Bob Buzzanco: The Manchurian President
[Bob Buzzanco is a Professor and Chairman of the Department of History at the University of Houston. He was the recipient of the Bernath Book Prize and the Bernath Lecture Prize.]
In late 2006 I wrote a piece for History News Network that was titled and asked “Is George Bush ‘The Manchurian Candidate?’” and said, “like a ’sleeper’ agent, or Laurence Harvey’s famed character, Sgt. Raymond Shaw, in The Manchurian Candidate, George W. Bush, the ultimate insider, is doing more to damage America than Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, Hassan Nasrallah, the Syrians, the Iranians, or any other enemy du jour, ever could.” [ http://hnn.us/articles/32618.html . ]
Well, now that our most recent and longest national nightmare has ended, I’d like to follow up and suggest immodestly [guffaw] that I had a point, and we’ve just seen the end of the Manchurian Presidency. After eight years of the Bush-Cheney junta, the U.S. is in its worst position globally and economically in generations, a position simply unimaginable in the aftermath of the “victory” in the cold war and certainly after the outpouring of support and sympathy after 9/11/01. The People’s Republic of China is ascendant; Bush has sent over 4000 Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis to their deaths with his criminal invasion of Iraq; the U.S. economy is a trainwreck, due not just to deregulation and tax cuts for the ruling class but also because of the brutal costs of Iraq and uncontrolled militarization; terrorism has not subsided; Afghanistan and Pakistan are more dangerous; and the U.S. image in the world has, to put it indelicately, fallen into the toilet.
It’s hard to imagine any enemy of the U.S. doing such damage and, if it were not for Bush’s idiocy and ideology [kind of a Clouseau on steroids] it would be hard to imagine that he did all of this without the intention of crushing American interests.
Just a brief travelogue of where this “conservative” president who claimed the patriotic and moral high ground and attacked his enemies as virtual traitors took us . . .
Iraq, despite the post hoc ergo propter hoc claims after the surge, remains indefensible and declarations of success there are as specious as when first uttered. Although the number of American soldiers killed decreased in the past 18 months, that was due in main to political arrangements made by U.S. officials, i.e. paying off and arming about 30,000 Sunni militants who had just before that been the target of American attacks. But politically, which is after all the final way to judge a war, the U.S. has alienated the Iraqis and emboldened enemies.
Not only to the American people think Iraq “wasn’t worth it” in polling data by huge margins [at least 60 percent disapproval in every poll for the past two years] but the Iraqis themselves want the U.S. out. Inside Iraq, in a late 2007 poll, over 70 percent of the Iraqis believed that the surge had failed and security had deteriorated. By spring 2008, as Hillary Clinton and John McCain were trying to show who was more hawkish and attacking the idea of a “timeline” for withdrawal, the Iraqi government asked for, you got it, a timeline for withdrawal from Iraq. Just yesterday, after President Obama met with military commanders to charge them with preparing a withdrawal plan, an Iraqi military spokesman endorsed the U.S. departure, saying “if the US pullout comes early, our Iraqi forces have prepared for this.” (I don’t recall Nguyen Van Thieu every saying anything like that).
Another situation for which Iraq is prepared is better relations with Iran, which is, once more, unimaginable given that the two countries fought one of the bloodier wars in recent times in the 1980s and were sworn enemies, and, in the equation of Bush himself, poses a grave threat to U.S. security. Indeed, the fact that Iraq and Iran are now essentially allies is staggering evidence of Bush’s failure.
Many Shiite from Iraq were exiled to Iran during the Saddam Hussein years and developed strong ties to the leadership in Tehran; in fact, Iraq’s leading religious figure, Grand Ayotollah Ali as-Sistani, is a native Iranian.
Just two weeks ago, Iraq’s Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki visited Iran [for the fourth time], met with America’s arch-enemy President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and spoke warmly of relations between Baghdad and Iran. “Our Islamic and humane duty requires that we always stand by the Iraqi nation,” Ahmadinejad said. Iran and Iraq agreed to increase trade by about five billion dollars and Maliki sought even greater Iranian investment to help Iraq rebuild after the American invasion and destruction. In a statement that must surely have made officials at Halliburton shudder, Maliki said “after elevating security and freeing Iraq from sectarian fighting, it is time to work hard to reconstruct the country and there is a need for companies from neighbouring nations to take on reconstruction projects.” I’d call this an Iran faint.
At the same time, the “global war on terror” has surely not eradicated terrorism, and in fact incidents of terror have risen since March 2003. The war in Iraq accelerated the number of attacks by 25 percent in 2006, and a study by Paul Cruickshank, a fellow at the Center on Law and Security at the New York University School of Law, found a 600 percent rise in terrorism between the invasion of Iraq and 2007. Perhaps even worse, the forces unleashed by U.S. actions in the post-9/11 Middle East have intensified anti-U.S. actions elsewhere, most notably in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and have arguably spilled over into incidents like the recent Mumbai attacks.
Although I’m always reluctant to cite “experts,” a recent survey in Foreign Policy of terrorism specialists showed that 70 percent thought that the world was becoming more dangerous for the U.S. than it had been [which, to be fair, was down from 91 percent two years ago] and a similar 70 percent thought the U.S. was losing the war on terror. (That perhaps may be Obama’s greatest accomplishment- the elevation of an African-American with Third World roots may make it less likely for potential terrorists abroad to want to blow up buildings and people to protest the United States)....
