• US President, George Bush

More Stories on This Section

A famous American writer, Philip Roth, who will be 75 next month, chose not to be charitable with a leader who has done colossal damage to America and its leadership of the world. George W. Bush Jr is the worst American president in history, he reiterated last week the harsh judgement of their president’s critics in an interview with Spiegel online. “He was too horrendous to be forgotten….

He's the worst American president we've ever had,” he said. ‘He's done a lot of harm.’
Across the Atlantic, in Germany, one of the most respected European leaders, former German Chancellor Helmut ‘The Lip’ Schmidt, compared US with Russia to dramatise the unreliability of his country’s strong ally: "Russia poses far less of a threat to world peace today than the United States,” he said in an interview in November, last year.

Roth, the acclaimed novelist, said Bush’s leadership was so ‘horrendous’ because he manipulated the nation into the disastrous Iraq war with absolutely cynical deceptions which yielded only enormous costs in human lives and resources. The renowned former Federal Reserve chairman, Allan Greenspan, had laid bare that the lies and fabrications were all contrived to grab Iraqi crude oil. Contrarily, Roth added, when the world faces the real threat of catastrophe with global warming and climate change, Bush turned US into reverse, hostile manipulator, an obstacle to global consensus rather than leadership to confront the menace.

The US House of Representatives Committee on Oversight and Government Reform agreed with him. "The Bush administration has engaged in a systematic effort to manipulate climate change science and mislead policymakers and the public about the dangers of global warming," a New York Times columnist cited its report last year in corroboration with Roth’s assertion. No wonder PollingReport.com tabulations of national opinion polls by AP-ipsos showed that Bush’s popularity rating has plummeted to 30 percent approval and 66 disapproval rate this month. In September 2005, poll by Time magazine, 45 percent approved and 50 percent disapproved.

No informed person took seriously his nebulous concept of fighting global terror precisely because of its seamlessness. However, in tandem with it was the hideous nonsense called “extraordinary rendition.” With rendition, unsuspecting foreign nationals are kidnapped illegally anywhere, flown to third countries with unenlightened and unintelligent leaders especially in Africa and Eastern Europe who practise torture. Their torture included savage water-boarding which simulates drowning in the victims. The arbitrary detention without charge or trial aggravated with torture destroyed America’s reputation for freedom and rule of law. Surely, a democratic United States should never condone let alone practise crude dictators’ brainless pastime in primitive countries.

Bush rode on the national unity he garnered in the US and the sympathetic goodwill abroad in the post-September 11, 2003 (or 9/11) terrorists’ attacks on US to weaken all the institutions which protected civil liberties and human rights as he claimed to be chasing America’s terrorist enemies: The legislature acquiesced, the judiciary and the free press were mostly muzzled. No wonder he blew the country’s intelligence networks in the US and abroad. Several Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) agents are either hiding or are fugitives from justice with arrest warrants hanging on their necks.

As a Spiegel commentator put it bluntly: “The United States has isolated itself internationally. No one on the planet, not even in its remotest corners, is currently sending Bush the message that the world wants more of America.” Now, the American military is so overstretched in Iraq and Afghanistan that landing American troops to attack any other country, be it Iran or Sudan, is out of the question: “Today, Bush is a dog that barks, but can no longer bite,” he added. In fact, in Afghanistan, resurgent Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters are shredding NATO alliance’s cohesive fabric.

However, as the American president ended his six-day junket through Benin Republic, Tanzania, Rwanda, Ghana and Liberia on the poorest continent in the world, all African democrats have one thing to praise him for: His uncompromising stand against the genocide in Darfur, West Sudan. But critics point at the senseless Iraqi war as the cause of the sapped US strength to mobilise global coalition to expel the genocidal Sudan government troops and their proxy janjwaweed militia in the war-torn area.
Otherwise, he has nothing much to offer the continent.

About 1.3 million peopling living with HIV/AIDS currently benefit from the five-year US-funded anti-retroviral supply programmes. Now, it requires an estimated $50bn to sustain it over the next five years. Bush pledged $30bn. Experts have criticised the billions of dollars he allegedly poured into other health promotion programmes without achieving the desired result. The suspicion was high that the funds got frittered away by American aid agencies without adequate controls for accountability.

Consequently, morbidity and mortality rates for malaria and other children’s diseases remain high while prevention programmes to minimize the spread of AIDS have hardly caught on. Meanwhile, the disease eradication programmes are as much in American interest because of rapid interactions of populations in the jet age. Besides, most of the anti-retroviral drugs are manufactured in the US anyway. Only few are manufactured in African countries under licence.

