can only be Republican ‘if’, then the ultimate extension of that is it ends up being a one-person party.”Asked if he agreed with “more than 50%” of Republicans who think the election was stolen, Bush said: “No. I guess I’m one of the other 50%.“By the way, I’m still a Republican, proud to be Republican. I think Republicans will have a second chance to govern, because I believe that the Biden administration is a uniting factor, and particularly on the fiscal side of things. So, you know, we’ll see. But I know this – that if the Republican party stands for exclusivity, you know, used to be country clubs, now evidently it’s white Anglo-Saxon Protestantism, then it’s not going to win anything.”Wood, the anti-Trump Texas Republican, said he voted for Trump in 2020. But he also said he thought “the party is going to get to where I am eventually. I want that to happen without having to lose and lose and lose. Political parties sometimes only get the message they need to try something different after a string of losses. I think we should do that now as opposed to doing it after we lose in the midterms or lose another presidential election.”The Texas sixth district has trended towards Democrats in recent elections but remains unlikely to flip.Earlier this week, Trump told Fox Business he was “100% thinking about running” in 2024.Rodimer, the former wrestler who is among the top money raisers in the field in Texas, told CNN: “President Trump is still the leader of the Republican party. I don’t think he’s going to go anywhere, ever. I hope he doesn’t. If he runs again, I’ll be fired up, I’ll be excited.” More

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    George W Bush reveals he voted for Condoleezza Rice in 2020 US election

    Former president George W Bush revealed in an interview with People magazine that he didn’t vote for either the Republican incumbent Donald Trump or Democrat Joe Biden in the November 2020 presidential election. Instead, he wrote in Condoleezza Rice.Rice, who served as secretary of state for Bush from 2005 to 2009, was aware of the write-in. But, “She told me she would refuse to accept the office,” Bush shared.This revelation comes amid a promotional book tour for Bush’s new compilation of oil paintings depicting American immigrants and their stories.It’s all in an effort, Bush says, to soften hearts for compassionate immigration reforms after several years of harsh and “frightening” anti-immigrant rhetoric, mostly from his own Republican party.Earlier this week, Bush criticized the GOP, calling current actors in the party “isolationist, protectionist and, to a certain extent, nativist”. Bush told People that he “painted with too broad a brush” and excluded “a lot of Republicans who believe we can fix the problem”.But the former president is not without his own history of faults, and his journey to rehabilitation after a devastating presidency built upon the “war on terror” isn’t as well received by many as one would think.Bush’s legacy includes the illegal invasion of Iraq in search of non-existent weapons of mass destruction, at a cost of hundreds of thousands of lives. He resisted LGBTQ+ rights, botched the government response to Hurricane Katrina and presided over the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression. More

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    George W Bush on Trump’s Republicans: ‘Isolationist, protectionist, nativist’

    George W Bush has called the Republican party under Donald Trump “isolationist, protectionist and … nativist” – a judgment unlikely to make the former US president new friends on the American right.Bush, who is promoting a new book, spoke to NBC on Tuesday.Asked to describe the state of his party under Trump – who lost the Oval Office after one term but retains a firm grip on his party’s base – Bush said: “I would describe it as isolationist, protectionist and, to a certain extent, nativist.“It’s not exactly my vision as an old guy, but I’m just an old guy that’s put out to pasture.”Bush’s book is called Out of Many, One: Portraits of America’s Immigrants. He told NBC the country that includes the Latin for his kicker, E Pluribus Unum, on its great seal was “a beautiful country … and yet it’s not beautiful when we condemn, call people names and scare people about immigration”.Trump continues to do that, calling on his successor, Joe Biden, to restore his draconian policies while followers on the extreme right of the party discuss forming an “America First Caucus” based on “Anglo-Saxon political traditions”.Bush, the son of another president, is from a political dynasty about as Wasp (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) as it is possible to get. But Trump took down the former Florida governor Jeb Bush, the former president’s younger brother, in vicious fashion in 2016.George W Bush maintains friendly relations with former presidents including the Democrats Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, and to some has come to present a more reasonable face of Republican politics.Others warn that progressives should not think too fondly of a man whose time in office included the invasion of Iraq and the bungled federal response to Hurricane Katrina.“I’m hoping there’ll be some pushback against this because I think it’s an absolute scandal that man should be rehabilitated and tarted up as in any way progressive,” Jackson Lears, a cultural historian, told the Guardian this week. More

