Bye George
On the eve of George Bush’s visit to London as part of his farewell tour, an open letter to the departing US president sums up his legacy, both to his own country and Britain
Dear Mr Bush (forgive me, I can’t quite manage “Mr President” or even “George”),
We won’t be meeting in person, and we won’t even be adjacent, as our government has banned a march (from Parliament Square, tomorrow teatime) in protest against your visit.
The fact that this isn’t much of a surprise is one of the baleful consequences of your presidency. If we did meet, I’d probably ask if you ever speculate how things might have fallen out had supreme court Justice Anthony Kennedy switched sides on December 12 2000, and (an “if”, I know) you’d lost the Florida recount and the election. I’d do so because my first beef about your presidency is that it denied us Al Gore’s.
OK, a Gore victory wouldn’t have stopped 9/11, and he would probably have been persuaded to take punitive action against Afghanistan. But invading Iraq would have destroyed his party, and, after all, Saddam Hussein didn’t try to kill his daddy. Following Bill Clinton’s latter efforts, he would have paid more serious attention to resolving Israel/Palestine. But, most of all, he would have given authority and leadership to confronting our most important, and probably most urgent, global challenge. What did you do about your global carbon emissions? Pull out of Kyoto.
For all the talk of confronting evil-doers and mounting crusades - surely the most accidentally apt analogy of your presidency - the moral cynicism of your attitude to climate change is emblematic. (You do, now, admit to some “commonalities” on the issue with the rest of the world). Your promise to return moral probity to the Oval Office emptied out as soon as you got your feet under the desk.
Few remember your acceptance speech in the Texas House of Representatives, chosen because of its record of bipartisan cooperation, in which you reiterated your commitment to an inclusive “compassionate conservatism”, and hinted at an administration that would acknowledge the thinness of its mandate. What happened next? One of the largest tax kickbacks to the rich in history. By 2012, the lowest 20% of US citizens will have gained $45 (£23) from your 2001 and 2003 tax-cut programme. Those with incomes over $1m a year will be $162,000 better off. Truly, as Joseph Stiglitz puts it, a rising tide will lift all yachts. This 10-year tax cut round gave $1.35 trillion to the American rich. To give an idea of its enormity: you’ve “only” spent half a trillion in Iraq. The combined $1.85 trillion? Universal healthcare introduced. Public education transformed. The social security timebomb defused at a stroke. You are spending in two weeks on the war what you spend in Africa in a year.
Following 9/11, America received a proper wave of international sympathy for its victims, who hailed from every corner of the planet. Understandably caught up in a wave of grief and defiance, the House of Representatives voted for the display of signs proclaiming God Bless America in schools, and the New York Board of Education passed a resolution requiring all public schools to lead a daily pledge. You set about removing the liberties that that pledge celebrates, with relish and a will.
Cornering the market in breathless acronyms, the Senate’s Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act increased government powers to conduct searches, deport suspects, eavesdrop on internet communications and monitor financial transactions. You appointed Iran/Contra scandal veteran John Poindexter to run an agency tasked with creating “Total Information Awareness” of your fellow Americans. The government can insist that libraries report what books they lend to whom. In a triumph of understatement, your press secretary warned that “people have to watch what they say and do”.
These “people” were Americans. This was before you started up on everybody else. This was before Guantánamo, and Abu Ghraib, and extraordinary rendition. This was when it was still a surprise to hear civilised, sensible politicians and commentators debating the efficacy of torture.
And then, there was the 2005 election, in which lines snaked round polling stations in South African proportions, and John Kerry received the largest democratic vote in history. Sadly, your election supremo managed to persuade sufficient numbers of previously non-voting Ohian Christian fundamentalists that a vote for Kerry was a vote for gay marriage to secure your reelection. You had already sought to do God in politics with a zeal unknown in US history. White House spokesmen contrast the “reality-based” reasoning of godless journalists with their own “faith-based” thinking. You have made a climate more conducive to creationism than at any time since the John Scopes monkey trial of 1925, in matters great and small.
Most of all, you have polarised the world, between good and evil, good guys and bad guys, us and them. One of the ironies of the Manichean, “clash of civilisation” model, which has split the world on your watch, is that the very aspects of literal, Wahhabist Islam that westerners have proper worries about - the death penalty, the subordination of women, homophobia, censorship, aggressive warmaking, the divine authority of leaders - are aspects you don’t have that much trouble with. And then, there’s your effect on us over here.
Even those without illusions about Labour’s new dawn thought the Blair government would do three good big things. First, it would reverse the widening gap between rich and poor. Second, it would protect and perhaps update Britain’s much vaunted democratic and civil liberties. And third, the government’s obvious ease with the diversity of modern Britain would embed multiculturalism into our institutions and practices.