A New York Times editorial from last December summarised Bush’s costly blunders in the White House: He damaged America’s intelligence-networks in the name of fighting terrorism. Cheered on by the British Prime Minister poodle Tony Blair, he cooked the books to justify the war which Helmut Schmidt labeled rightly as a “war of choice, not a war of necessity.” Iraq Coalition Casualty Count has so far recorded 3,963 American and 174 British deaths. At the same time, Iraq Body Count’s civilian deaths numbered up to 88,783. Horrendous figures, certainly, but they are not surprising.

Retired commanders on both sides of the Atlantic lambasted the faulty planning of the war which doomed it to failure and no mission accomplished. For instance, in October, last year, Lt. Gen (rtd) Ricardo Sanchez, told New York Times that the politicians in the White House, State Department and US Congress’ lust for power, created the Iraqi nightmare for which all must be held accountable. Unfortunately, he added, the "catastrophically flawed, unrealistically optimistic” planning was a dereliction of duty which would have cost a military officer immediate dismissal or court martial. Across the Atlantic, two retired British army chiefs, Generals Sir Mike Jackson described US post-war plan as "intellectually bankrupt" and Tim Cross called it “fatally flawed.” Yet the Tony Blair poodle beat the war drums till the continent’s legend, former South African President Nelson Mandela denigrated him as the self-appointed foreign minister of the American military.

Bush launched the headless war against terror to make the world safe. He ended up giving Muslims around the world the erroneous impression that it was targeted at them. Now, Iraq has become the breeding ground for terrorists as the anti-American insurgents’ violence against civilians appals all. His war sucked America’s electronic spies into illegal wiretapping of American citizens and turned intelligence agents and uniformed soldiers into torturers in secret, outlaw prisons in foreign countries. Abu Ghraib in Iraq and Guantanamo Bay in Cuba are the two most notorious prisons for the scandalous abuses. Now, every concerned person holds his bated breath, hoping that the so-called surge would minimize the violent internecine deaths among the Iraqis.

Now, the problems of the American economy, badly mismanaged by Bush, have become a burden to the world. Its collapsed housing mortgage disaster, called subprime loans scheme, alone, is rocking financial institutions worldwide. Last Wednesday, its central bank policymakers have reviewed growth rates this year to between 1.3 percent and 2.0 percent, down from forecasts of 1.8 percent to 2.2 percent, but still the slowest rate in five years. Unemployment would climb to about 5.3 percent this year, compared to forecast of about 4.9 percent.

But Bush’s government of discredited neoconservatives took their fabrications one notch down the cesspool of infamy by building gigantic stockpiles of fictitious weapons of mass destruction in Iraq for the rest of the world. Meanwhile, he greedily coveted the latter’s crude oil. Then, more notoriously, he added the nonsense of extraordinary rendition, what a Council of Europe human rights abuse investigator disparaged as outsourcing of torture.

Despite the hairbrained policy of fighting terror with rendition, CIA agents have neither captured nor killed Osama Bin Laden, the al-Qaeda leader who haunts Bush’s dreaming and waking moments. Worst of all, the world is no safer than he dreamt he was making it.

A New York Times columnist, Thomas L. Friedman regretted that Bush sought to use the September 11 national tragedy to unite Americans around a common enemy, making all Americans look stupid. “9/11 has made us stupid. You may think Guantánamo Bay is a prison camp in Cuba for Al Qaeda terrorists. A lot of the world thinks it’s a place we send visitors who don’t give the right answers at immigration. We can’t afford to keep being this stupid! We need a president who will unite us around a common purpose, not a common enemy,” Friedman wrote.

To illustrate the deplorable consequence of only the rendition atrocities, an American CIA agent, with his unlikely name of Robert Lady, is on the run. The former hunter has turned the hunted fugitive. An Italian judge has issued an arrest warrant for Lady’s extradition along with 25 other CIA agents. They allegedly kidnapped the fiery Egyptian cleric, Imam Abu Omar in Milan. The CIA gang flew him to Egypt where he was detained and tortured. Robert Lady was the CIA chief in Italy then.

In Canada, a parliamentary committee which probed for two years the scandalous kidnapping of Maher Arar, a computer engineer, returned a verdict of not guilty. Arar was abducted by CIA agents at JF Kennedy International Airport in New York. He was on his way back to Canada from Tunisia where he went on holiday. They denied him Consular service contrary to the Vienna Convention, detained him for four weeks and subsequently flew him to Syria via Jordan.

In Syria, he was tortured for 10 months.
But the most celebrated scandal of all was that of German citizen, Khaled el-Masri, a Lebanon-born. CIA agents kidnapped him in Macedonia where he went on holiday. They sedated him on the Boeing 737 plane, flew him to Afghanistan and detained him in one of their secret prisons there for more than a year and tortured him. Eventually claiming mistaken identity, they flew him to Albania and released him there.