Bush’s Legacy

Goes even deeper than re-defining “dissassemble” to mean “not tell the truth.” Andrew Bacevich lists very real and far-reaching changes in the way our government functions wrought by 8 years of W:

Yet in crucial respects, the Bush era will not end Jan. 20, 2009. The administration’s many failures, especially those related to Iraq, mask a considerable legacy. Among other things, the Bush team has accomplished the following:

Defined the contemporary era as an “age of terror” with an open-ended “global war” as the necessary, indeed the only logical, response;

Promulgated and implemented a doctrine of preventive war, thereby creating a far more permissive rationale for employing armed force;

Affirmed - despite the catastrophe of Sept. 11, 2001 - that the primary role of the Department of Defense is not defense, but power projection;

Removed constraints on military spending so that once more, as Ronald Reagan used to declare, “defense is not a budget item”;

Enhanced the prerogatives of the imperial presidency on all matters pertaining to national security, effectively eviscerating the system of checks and balances;

Preserved and even expanded the national security state, despite the manifest shortcomings of institutions such as the CIA and the Joint Chiefs of Staff;

Preempted any inclination to question the wisdom of the post-Cold War foreign policy consensus, founded on expectations of a sole superpower exercising “global leadership”;

Completed the shift of US strategic priorities away from Europe and toward the Greater Middle East, the defense of Israel having now supplanted the defense of Berlin as the cause to which presidents and would-be presidents ritually declare their fealty.

By almost any measure, this constitutes a record of substantial, if almost entirely malignant, achievement.

Summing up, Bacevich argues that “Bush has put the country on a path pointing to permanent war, ever increasing debt and dependency, and further abuses of executive authority.”

I would add that Bush has not accomplished these things by himself; He was abetted by a Republican dominated Congress for most of his term, by a largely complacent and feckless press which, with few exceptions, failed to draw attention to the consequences of many of these changes, and by an electorate too easily pushed into a compliant panic by fear-mongerers and war pimps.

As Bacevich further points out, it will be a considerable task to weed out the malignant growths of the Bush administration.