Bush-loathing scholar Andrew Bacevich has taken to the Boston Globe to pen a screed documenting the horrible misdeeds perpetrated by the administration. Bacevich even ordered his complaints in a tidy little list:
The administration's many failures, especially those related to Iraq, mask a considerable legacy. Among other things, the Bush team has accomplished the following:
• Defined the contemporary era as an "age of terror" with an open-ended "global war" as the necessary, indeed the only logical, response;
• Promulgated and implemented a doctrine of preventive war, thereby creating a far more permissive rationale for employing armed force;
• Affirmed - despite the catastrophe of Sept. 11, 2001 - that the primary role of the Department of Defense is not defense, but power projection;
• Removed constraints on military spending so that once more, as Ronald Reagan used to declare, "defense is not a budget item";
• Enhanced the prerogatives of the imperial presidency on all matters pertaining to national security, effectively eviscerating the system of checks and balances;
• Preserved and even expanded the national security state, despite the manifest shortcomings of institutions such as the CIA and the Joint Chiefs of Staff;
• Preempted any inclination to question the wisdom of the post-Cold War foreign policy consensus, founded on expectations of a sole superpower exercising "global leadership";
• Completed the shift of US strategic priorities away from Europe and toward the Greater Middle East, the defense of Israel having now supplanted the defense of Berlin as the cause to which presidents and would-be presidents ritually declare their fealty.
By almost any measure, this constitutes a record of substantial, if almost entirely malignant, achievement.
First of all, I don't concede all of Bacevich's points and consider some of them pretty darn obtuse. But just for the sake argument, let's say that I agree with his list in its entirety (which once again, I don't). Generally speaking, I'm the first to mention what is to me the inconvenient fact that the president and his minions have made oodles of errors. Okay, I'm not the first - with a lefty blogosphere constantly on outrage patrol, how could I be?
But even with the all the Bushie missteps, can we not acknowledge one accomplishment that is far from "entirely malignant?" Since 9/11, there has not been a terrorist attack on American soil. Surely Bacevich has noticed this. And surely he understands that it isn't the kindness of the Jihadist soul that has made this happen.
Some on the left argue that the multiple Bush depredations to our civil liberties etc. haven't been worth the increase in safety. At least this is an intellectually honest argument. I would even encourage the people making such an argument to bring it before the electorate in November. It wold be great if they quantify their thinking with some metrics, e.g., "I would be willing to allow x 9/11's as a tradeoff for closing the Guantanamo Bay detention center."
Bacevich's argument, oddly enough, is actually the fundamentally frivolous one. By failing to assess the accomplishments of the past eight years and what role the administration had in them, he beclowns himself. By failing to take into account a level of success regarding homeland security that no one foresaw some seven years ago, he implies that future administrations should ignore the Bush administration's legacy even in an area where it is undeniably strong.
