Yes, George W. Really Should Remain Silent - By Josh Marshall
By JOSH MARSHALL Published APRIL 28, 2015, 9:06 AM EDT
For all my many criticisms of him during his presidency, I have come to respect President Bush's post-presidency. He's kept out of the toxic political battles that came after he left office. He's had the confidence or perhaps simply the realism and detachment to leave it to posterity to judge his presidency and not try to duke it out in the 24/7 press cycle like his toxic second Dick Cheney. And there are moments of grace, like the recent 50th anniversary commemoration of the the March on Selma. DC's Republican leadership stayed away. But Bush was there. One might argue that there was little to be gained by Republicans attending since, in the nature of things, it was not going to be a receptive audience and they would be upstaged infinitely by the iconic symbolism of an African-American President. But the same applies to Bush. And he was there.
But there's another side to Bush's post-presidential silence - one often ascribed to the virtues of the Bush clan itself: it is merited and it is wise. For Bush himself.
As you may have noticed, President Bush attended the Sheldon Adelson presidential cattle call Saturday. And though his comments were private, someone transcribed them in some detail and then leaked them to Josh Rogin of Bloomberg. The remarks aren't terribly detailed or specific. He thinks President Obama is naive and has placed the US in strategic retreat around the globe and particularly in the Middle East. He criticizes the President for withdrawing all US troops from Iraq, says he's misjudging the Iranians and believes his successor has no plan to combat ISIS. “You think the Middle East is chaotic now? Imagine what it looks like for our grandchildren. That’s how Americans should view the deal," he reportedly said.
Republicans can carry on and complain that six years into his presidency, President Obama is still pointing to the mess left him by his predecessor. But the White House harps on this point because it has the virtue of being true and the public knows it. More than six years in, poll after poll supports this claim. In fact, it is probably fair to say that there is no president in living memory, perhaps no president in the last century, who has left such an unmitigated mess to his successor. Whatever his public discretion, Bush's comments show he still inhabits a bubble of denial about the challenges the country faces and his central role in exacerbating, and in many cases creating, them.
Perhaps the biggest mess is the post-2008 crisis economy. This was a staggering mess to recover from. But Bush and his defenders at least have an argument that the entirety of the collapse can't be laid at his feet. Yes, it happened on his watch, after almost eight years of his presidency. But the roots of the crisis stretched back into a climate of financial services deregulation that he accelerated but didn't begin. A lot of it goes back to the Clinton administration and before Reagan, even the Carter administration. This isn't to absolve Bush. He has much to answer for. But you cannot point to decisive and contingent decisions he made which caused the crisis.
On foreign policy the verdict is very, very different. If our two primary challenges in the Middle East today are ISIS and Iran, neither is at all imaginable in their current form absent the decision to invade Iraq in 2003. The situation with ISIS probably speaks for itself. With a unified Iraq and without the insurgency that followed the US invasion, there would be no ISIS. Some version of it might hypothetically exist in Syria. But ISIS is an Iraqi creation, which made a hejira of sorts into Syria to return Iraq in force. In any case, no 2003 invasion, no ISIS. Saddam Hussein's regime was awful, repressive and aggressive. But it held together, brutally, the fulcrum of ethnic and sectarian divisions that have spilled in all directions since his fall.
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