Scott Spiegel

George W. Bush’s memoir Decision Points is a surprisingly good read—not that I expected it to be terrible, as Bush-haters probably do.  (I rate his presidency middling, better than his father’s, and better than any Democrat’s since at least JFK’s.)

Given the sharp turn our nation has taken leftward—and downward—the memoir made me feel ridiculously nostalgic.

The chapter titles are short, punchy, to-the-point.  You can practically hear W reciting them into his mini-tape recorder: “Quitting.”  “Running.”  “Personnel.”  “Stem Cells.”

That would be “Quitting” as in drinking, and “Running” for political offices including governor of Texas and the presidency.  “Personnel” relates Bush’s decision-making process for nominating and/or firing staffers Dick Cheney, James Baker and Ted Olson (lawyers in Bush v. Gore), Colin Powell, Condoleeza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld, Bob Gates, Andrew Card, John Roberts, Harriet Miers, and Samuel Alito.

Not surprisingly, the longest chapter is “Iraq,” which outlines Bush’s decision to invade the country and take out Saddam Hussein.  Bush lays out the case for his decision to attack clearly, logically, and unimpeachably, including the overwhelming global consensus that Hussein was producing weapons of mass destruction.  Bush chronicles the support he received from steadfast allies Tony Blair, John Howard, and José Maria Avnar, and the backstabbing he encountered from treacherous weasels Gerhard Schroeder, Jacques Chirac, and Vladimir Putin.

The facts Bush provides on the lead-up to the Iraq War remind us that claims he “rushed to war,” “went it alone,” and had no plans for postwar Iraq are the fevered delusions of leftist lunatics.  (Just reading about the U.S.’s efforts to rope Security Council members into approving UN resolutions to deal with Hussein “diplomatically,” I grew six inches of facial hair.)

“Leading” describes Bush’s leadership on a variety of issues, including No Child Left Behind and the regrettable Medicare prescription drug benefit, as well as his heartbreaking second-term failure to pass Social Security reform and his (mostly solid) immigration reform.

Three chapters are stinkers; fortunately, they come near the end.  “Lazarus Effect” brags how generous Bush was with taxpayer money in starting an AIDS prevention program in Africa that constituted a drop in the bucket because it did nothing to address the corruption in Africa’s tyrannical regimes.  (Bizarre revelation: Upon landing in Tanzania, Bush writes, “[A] cluster of women danced to the festive beat of drums and horns.  As one rotated to the music, I saw my photo stretched across her backside.”)

“Freedom Agenda” boasts about Bush’s push for a two-state Israeli-Palestinian solution over the objections of Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Powell, and his support for free elections for Palestinians who ended up voting Hamas into power.  “Financial Crisis” justifies Bush’s backing of the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) and automobile industry bailout.  It’s not surprising that the “moderate,” “bipartisan” activity outlined in these three chapters was concentrated in Bush’s final two years, after the disastrous political events of 2005 (including the outcry over his response to Hurricane Katrina).

In the introduction, Bush explains that the book is structured thematically: rather than a straightforward chronological narrative, each chapter covers a choice point in his life.  The result can feel a bit postmodern at times.  For example, we make it through one chapter that ends with his decision to run for president, then are plopped back into his pre-governorship days.

Still, I applaud Bush’s decision to structure the book this way, because it emphasizes something important about the life of a political leader: namely, the importance of free will and personal responsibility.  Bush describes his thought process as he faced each momentous decision, and while he admits he didn’t always make the best decision, he insists he was the one who made the decisions, takes full responsibility for them, and learns from his mistakes.

Contrast the active title of Bush’s memoir with the passive title of Barack Obama’s premature first memoir, Dreams from My Father, which emphasizes the hereditary, environmental forces that swept Obama’s worldview into the twisted, collectivist wilderness it inhabits today.

Or contrast Bush’s willingness to take responsibility for his mistakes—and graceful post-presidency silence on Obama’s calamitous first two years—with Obama’s constant badmouthing of Bush and blaming him for everything bad in his administration.  As Rush Limbaugh noted last week in his interview with the former president, Bush didn’t spend eight years blaming President Bill Clinton for faulty, impotent foreign policy and failed efforts to prevent the spread of Islamic terrorist networks that attacked the West after 9/11.

Bush enjoys a certain satisfying revenge on his critics by laying out the facts and circumstances behind each decision and forcing them to judge whether they would have done differently.