Read entire article at Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations
In late 2006 I wrote a piece for History News Network that was titled and asked “Is George Bush ‘The Manchurian Candidate?’” and said, “like a ’sleeper’ agent, or Laurence Harvey’s famed character, Sgt. Raymond Shaw, in The Manchurian Candidate, George W. Bush, the ultimate insider, is doing more to damage America than Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, Hassan Nasrallah, the Syrians, the Iranians, or any other enemy du jour, ever could.” [ http://hnn.us/articles/32618.html . ]
Well, now that our most recent and longest national nightmare has ended, I’d like to follow up and suggest immodestly [guffaw] that I had a point, and we’ve just seen the end of the Manchurian Presidency. After eight years of the Bush-Cheney junta, the U.S. is in its worst position globally and economically in generations, a position simply unimaginable in the aftermath of the “victory” in the cold war and certainly after the outpouring of support and sympathy after 9/11/01. The People’s Republic of China is ascendant; Bush has sent over 4000 Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis to their deaths with his criminal invasion of Iraq; the U.S. economy is a trainwreck, due not just to deregulation and tax cuts for the ruling class but also because of the brutal costs of Iraq and uncontrolled militarization; terrorism has not subsided; Afghanistan and Pakistan are more dangerous; and the U.S. image in the world has, to put it indelicately, fallen into the toilet.
It’s hard to imagine any enemy of the U.S. doing such damage and, if it were not for Bush’s idiocy and ideology [kind of a Clouseau on steroids] it would be hard to imagine that he did all of this without the intention of crushing American interests.
Just a brief travelogue of where this “conservative” president who claimed the patriotic and moral high ground and attacked his enemies as virtual traitors took us . . .
Iraq, despite the post hoc ergo propter hoc claims after the surge, remains indefensible and declarations of success there are as specious as when first uttered. Although the number of American soldiers killed decreased in the past 18 months, that was due in main to political arrangements made by U.S. officials, i.e. paying off and arming about 30,000 Sunni militants who had just before that been the target of American attacks. But politically, which is after all the final way to judge a war, the U.S. has alienated the Iraqis and emboldened enemies.
Not only to the American people think Iraq “wasn’t worth it” in polling data by huge margins [at least 60 percent disapproval in every poll for the past two years] but the Iraqis themselves want the U.S. out. Inside Iraq, in a late 2007 poll, over 70 percent of the Iraqis believed that the surge had failed and security had deteriorated. By spring 2008, as Hillary Clinton and John McCain were trying to show who was more hawkish and attacking the idea of a “timeline” for withdrawal, the Iraqi government asked for, you got it, a timeline for withdrawal from Iraq. Just yesterday, after President Obama met with military commanders to charge them with preparing a withdrawal plan, an Iraqi military spokesman endorsed the U.S. departure, saying “if the US pullout comes early, our Iraqi forces have prepared for this.” (I don’t recall Nguyen Van Thieu every saying anything like that).
Another situation for which Iraq is prepared is better relations with Iran, which is, once more, unimaginable given that the two countries fought one of the bloodier wars in recent times in the 1980s and were sworn enemies, and, in the equation of Bush himself, poses a grave threat to U.S. security. Indeed, the fact that Iraq and Iran are now essentially allies is staggering evidence of Bush’s failure.
Many Shiite from Iraq were exiled to Iran during the Saddam Hussein years and developed strong ties to the leadership in Tehran; in fact, Iraq’s leading religious figure, Grand Ayotollah Ali as-Sistani, is a native Iranian.
Just two weeks ago, Iraq’s Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki visited Iran [for the fourth time], met with America’s arch-enemy President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and spoke warmly of relations between Baghdad and Iran. “Our Islamic and humane duty requires that we always stand by the Iraqi nation,” Ahmadinejad said. Iran and Iraq agreed to increase trade by about five billion dollars and Maliki sought even greater Iranian investment to help Iraq rebuild after the American invasion and destruction. In a statement that must surely have made officials at Halliburton shudder, Maliki said “after elevating security and freeing Iraq from sectarian fighting, it is time to work hard to reconstruct the country and there is a need for companies from neighbouring nations to take on reconstruction projects.” I’d call this an Iran faint.
At the same time, the “global war on terror” has surely not eradicated terrorism, and in fact incidents of terror have risen since March 2003. The war in Iraq accelerated the number of attacks by 25 percent in 2006, and a study by Paul Cruickshank, a fellow at the Center on Law and Security at the New York University School of Law, found a 600 percent rise in terrorism between the invasion of Iraq and 2007. Perhaps even worse, the forces unleashed by U.S. actions in the post-9/11 Middle East have intensified anti-U.S. actions elsewhere, most notably in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and have arguably spilled over into incidents like the recent Mumbai attacks.
Although I’m always reluctant to cite “experts,” a recent survey in Foreign Policy of terrorism specialists showed that 70 percent thought that the world was becoming more dangerous for the U.S. than it had been [which, to be fair, was down from 91 percent two years ago] and a similar 70 percent thought the U.S. was losing the war on terror. (That perhaps may be Obama’s greatest accomplishment- the elevation of an African-American with Third World roots may make it less likely for potential terrorists abroad to want to blow up buildings and people to protest the United States)....