February 15, 2011--Bush (George W) & Obama

Two weeks ago, Republicans were proclaiming that if Hosni Mubarak stamped out the rebellion in Egypt or the Muslim Brotherhood took control of events, the question would be, “Who lost Egypt?” And the answer would be, “Barack Obama.”

These “who-lost?” slurs are familiar to anyone who remembers 20th century history.

The question that was an accusation, “Who lost China?” after Mao Zedong and his forces completed a communist takeover, resonated toxically in our political life for decades. It was claimed by Republicans that Democrat president Harry Truman was responsible because it happened in 1950 on his watch and that if the country wanted a robust foreign policy they should vote for GOP candidates.

So we did and eventually got fiercely anticommunist Richard Nixon, who promptly lost the war in Vietnam and made up with the hated “Red” Chinese.

What to make of that? Easy—life and politics are complicated.

As evidence of that, this past weekend while potential Republican presidential candidates strutted their stuff before 10,000 attendees at the American Conservative Union’s convention (CEPAC) to see who could best pander to Tea Party activists, not a one mentioned Egypt by name, though Mitt Romney, who most needs to polish his right-wing credentials, said, codedly, that Obama has been consistently wrong about the Muslim Brotherhood.

Other Republicans not running for anything on the Sunday talk shows managed to squeak out the words that maybe, just maybe Obama had not only not lost Egypt but perhaps he had done as well as could be expected in walking a tightrope between competing interests in Egypt as well as within his own administration.

Now that Obama’s positive role in all this complexity has been grudgingly acknowledged by the shrinking number of adults in the Republican establishment, a new debate has popped up—

Maybe, some are saying, the president most responsible for bringing democracy to Egypt is not Obama at all but, are you seated, George W. Bush.

You say the very same Bush who brought democracy to Iraq through a war that began with an unprovoked shock and awe bombing campaign followed by an invasion and occupation by 130,000 American troops?

Indeed, that President Bush.

His apologists claim that he, and not Obama, articulated a grand democratic strategy—his vaunted “freedom agenda.” Didn’t he, after all, make “ending tyranny in our world” the centerpiece of his second inaugural address?

Indeed he did. But liberals and their alleged friends in the media were so busy calling him a fascist and worse for his pre-emptive aggression against what he called a member of the “axis of evil,” and for turning the government loose to snoop and spy on all of us, that we were incapable of hearing his noble words.

Barack Obama, Bush’s supporters say, is merely making Bush’s agenda his own. Obama is capable of delivering soaring speeches of the kind he did in Egypt in 2009, but when it comes to the action step, he is inclined to follow his predecessor’s lead. Not only in Egypt, it is asserted, but in Iraq and Afghanistan as well. Who is it, they ask, who tripled the number of troops Bush assigned to Afghanistan? Again easy—Obama carrying out Bush’s anti-terrorism policies.

This is all laid out in Peter Baker’s article in the Sunday New York Times. (Linked below.)

When confronted with this claim, according to Baker, Obama supporters snip, “Give me a break. How many democracies took pace when [Bush] was in office?”

The answer is quite a few. In Ukraine, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, Lebanon, and lest we forget, Gaza, where the results of the free election there turned things over to Hamas. Not the result the Bush team wanted, but no one ever said democracy is not messy.

As we are likely to see very soon in Egypt as people who disagree with each other about the future of their country attempt to sort things out.

While back in the States, we should expect to hear a lot of demagoguery and hypocrisy. From all sides. Democracies are like that too.

So perhaps we should strive to understand that the U.S. is not in charge of events of the kind we have been witnessing in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, and elsewhere. We do not deserve credit or blame if struggles for democracy succeed or fail. Not Bush, not Obama.

What may be true is that our on-going example is our most important contribution to the democratizing process. Our very imperfect democracy itself is our most potent export.

If so, if we are serious about seeing tyranny end, we should then pay more attention to perfecting that example.

We could find ways to disagree more intelligently. We could seek to reduce the unnatural causes of inequality. We should work on protecting our vaunted rights. And we should stop meddling in other people’s affairs.

In the age of satellite TV and the social media this is the best strategy. Maybe the only one.