The crucial passage from the excellent “Surge” chapter—and maybe from the whole book—is this: “Years from now, historians may look back and see the surge as a foregone conclusion, an inevitable bridge between the years of violence that followed liberation and the democracy that emerged.  Nothing about the surge felt inevitable at the time.  Public opinion ran strongly against it.  Congress tried to block it.  The enemy fought relentlessly to break our will.”  Beneficial outcomes aren’t inevitable or immediate, Bush reminds us—they are the hard-won product of courage displayed at crucial decision points.

One thing supporters and detractors agree on is that Bush’s unpopularity by the end of his second term was the result of choices he had made.  His unpopularity was not proof he had made good choices, but it was evidence he had made tough ones.



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In anticipation of President Barack Obama’s primetime address to the nation last night on the Iraq War, columnist Eugene Robinson wrote, “Now that the Iraq War is over… only one thing is clear about the outcome: We didn’t win.”

Actually, I can think of about 12 things that are clearer about the outcome of the Iraq War than the conclusion that we didn’t win: (1) Obama was wrong about the surge, (2) Vice President Joe Biden was wrong about the surge, (3) President George W. Bush was right to ignore Congressional Democrats and the Iraq Study Group and order the surge in 2007, (4) insurgent violence dropped precipitously after the surge was implemented, (5) if Democrats had had their way on the surge in Iraq, per Harry Reid’s declaration that “this war is lost,” it would have been lost, (6) Biden was wrong about dividing Iraq into ethnic partitions, (7) Biden is a loon for claiming that the Iraq War could be one of the great successes of the Obama administration, (8) Iraq is now the fourth-most politically free Middle Eastern country, after democracy Israel, republic Lebanon, and constitutional monarchy Morocco, (9) General David Petraeus’ Iraq surge set the model for beating back insurgents and winning in Afghanistan, (10) despite liberals’ bleating about its expense, eight years of the Iraq War—including training and preparation for the March 2003 invasion—now turn out to have cost less ($709 billion) than Obama’s useless trillion-dollar stimulus bill, (11) Bush’s popularity didn’t sink to the level that Obama’s is at now until late 2005, two-and-a-half years into the Iraq War and well into Bush’s second term, and (12) Obama’s address last night was full of bromides, revisionist history, and platitudinous prescriptions for the future that have little relation to what will actually need to be done in the War on Terror according to a fair evaluation of conditions on the ground.

But then I’m not Eugene Robinson, who recently called those who wanted an investigation into Park51 mosque supporter Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf’s radical ties “loudmouths,” “fraidy-cats,” and “professional victims,” dismissed Tea Partiers as racists, and called Dr. Alveeda King a “puppet” for appearing at Glen Beck’s Restoring Honor rally.

Oh, and: (13) if anyone deserves to give a triumphal speech marking the end of combat operations in Iraq, it is Bush, Petraeus, Vice President Dick Cheney, or Kermit the Frog—anyone but Obama, who opposed the war from the start and voted as U.S. senator to defund it.

And: (14) Obama has learned nothing about the danger of prematurely promising to remove our troops by a certain date and the fortifying effect this has on our enemy, as demonstrated by his declaration in his speech that we will begin removing troops from Afghanistan in July 2011 according to his preordained schedule, and by his standing commitment to remove all 50,000 troops still stationed in Iraq by the end of 2011.

Not to mention: (15) the most factual elements of Obama’s address could have been cribbed from a Bush speech on Iraq from five years ago, such as “We must never lose sight of what’s at stake.  As we speak, al Qaeda continues to plot against us,” and (16) Obama wasn’t honorable or honest enough to give Bush credit for the surge, saying only that “[N]o one could doubt President Bush’s support for our troops, or his love of country and commitment to our security,” which is about as controversial to his antiwar base as saying, “No one could doubt President Bush’s support for his family, or his love of his wife and children.”

Robinson’s liberal fantasy proclaims, “The war was on its way toward becoming a disastrous failure until the country’s Sunni minority turned against the al-Qaeda jihadists who had flooded into Iraq to fight against the hated Americans,” then adds, as an afterthought, “and Bush’s troop surge, ably led by Gen. David Petraeus, capitalized on this shift of allegiance.”  Yes, sectarian conflict facilitated conditions in which the surge could flourish, but: (17) Bush and Petraeus were savvy enough to recognize this shift in conditions on the ground, prepare a successful strategy to take advantage of it, execute this strategy despite the histrionics of Congressional Democrats, and persist until it yielded its intended results.

