MILLIONS of American citizens are expected to be present next week at the changing of the guard in Washington DC, and a worldwide television audience of billions is likely to tune in to watch the 44th president of the United States take his oath. The level of domestic and global anticipation is a tribute to the expectations Barack Obama has aroused – many of which are bound to be dashed in the weeks, months and years ahead. The president-elect cannot, however, take credit for all of the excitement.

 

Seldom before has the impending departure of a White House incumbent been such an unequivocally delightful prospect. Considering the reputations of some of George W. Bush’s predecessors, that’s quite an achievement. In fact, one probably has to go back to JFK for an instance of a president whose exit did not inspire a collective sigh of relief. But this time the sigh will be louder and deeper than usual.

 

Popular perceptions of the outgoing administration’s record of  incompetence and bloody-mindedness are bound to be something of a boon for Bush’s successor, in that after the past eight years even moderate mediocrity would seem like a distinct improvement. Not that Obama, apparently unfazed by the monumental challenges that confront him on almost every front, has any intention of wallowing in mediocrity. Many of these problems are, in one way or another, a part of Bush’s odious legacy – which, unfortunately, will linger on like a foul odour.

 

Looking back at the turn of the millennium, one can only wonder what American voters were thinking when they decided to elevate the governor of Texas to the highest office in the land. During the campaign, he seldom lost an opportunity to demonstrate his inadequacies. “Rarely is the question asked: is our children learning?” he ventured early on. “I understand small business growth: I was one” was a gem of a confession. And then there was this bizarre warning: “This is still a dangerous world. It’s a world of madmen and uncertainty and potential mential losses.” [EDS: “MENTIAL” IS CORRECT] Whatever that meant, it didn’t bode well.

 

His ignorance of international affairs was a part of his broader intellectual incuriosity. His area of administrative expertise? Well, Texas under him had a considerably higher rate of executions than other American states; the governor routinely turned down clemency appeals. The quality of mercy evidently passed him by, as did the concept of correcting possible errors.  At the national and international levels, these manichean characteristics did a great deal more grievous harm.

 

But, back in 2000, what was it about this man that attracted the average Republican voter? His mangled syntax, his inane expressions, his apparent lack of interest in expanding his knowledge? Such attributes may have stood him in good stead in an election for a class idiot or a court jester, but surely not the most powerful political post on earth? If many of them saw in him a reflection of themselves, then their self-image was clearly less than flattering.

 

One mustn’t forget, though, that he only came within a whisker of winning the presidential election in November 2000: Al Gore was ahead in the popular vote and would have probably taken the crucial state of Florida had it not been governed by W’s brother Jeb, and had every vote been counted. Anyhow, it was the Supreme Court judges that eventually pushed Bush into the White House.

 

The controversy over Florida receded from the public consciousness only with a little help from Osama bin Laden’s murderous emissaries, and the war against an abstract noun, launched shortly afterwards, meant that the shadow cast over the White House by the Enron scandal went largely unnoticed. But the interim between 9/11 and November 2004 was surely long enough for even the meanest intelligence to grasp that Bush and his colleagues – among them the leading lights of the neoconservative Project for the New American Century, an alarming plot for world domination that must have turned Hitler’s ghost green with envy – were leading the US, and much besides, down the road to perdition. By then, even the atrocious goings-on at Abu Ghraib had been well documented, and only the pathologically gullible could have bought the official line that “a few bad apples” were responsible for the sadistic abuse of Iraqi prisoners.

 

It also took an inordinate degree of gullibility to accept that the administration had been misled by intelligence reports in believing that Saddam Hussein was concealing weapons of mass destruction. Amazingly, Bush and the sinister Dick Cheney continue to peddle that line in interviews. Anyhow, the point is that by November 2004 the Bush administration had clearly violated international law, human rights and the US constitution, not to mention common sense. The “war against terror” had not only become an excuse for torture but was helping to recruit young Muslims to the most deleterious causes. And the great American public, in its wisdom, re-elected George W. as their president.

 

Does Obama’s triumph four years later to some extent mitigate the culpability of the electorate? Perhaps. But it was Hurricane Katrina more than Abu Ghraib, Fallujah, Haditha or Guantanamo Bay that turned the tide, and it was last year’s economic crash – the consequence of financial deregulation combined with inordinate degrees of greed – that effectively sealed the political fate of Bush’s would-be Republican successor. Else it may well have been John McCain and Sarah Palin taking oath next Tuesday: a pair somewhat in the Bush-Cheney mould, with the roles reversed between the elderly repository of malevolence and a somewhat more telegenic but intellectually deficient sidekick.

 

George W. will not be missed. Or forgiven. But nor should he be forgotten in a hurry: the antics of his awful administration must serve as a cautionary tale. His line in slightly self-deprecating humour may have been mildly amusing had he been employed as a bartender in some seedy Houston joint, but you can’t convincingly play the clown with so much blood on your hands: hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, thousands of Afghans, thousands of Americans. And when, unlike Lady Macbeth, you make not the slightest effort to wash it off.

 

Characteristically, the highlight of Bush’s final week in office involves presenting the Presidential Medal of Freedom, his country’s highest civilian award, to two of his partners in crime: Tony Blair and Australia’s John Howard. Now if only Muntazer Al Zaidi had been flown in from Abu Ghraib or wherever the poor man is incarcerated, and equipped with three pairs of Iraqi boots, that would have made the ceremony so much more entertaining. And appropriate.

 

Email: [email protected]

---