Oh, how the audience laughed. George W. Bush, the US’ former worst president
until the age of reality TV politics, was giving a speech on May 19 in Texas
when he reached the topic of the war in Ukraine.
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“Russian elections are rigged,” he told the
audience. “Political opponents are imprisoned or otherwise eliminated from
participating in the electoral process. The result is an absence of checks and
balances in Russia, and the decision of one man to launch a wholly unjustified
and brutal invasion of Iraq.”
The error hung in the air for a surprisingly long moment,
before Bush corrected himself. “I mean, of Ukraine.”
But the worst part came next, when he shrugged his
shoulders, appeared to nod to himself and said, “Iraq too” in an off-hand
manner. The audience — surprisingly forgiving at this long-awaited admission by
the man who ordered the worst American political decision of the 21st century —
laughed.
Inevitably, late-night TV hosts and social media
gotcha hunters repeated the clip endlessly, perhaps enjoying reminiscing about
a time when a president’s notorious propensity for gaffes merely evoked
derision and not, as with Donald Trump’s barbs against Kim Jong-un, might have
provoked nuclear war.
It goes without saying, however, that there is
nothing remotely funny about Bush’s admission, and the audience ought to be
ashamed for laughing. The Iraq war was devastating, to the country and far
beyond it. Hundreds of thousands dead, a civilization in ruins, its wealth
looted, and its people traumatized. It was, by any measure, a historic crime.
Indeed, worse than the audience’s laughter was the shared understanding that
neither Bush nor anyone who served in his Cabinet would ever face consequences.
No doubt the audience would not have laughed at a
similar speech by Vladimir Putin over his invasion of Ukraine, nor Saddam
Hussein over his invasion of Kuwait.
It goes without saying, however, that there is nothing remotely funny about Bush’s admission, and the audience ought to be ashamed for laughing. The Iraq war was devastating, to the country and far beyond it.
But such excusatory laughter is an indication of the
rehabilitation of a president who was, until just a few years ago, politically
toxic, and the absolute lack of a reckoning in American society for the Iraq war.
This, despite the fact that the two wars Bush
launched are still raging. The botched withdrawal from Afghanistan was only
last year — something hard to recall in the midst of the Ukraine war.
There are still American soldiers in Iraq and they
are still occasionally killed, because of the war launched by Bush.
If American society has by and large forgotten the
wars in Iraq and, apart from a recent spike in interest last summer during the
withdrawal, Afghanistan, it is a certainty that the American families of the
thousands dead and tens of thousands injured in those wars have not.
I doubt any of those families who saw the clip of
Bush found it amusing, nor were inclined to interpret it charitably as the
charming dotage of an old man. That was certainly how Bush himself saw it,
shrugging immediately afterwards that he was 75 years old, after all.
It is almost too glib to say that millions of
Afghans, Iraqis, and Arabs who directly felt the brunt of those catastrophes
found it amusing.
Part of the reason for the determined forgetting of
America’s most disastrous war is because the political generation that waged
the war is fading away.
Donald Rumsfeld, the hawkish secretary of defense
most associated with Bush’s rush to war, died last year.
Colin Powell, Bush’s secretary of state and the man
who gave a pivotal speech to the UN in the run-up to the invasion — a speech he
later regretted and admitted had “blotted my record” — also passed away at the
end of 2021.
Dick Cheney, Bush’s vice-president, is in his 80s and
rarely seen in public now.
While some of Bush’s Cabinet faced some public
opprobrium, there was no political or legal reckoning, nothing in the US on the
scale of the UK’s Chilcot Inquiry — a seven-year investigation that
interrogated witnesses over the decision to go to war, including the former
prime minister Tony Blair. At least Blair faced an inquiry, although in front
of a civil servant and not, as his critics would have preferred, a judge.
Indeed, far from any sort of political reckoning,
many of the architects of the war – and its supporters in politics and the
media – have been rehabilitated and have gone on to have stellar careers.
No one person better encapsulates this than the
relentlessly bellicose John Bolton, a man who, as Elizabeth Warren once
quipped, never met a war he did not like. That was not really a quip, more an
analysis of Bolton’s track record in government, first with Bush, pushing the
2003 Iraq invasion, and then again popping up as Trump’s national security
advisor, intent on dragging the US to war in Iran and North Korea. Bolton’s
subsequent opposition to Trump appears to have removed the stench of the
invasion.
That the decision of one man to launch a wholly unjustified and brutal invasion can be reduced to a punchline in the hope that the laughter can obscure the shame of what came next.
Bush himself also traveled this same route, from
political outcast to venerable, if occasionally embarrassing, elder statesman.
And the reason is the same: Donald Trump.
So politically toxic was Trump, so aggressive, so
unsophisticated, so lacking in the most basic understanding of feigning
civility in political life, that both conservatives and liberals in the US have
been willing to forgive the sins of the Bush era, simply to imagine that there
was a politically normal past before Trump. That the decision of one man to
launch a wholly unjustified and brutal invasion can be reduced to a punchline
in the hope that the laughter can obscure the shame of what came next.
The
writer is currently writing a book on the Middle East and is a frequent
commentator on international TV news networks. He has worked for news outlets
such as The Guardian and the BBC, and reported on the Middle East, Eastern
Europe, Asia and Africa.
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