News from the New Party

The Bush legacy

On the occasion of the farewell visit of President George W. Bush to the U.K., Oliver Kamm delivers a fair assessment of the Bush legacy:

For all Bush's verbal infelicity, diplomatic brusqueness, negligence in planning for post-Saddam Iraq, and insouciance regarding standards of due process when prosecuting the war on terror, the world is a safer place for the influence he has exercised.

When Bush ran for president in 2000 he was an isolationist advocate of scaling back America's overseas commitments. But after 9/11, he was right in not interpreting the attack as confirmation that America was stirring up trouble for itself. The theocratic barbarism responsible for the attack on the Twin Towers was driven not by what America and its allies had done, but by what we represented. In the words of Osama bin Laden, illegitimately appropriating for himself the mantel of Islam, "every Muslim, the minute he can start differentiating, carries hate toward Americans, Jew, and Christians".

The most fundamental decision in western security policy in the past seven years has not been the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. It has been the recognition that the most voluble adversaries of western society are not merely a criminal subculture, and still less an incipient liberation movement. Rather, they are a reactionary, millenarian and atavistic force with whom accommodation is impossible as well as intensely undesirable.

The grand strategy pursued by the US under Bush has overestimated the plasticity of the international order, but it has got one big thing right. There is an integral connection between the terrorism that targets western societies and the autocratic states in which Islamist fanaticism is incubated.

This is surely right.  While the Bush administration has made many mistakes in the prosecution of the Iraq War in particular, the Bush analysis of the world situation and the necessary response to it has been essentially correct.  The attempt to liberate oppressed peoples in Iraq and Afghanistan, and to give them the opportunity to build democratic institutions of their own, has not been an imperialistic exercise - it has rather been an exercise in humanitarianism. 

The usual suspects who demonstrated this week to demand that President Bush go home are the same bunch of idiots who were and presumably remain happy to allow dictators in far off countries to slaughter their own people to their heart's content.  It is the people and government who try to stop them who are condemned.  Insofar as President Bush has helped to shape a world view in which liberal interventionism is regarded as a serious option in foreign policy, he has done the world - in particular the oppressed of the world - a great service.