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    George W Bush is back – but not all appreciate his new progressive image

    He’s back.George W Bush, the former US president, returns to the political stage this week with a promotional book tour comprising numerous “virtual conversations” and TV and radio interviews, including a late night talkshow.The media appearances, focused on immigration reform, look set to confirm Bush’s improbable journey from reviled architect of the devastating Iraq war to elder statesman venerated even by some liberals. The Republican’s approval rating has soared since he left office in 2009 and he has been praised by his Democratic successor, Barack Obama.Not everyone, however, is comfortable with the rehabilitation of a leader whose “war on terror” yielded waterboarding and other forms of torture. They argue that Americans with short memories have become overly eager to embrace Bush, 74, as a folksy and avuncular national treasure.“I’m hoping there’ll be some pushback against this because I think it’s an absolute scandal that man should be rehabilitated and tarted up as in any way progressive,” said Jackson Lears, a cultural historian.Lears added: “This is a man who, in company with [vice-president Dick] Cheney of course, created more permanent and long-lasting damage to the presidency and the American system of government than probably anyone before or since.”Bush’s new book, Out of Many, One, fits his new image. The 43rd president has painted 43 portraits of immigrants he has got to know and has written their stories. His purpose, says his office, is to put human faces on the important debate around immigration and the need for reform.Bush’s publicity blitz will be reminiscent of that undertaken by Obama last November for the publication of his presidential memoir. It includes a virtual conversation with Arnold Schwarzenegger, the immigrant Hollywood actor and former governor of California, hosted by the George W Bush Presidential Center on Sunday.There will be an event with his daughter, Barbara Bush, via Barnes & Noble and further virtual conversations hosted by other bookshops. Media appearances range from an opinion column in the Washington Post newspaper to a three-part CBS interview in which anchor Norah O’Donnell visits Bush and his wife, Laura, at their ranch in Texas.Bush tells O’Donnell that the immigration system was one of the biggest disappointments of his presidency. “I campaigned on immigration reform,” he says. “I made it abundantly clear to voters this is something I intended to do.”But Lears, a history professor at Rutgers University in New Jersey and editor of the journal Raritan Quarterly, finds the notion of Bush as a champion of immigrants as “self-parodic”.He said: “It’s almost beyond belief that he would be celebrated for that or any other kind of humane gestures of inclusion and tolerance.“He was a man who wrapped his very narrow-gauge nationalism, his chauvinism and militarism in the rhetoric of righteousness. He was an evangelical Christian and that, to me, is more offensive in many ways than Trump’s style, which was overt, offensive and repellent.”Bush’s broadcast interviews will also include Fox News, National Public Radio, Telemundo and ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel Live! – a late-night show hosted by comedian Jimmy Kimmel. His counterpart on NBC, Jimmy Fallon, suffered a backlash for being too soft on Donald Trump and playfully stroking the candidate’s hair just weeks before the 2016 election.The promotional tour, and direct intervention on immigration, will put the seal on Bush’s comeback to the public stage. After Joe Biden’s inauguration, he made a joint TV appearance with Bill Clinton and Obama that presented the trio as guardians of democracy in the wake of Trump’s scorched earth assault on institutions.Yet for some it was hard to reconcile this conceit with the man who once faced demands to be prosecuted for war crimes over the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques”, or torture, at CIA “black sites” in the aftermath of the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks.Bush’s legacy includes the illegal invasion of Iraq in search of nonexistent weapons of mass destruction, at a cost of hundreds of thousands of lives. He resisted LGBTQ+ rights, botched the government response to Hurricane Katrina and presided over the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression.Lears also criticizes Bush for an unconstitutional expansion of executive power that holds today. “This man committed more impeachable offences than you can shake a stick at and he’s being celebrated now in this mindless way,” he said.“I think of it as a yet another unintended and catastrophic consequence of Trump derangement syndrome: the sense that, well, maybe he wasn’t so bad after all because, after all, he and Laura and Barack and Michelle like each other. This seems to be the mentality that we’re dealing with.“It’s an enormous blind spot now and it’s perfect that an airhead like Jimmy Kimmel would be participating in this rehabilitation. I can’t imagine anything that would better signify the depths to which our public discourse has fallen than George Bush being celebrated on Jimmy Kimmel.”But even many of Bush’s critics have acknowledged some successes from his administration such as the President’s Emergency Plan for Aids Relief, or Pepfar, a historic global health initiative that saved or improved millions of lives in Africa. But they object to the way in which his long list of failures is being whitewashed because at least he is not Trump.Dan Kovalik, an author who teaches international human rights at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, said: “America is the land of amnesia. It’s not a country where people remember what happened yesterday, much less what happened in the Bush years. Also, because Trump was so bad, at least in terms of his personality, everyone else looks good by comparison.” More