Give Obama credit for this: his Iraq speech was the best speech he has ever given from the Oval Office.  Of course, the only other Oval Office speech he’s given was on the BP oil spill, an address that even liberal supporters at MSNBC and The New York Times panned as amateurish and ineffective.

Bonus fact!: The Brookings Institution’s Iraq Index reports that 79% of Iraqis believe that conditions in their country will be the same as or better in 2010 than in 2009—more than you can say for residents of the United States.



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Warning: Tiger Woods, Michael Jackson, and Balloon Boy are nowhere to be found in this list!

1. Iran Election Upheaval – Brave protestors took to the streets of Tehran and Twittered to the world shocking pictures and videos of civilian beatings and shootings by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, despite the inability of our Commander-in-Chief to raise an eyebrow over the carnage for a week.  As “President” Ahmadinejad continues to mock the West’s demands that Iran halt its uranium enrichment, the outrage of the emboldened and mobilized protest movement has the potentially farthest-reaching consequences of any event in 2009.

2. Health Care Reform Debate – Simultaneously the most outrageous and boring story of 2009.  On the one hand, we listened all year in disbelief as conservative think tanks unearthed fresh horrors in evolving versions of the bill; on the other hand, we listened to Democrats recite tired lies about “45 million uninsured” and “bending the cost curve” and “Nancy Pelosi approving a surtax on Botox.”  As Obama supporter Camille Paglia admitted, “By a proportion of something like 10-to-1, negative articles by conservatives were vastly more detailed, specific and practical about the proposals than were supportive articles by Democrats, which often made gestures rather than arguments and brimmed with emotion and sneers.”

3. Climategate – In which more pages of e-mails and computer code than in all the healthcare reform bills combined were leaked to the press, revealing climate “scientists” fudging data, threatening to delete data, and doing everything but counting pregnant chads to make the results come out the way they wanted.  Here’s a deal for Michael Mann, author of the discredited “hockey stick” graph of global temperature over the past few millennia: if “trick,” “hide,” and “decline” no longer mean what they once did, then neither do “dire,” “peer-reviewed,” or “consensus.”

4. Afghanistan Surge – General McChrystal begged President Obama in private and in public to give him the troops he needed to implement the counterinsurgency strategy Obama had hired him to carry out back in March.  After four months of dawdling, Obama gave McChrystal 75% of his revised request—which was 50% of his initial request—with no rationale provided for his bargain basement offer.  If this is how Obama treats the “good war,” I’d hate to see what he does to the bad one.

5. Tea Party Movement – Rasmussen released a poll in December showing that in a three-way generic race among Democratic, Republican, and Tea Party candidates, the Tea Party contender would beat the Republican by 5 points.  Despite the left’s ludicrous charges of racism and desperate use of lewd sexual terms never adopted by any Tea Party patriot, the biggest mass uprising against government spending and abuse of power since 1773 grew angrier and more forceful as the year went on, and will only be further inflamed by the Senate’s Christmas Eve passage of the health care spending act.

6. Stimulus Bill Passage – It would give you a concussion if it fell on you, even if dropped by Obama at the nadir of his bow to the King of Saudi Arabia or the Emperor of Japan.  Four months after its urgently required, life-or-death passage, only 5% of stimulus funds had been spent, a detail the administration papered over by simply lying about funded projects.  Naturally, this summer Democrats began clamoring for another stimulus package.

7. Sonia Sotomayor Confirmation – Proof that Democrats were never the party against racism—they were once the party that supported racism, and now they’re the party that supports reverse racism.  If Our Wise Latina’s speeches on biological differences between the races had been half as incendiary, the media would be consoling us that she might have been rejected for the Supreme Court if what she had said had been any worse; yet the fact is, if her words had been twice as offensive, wimpy Republicans in Congress would probably still have voted to confirm her.

8. Ft. Hood Shootings – The first terrorist attack on U.S. soil since 9/11, which was allowed to happen for the same reason as 9/11—the politically correct refusal to identify the danger of Islamism and its adherents’ wish to obliterate us and our allies for promoting freedom.  The most damning detail was Major Nidal Hasan’s PowerPoint presentation to a group of army scientists on the Koran’s injunction to decapitate infidels—to which the army responded by giving Hasan a promotion in Texas to get him out of their hair.

