Mick Hartley

Michael Young in Lebanon's Daily Star:

A large part of the hope accompanying the election of Barack Obama as president of the United States has been relief at the departure of George W. Bush. While by no means an outstanding figure, Bush is today so abhorred that an evenhanded reading of his legacy seems impossible. Yet the reality is that, when it comes to foreign policy, his administration has been just about as good, and as bad, as its predecessors.

There are dark spots to be sure. The Guantanamo prison along with the more discriminatory aspects of the USA Patriot Act, the Bush administration's creepy legal effort to justify torture in its "war on terror," the Abu Ghraib outrage, the extraordinary rendition program sending individuals back to their countries of origin to be mistreated, are all blights on a country claiming to support human rights and the rule of law. The Obama administration's intention to close down Guantanamo comes not a moment too soon. To a large extent, Bush's claims about spreading democracy to the Middle East were undermined by such behavior, even if the American legal system and media, it must be recognized, were in the forefront in limiting or highlighting the administration's abuses….

What about the Middle East, where Bush supposedly revolutionized Washington's dealings with the region? The Iraq war has become the benchmark by which everyone judges the US president. Certainly, the political preparations for the war, like the planning for the postwar situation, were a disaster, the result of manipulation, negligence, incompetence, and hubris. But in repeating this, critics of the US never acknowledge an essential truth: Bush removed from power a mass murderer of historical proportions, who would have only perpetuated his vicious, kleptomaniacal rule to the detriment of his people had he not been ousted. Nothing but military force could rid us of Saddam Hussein.

By the same token, few of the critics acknowledge that Bush, and here the president can take personal credit, pushed through a change of strategy in Iraq that proved successful in lowering the levels of violence, the so-called "surge." Since Vietnam and the days of Lyndon Johnson, there had been a perception that losing American wars will remain losing wars. Bush, along with his field commander General David Petraeus, showed that this was not the case. Blame Bush for overseeing a postwar plan for Iraq that was a shambles, but also accept that he believed in a more positive outcome there when most of those around him hadn't a clue what to do.