In spite of all this, alas, political memory is appallingly short (even if the life of Bush's forever prison in Cuba and other worst legacies is not). We are left, after a passage of years, with vibes rather than facts. And the lingering aura around Bush is one of decency—especially compared to the Republican party of today. The result has been an inescapable drift among millennials toward viewing the former president with affection—even among those of us who went to high school in the Bush years and developed our first sense of political identity around hating him.
This development has been helped along by the fact that the only times in recent years when Bush II has returned to the headlines, it has been in ways that reinforce the positive vibes. There was Ellen DeGeneres opining a few years back that she goes to baseball games with the former president and considers him a friend—holding this up as a prime example of the lost art of bipartisan congeniality; there have been Bush's remarks in favor of immigration reform and against the narrow xenophobic turn his party has taken since he left office; the statement Bush put out after the death of George Floyd; and so on.
But now, in recent days, the Politico article points out, Bush has reappeared in a role far more reminiscent of the hawk we recall from our angry adolescence—the father figure we rebelled against as teenagers, rather than the friendly grandfather figure we knew in the era of his low-decibel retirement. Specifically, he has dropped back into the news cycle in order to opine on the Israel-Palestine conflict. And it has not been merely to restate the obvious: condemning Hamas and expressing empathy and solidarity with the victims and survivors of terrorism. Instead, he's sounding more like the progenitor of the "War on Terror" we'd almost forgotten.
As I've said repeatedly at this point, of course, I do think that Israel has a legitimate moral basis to use force against Hamas. I can't imagine how any state could be expected to suffer a direct attack on its civilian population, on its own soil, and not respond militarily in some fashion—still less when hundreds of their own citizens were still being held as hostages at gunpoint. But, that does not mean one has to undermine in advance any possibility for a negotiated peace (as Bush apparently did); still less does it entail that one should fight such a war—however justified—in the manner of Bush—that is, with a total disregard of international law.
Bush's comments are especially concerning given that Israel so far seems at risk of fighting a very Bush-style war. The Israeli military's relentless aerial bombardment of the Gaza Strip has already reportedly killed thousands (reliable figures are hard to come by—but it seems likely that at least hundreds of innocents, many of them children, have already died under IDF fire). The carnage can only serve to remind us of the worst of U.S. atrocities in the Middle East during Bush's tenure: the civilian death toll of U.S. bombing in Iraq; the torture and rendition and indefinite detention of prisoners without trial. Israel has even reportedly dropped white phosphorus on populated areas—just as the U.S. did in Falluja.
In some ways, therefore, it seems like the old, bad, war-mongering Bush is back in our midst; and the peaceful portrait-painting septuagenarian Bush is out. Indeed, I have to confess that the first thing that came to mind for me, in reading Bush's swaggering gunslinging comments about icing terrorists and refusing to negotiate with "killers," was a poem by Harold Pinter that I hadn't thought about in years. In one of several pieces he wrote in response to the Bush-led U.S./U.K. invasion of Iraq, Pinter penned four wonderfully crass and vitriolic lines condemning Bush and Blair. The one that came back into my head at this moment: Careful, Pinter warns us, "The big pricks are out."
Yet—instead of harping on this sense that we have lost the more admirable and restrained version of Bush we had gotten to know in recent years, only to regain the war criminal Bush dripping with toxic machismo, perhaps it is more accurate to simply recognize that these have always been the two sides of the Bush coin. Even when he was in office, after all, Bush already had a reputation as a decent man in his private life. This didn't change even as he ordered ever more controversial and legally-dubious actions overseas. My parents, for instance, even if they would never have voted for him, spoke admiringly of his reputation as a family man—especially by contrast to the then-fresh memories of Clinton's serially sleazy behavior.
This left me, as a teenager in the Bush years, feeling just as conflicted about him in many ways as I still feel today. I wanted to cry out to the world: "Who cares if he's a good husband and father if he's also a blood-thirsty warmonger who violates the Constitution!" I'll never forget when I picked up a volume of Lord Byron's verse, at around this time in my life, and I found his outstanding political satire, "The Vision of Judgment," about King George III's attempt to gain entrance to Heaven. I was struck at the time by what seemed an inescapable parallel to my own contemporary tyrant named George: specifically because Byron dwells so much on this theme of the contrast between the King's reputation for private virtue and his public actions that undermined freedom for millions.
I went back now to look up the passage that had struck me so forcefully as a teenager; and it still seems to me on-point where Bush is concerned. One contemporary George really was much like the historical one, it would seem. Byron writes at one point, for instance (through the voice of one of Satan's imps who has accompanied the deceased monarch to the pearly gates in order to advocate for Hell's jurisdictional right to his soul): "“I know he was a constant consort – own/ He was a decent Sire, and middling lord;/ “All this is much, & most upon a throne – [...] / “I grant him all the kindest can accord/ And this was well for him – but not for those/ Millions who found him what Oppression chose."
This, it still seems to me, is the right and proper take to have on George W. Bush as well. Even in the wake of his most recent comments—with all the bad memories they have stirred—I still think all the reasons why we regard him with nostalgia and affection have some basis in truth. He is in fact a decent man in his private life, so far as anyone can discover. He is indeed refreshingly principled, if in a rather stilted and Manichaean way, especially by comparison to the vacuous nihilism, the sheer moral void, of the Trump/MAGA faction of the Republican Party we have today.
Yet, even conceding this, one has to ask: what good does this do for the millions of people whose lives were made materially worse by his actions? What does it matter to someone locked away for decades without trial, or tortured in a secret CIA prison, to know that the man who ordered these atrocities was at least not an adulterer or a cheat? In short, we have to concede—and we do still concede, even after this latest reminder of Bush's worse qualities, that he is a man of private virtue and continence. But this also does not mean we have to absolve him, by any means, of his public failings. For we could still say, with Byron's imp: such private decency "was well for him [and his family, no doubt] – but not for those/ Millions [in Iraq and elsewhere] who found him what Oppression chose."
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