9. Pakistan Helps the U.S. Fight the Taliban – The Pakistan Army finally stepped up to the plate, no thanks to Obama’s dithering over the U.S.’s own commitment in the region.  Pakistan began Operation Path to Deliverance, in which they managed to send the same number of troops Obama finally agreed to as part of General McChrystal’s surge (30,000) to South Waziristan to beat back insurgents.

10. New Jersey/Virginia Gubernatorial Elections – Last year, liberals hooted that Republican primary candidates were avoiding George W. Bush like the plague, but the joke’s on them—their messiah is turning into the kiss of death in just his first year of office.  Obama’s multiple campaign stops for would-be governors Corzine and Deeds did nothing to assist them, and possibly even hindered their candidacies.

On matters such as whether to spend $800 billion on “stimulus” projects, $1 trillion on health care “reform,” or billions of dollars to build stadiums in the “city” of Chicago, President Obama is all about the now.  When it comes to approving a months-old request from his beleaguered general in Afghanistan to increase troops in an eight-years-and-running war to support the dying soldiers already there, Obama engages in leisurely stargazing.

Never mind that only a wee percentage of funds are seeping out eight months after the stimulus bill was passed, health care legislation wouldn’t start until 2013, and the 2016 Summer Olympics don’t take place for seven years.  Those items were all at the top of Obama’s to-do list.

The war in Afghanistan just entered its ninth year.  Obama formulated his grand strategy for Afghanistan in March, and replaced his former commander there with General Stanley McChrystal in June.  McChrystal, as requested, made his assessment of what was necessary to implement Obama’s counterinsurgency strategy, including adequate troop levels, and has been waiting since August for Obama to give him what he needs.

Now Obama tells us that before troops can be approved, we need to make sure we have a strategy.  As George Will recently asked, didn’t Obama formulate his strategy in March?  Has it changed since then?  If not, then why the delay in sending troops to carry it out?

For one, we are told that discontent is brewing among Congressional Democrats over sending more troops, and that Obama wants to take into account their diverse opinions.  Yet discontent is always brewing among Democrats over sending any American troops anywhere, unless the mission is purely humanitarian and serves absolutely no U.S. security interest.  People who think it’s always wrong to go to war or escalate a conflict cannot be trusted to give strategic advice on troop levels in any specific conflict.

Even Hillary Clinton is sane enough to realize that if we follow Vice President Joe Biden’s preferred plan of stepping up surgical strikes and predator attacks against Al Qaeda leaders, maintaining current troop levels, and allowing the Taliban to retake large swaths of Afghanistan, Al Qaeda will return to the region before we know it.

Now, as a red herring, senior Democrats are criticizing McChrystal for “violating” the chain of command, simply because after a speech he gave last week he honestly answered a question on strategy by referencing the need for more troops in Afghanistan.

To remind Obama: McChrystal was brought in to replace General David McKiernan due to Obama’s stated intent to implement the new counterinsurgency strategy that General David Petraeus had successfully used in Iraq.  McChrystal privately requested 30,000 to 40,000 additional troops in August, a detail that was leaked to the press.  Last week, he obliquely reiterated the need for more troops in his factual response to a question.  How was he supposed to know that Obama had gone all mushy and was reconsidering his already committed to strategy?

To satisfy critics’ demand that he say nothing precise without clearing it with our commander-in-chief, McChrystal’s response to questions about strategy in Afghanistan would have had to have been, “We’re going to win in Afghanistan.  As for details, please ignore everything I’ve said before and the report and troop request I issued in August—all of that may or may not be true and reflect my honest assessment of the situation and the reason I was hired, but I have to speak with Obama to see if his strategy has changed in the last five minutes.”  (This would have been an especially interesting standard for McChrystal to live up to, inasmuch as Obama had had exactly one phone conversation with the general since he took command before last week.)

The most infuriating aspect of having to listen to all this dithering over troops is that we just went through this whole process in Iraq several years ago—and the “troop dilemma” was conclusively decided in favor of the surge option.  George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld mistakenly ignored the advice of then-General Eric Shinseki to implement massive troop increases in 2003.  The war bumbled along for several more years, until General Petraeus sent more troops and began his counterinsurgency operation in 2007, and by 2008 we were hardly hearing a peep from Iraqi insurgents.