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    George Shultz obituary

    Many politicians and diplomats from the 1980s lay claim to a pivotal role in ending the cold war, but the former US secretary of state George Shultz, who has died aged 100, had a better claim than most. And he was not shy in letting people know, as he did at length in his 1,184-page account of his years at the state department, Turmoil and Triumph (1993).
    When he became secretary of state in 1982 – a job he was to hold for seven years – relations between the US and the Soviet Union were at a dangerous low. The administration of US president Ronald Reagan was packed with anti-Soviet hardliners. Reagan himself in 1983 dubbed the Soviet Union “the evil empire”.
    Shultz seldom let his frustration with anti-Soviet colleagues in the Pentagon, the CIA and elsewhere in the administration show in public. But he let his guard down in a terse response to a reporter who asked whether he was enjoying the job: “I did not come here to be happy.”

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    He persevered, opening up a secret channel to the Soviet Union and gradually winning over Reagan, with whom he established a close bond. Relations with the Soviet Union began to improve. Four years after taking office, Shultz was in the room at one of the most extraordinary diplomatic encounters of the 20th century, the 1986 Reykjavik summit at which Reagan and the Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, came briefly and tantalisingly close to agreeing to eliminate all nuclear weapons.
    When Shultz left office in January 1989, he said Americans were unable or unwilling to recognise that the cold war was over. “But to me it was all over bar the shouting,” he wrote. Ten months later the Berlin Wall came down and in December 1991 the Soviet Union was dissolved.
    Shultz looked stuffy and conventional, and for the most part he was, but he liked to persuade people he was not as conservative as he appeared. A regular ploy when being interviewed was to direct journalists to a signed photograph of him dancing at a White House dinner with Ginger Rogers. She had written: “Dear George, For a moment I thought I was dancing with Fred. Love, Ginger.”

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    Born in New York, George was the son of Margaret (nee Pratt) and Birl Shultz, who in 1922 helped found the New York Institute of Finance to train those working on Wall Street. When he was three the family moved to New Jersey.
    He studied economics at Princeton and after graduating in 1942 joined the Marines. Service in the Pacific included the taking of the Palau islands in 1944, when more than 2,000 Americans and 10,000 Japanese were killed.
    During a rest and recreation break in Hawaii Captain Shultz met a lieutenant in the army nursing corps, Helena “Obie” O’Brien. They married in 1946 and had five children.
    Although an average student at Princeton, he completed a PhD in labour relations at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1949 and stayed on to teach.
    Throughout the rest of his life, he combined academia – MIT was followed in 1957 by the University of Chicago, and in 1968 by Stanford University – with long spells in business and in government. He was a Republican, but more pragmatic than ideological. He became one of the ultimate Washington insiders, serving under three presidents – Eisenhower, Nixon and Reagan – and worked on various federal task forces at the request of John F Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. He was an informal but influential adviser on foreign policy to George W Bush. More