All three were going reasonably well, until Mr Blair went to Washington. We know what joining your invasions cost us. What did we get in return? We imported your excuse for the Iraq invasion, and so we also imported the collapse in trust which followed its unravelling. Increasingly, the patriotic values that our government invites newcomers to sign up to have looked less like a welcoming mat and more like a watchtower. In his famous January 2006 “stick a flag in your lawn” speech, Gordon Brown cited a “golden thread” of British freedoms - from Magna Carta to universal suffrage - culminating in the “generous, expansive view of liberty” we enjoy today. Ten months later, Tony Blair announced: “Our tolerance is part of what makes Britain, Britain. So conform to it; or don’t come here.”
Three months after that, Brown is suggesting that newcomers undertake community service as a condition of becoming British citizens. We imported the self-righteous, “for us or against us”, ends-justifying-means mentality, which justifies not only the erosion of civil liberties but the presumptions on which they’re based. It seems increasingly difficult to argue that you can disapprove of an activity without wanting to ban or discourage it, that governments and police forces can abuse powers, and that surveillance, punitive sentencing and excessive detention is a threat to the innocent as well as the guilty.
Last Sunday, Jacqui Smith hoped that her opponents never had to deal with a terrorist outrage that 42-day detention might have prevented, as if there was no countervailing principle at stake. Her opponent on the libertarian side of the argument was Boris Johnson.
Three days later, all bar 36 of the parliamentary Labour party put themselves to the right of all the parliamentary Tory party bar Ann Widdecombe.
Following your helpful hints, we have imprisoned foreign nationals without trial, driving detainees and those subject to draconian control orders into mental hospitals.
Should you or anyone else wish to understand how the ever-tightening legal tourniquet has fuelled resentment in Muslim communities, download Gareth Pierce’s magisterial article on detention legislation from the London Review of Books website. Its title is: Was it like this for the Irish? You have made us unlearn the lessons of our own past.
Those of us who warned that - even as amended - the clauses prohibiting “glorification” of terrorism could be used against biographers of Nelson Mandela or historians of the Boston Tea Party were gently pooh-poohed as alarmist. But even we didn’t think the first person to be prosecuted under section 58 of the Terrorism Act 2000 would be a poet.
When Martin Amis conducts what he calls a “thought experiment” about the collective punishment of Muslims - travel restriction, strip searching, deportation - he gets defended by Christopher Hitchens in the Guardian. When Samina Malik fantasises about being a terrorist, she ends up in court accused of being one.
Last month, postgraduate student Rizwaan Sabir was held by the police for six days after Nottingham University found an al-Qaida training manual, downloaded from a US government website, on his computer. Despite his supervisors insisting it was relevant to his research, the university informed the police. The administrator who printed the document out for him, Hisham Yezza, is still detained, threatened with deportation under immigration regulations.
Like you, we are chipping away at the very things that we are asked to defend. The liberties that newcomers are asked to value and do value are being gradually eroded, because they’re here.
While finally, and cheered on by formerly progressive intellectuals and commentators, our government has blamed homegrown terrorism on the open, tolerant, multicultural, live-and-let-live Britain that, despite all problems and setbacks, has gradually emerged since and despite Enoch Powell’s apocalyptic jeremiad of 40 years ago.
So, is there anything to thank you for? Well, at least, in a number of significant respects, we know where we are. If your predecessor presided over a boom financed by ballooning personal debt, it’s good that your reinvention of 1980s gung-ho capitalism has exposed the predictable consequences of an unregulated economy fuelled by greed. The victims of the sub-prime mortgage collapse - small investors and small householders alike - stand side by side with the victims of hurricane Katrina as witnesses to the limitations of the nightwatchman state.
You’ve also reminded us of something. For you, the “war on terror” reveals enemies. For its opponents, the war has reminded us what we have in common. Pro-war ideologues have pitted progressive principles (secularism, sexual freedom, individual liberty) against the people we’ve attacked abroad and demonise at home.
The events of the last week - in the House of Commons and the supreme court - demonstrate the importance of civil liberties and human rights as a common platform for the powerless and the people who instinctively support them.
Finally, you’ve succeeded in doing something that doesn’t happen that often in either of our countries: you’ve made change a popular, engaging and viable political slogan (I see you’re even using it yourself). The joke postcard map that contrasted liberal, blue, coastal America with the blood-red central lump of “Dumbfuckistan” is a tempting heresy; the crude, county-by-county electoral map does seem to show that the further people live from other people, the more likely they are to vote for you.
But the mauves and purples of population-proportionate America remind us that there are married, churchgoing, rural DemocratS; that the American genius is for perpetual reinvention; that your country still retains that spirit of doing the impossible, which not only irrigated southern California but also desegregated the south.
So your lasting contribution to American politics may be something quite unthinkable a year ago: its first black president.
If so, the voters who outnumbered yours in 2000, and who turned out in unprecedented numbers against you in 2004, will not have voted in vain.
June 15th, 2008 | Category: Bush
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