In other words, we learned what to do in Afghanistan from what we finally did in Iraq.  General Petraeus now supports General McChrystal’s counterinsurgency operation in Afghanistan.  Why do we have to learn this bloody lesson the hard way all over again, just because Obama wants to appear “thoughtful”?

One eerie possibility is that Democrats actually believe all that nonsense they were spouting in 2008 about “many factors” being responsible for quelling the violence in Iraq, such as: cooperation from the nice Iraqi people, efforts made by the efficient Iraqi government, Sunni-Shiite compromises, the weather, oh—and also some super-helpful troops that were sent over at the last minute.

Some have suggested that Obama may listen to his inner Zen and take the “middle way”—that is, approve a modest increase, such as 10,000 troops, but not meet McChrystal’s full request.  This solution would offer the twin advantages of putting more U.S. soldiers in harm’s way and not giving McChrystal enough troops to succeed in his mission.  Sounds like a winner!

As Senator John McCain recently noted, half-measures in war “lead to failure over time and an erosion of American public support,” as in Iraq.  Or, as Ike Shelton, chair of the House Armed Services Committee, more succinctly put it, Obama had better not “half-ass it and hope.”

A couple of months ago, the mainstream media was snickering because a national survey of liberal historians had rated George W. Bush to be among the least successful of all American presidents, mostly on the basis of his conduct in the war against Islamic terrorists.  Given Obama’s adoration by the media, his wholesale reversal of nearly every one of his foreign policy campaign promises, and his Xeroxing of Bush’s war strategy, Bush should reach… oh, about #2 on the presidents’ list by the end of Obama’s tenure.

Candidate Obama wailed for years about Bush’s war in Iraq and promised to remove all troops by March 2009.  The latest plan, which President Obama scrawled on a cocktail napkin at one of his Wednesday night White House soirees, is to remove them by August 2010 and leave up to 50,000 troops in place for security purposes—and if you believe those dates and numbers won’t be extended further as “conditions change on the ground,” you probably voted for Obama.  Admittedly, “Obama lied, kids died” doesn’t have quite the same ring, but I think if Bush had pulled a fast one like this, we would have heard a few more complaints about his mendacity.

Obama formerly countered the spectacularly successful surge in Iraq, claiming that there was no way it could work—then turned around as President and implemented something in Afghanistan that starts with ‘s’ and rhymes with ‘urge’ but is definitely not a surge.

As Senator, Obama rejected special funding measures for U.S. anti-terror military conflicts—then, while president, asked Congress for an additional $83 billion for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; you know, the ones we were fighting all along.  On the campaign trail, Obama whined about the cost of war and swore that funding would not be approved without benchmarks; when Congress’s bill came to a vote, Obama asked that the benchmarks be removed.

Obama once complained that Predator drone air attacks on suspected terrorists in Afghanistan and Pakistan were killing civilians; as President, he ramped up use of this targeted killing tactic at a higher rate and with more civilian casualties than under Bush.

Obama at one point criticized the Patriot Act, including its provisions allowing warrantless wiretapping and obtaining suspects’ financial, travel, and telecommunications records without their knowledge; now he supports renewing the act.

Obama previously opposed the use of the “state secrets doctrine” to prevent the required disclosure of evidence in court that would harm national security; in several cases stemming from the previous administration’s surveillance and interrogation practices, Obama’s Justice Department has invoked that very doctrine to prevent the disclosure of evidence.

Obama used to resist the practice of rendition, or capturing terrorist suspects and sending them to a third country for interrogation; recently he vowed to continue the practice.

At one time, Obama spoke out against the use of enhanced interrogation techniques on high-level terrorist suspects.  Recently, however, he set up a committee to look into whether CIA interrogators should be allowed looser standards than military interrogators—i.e., he left the door open for these techniques to be used again if he deems necessary.  He rejected the call to establish a Truth Commission into the Bush administration’s interrogation techniques and the prosecution of those who approved or implemented them.  When Nancy Pelosi claimed the CIA lied to her about the use of these techniques, Obama did not publicly support her, and allowed CIA director Leon Panetta to release a memo contradicting her claim.

In the past, Obama contested the practice of detaining terrorist suspects without trial; yet his Justice Department filed a brief claiming that his administration can hold for an indefinite period of time the following: Al Qaeda members, Taliban members, “associated forces,” and anyone who “substantially” supports them, which includes about half of Congress.  Federal judge Reggie Walton slyly mocked the Obama administration’s arguments as drawing “metaphysical distinctions” between his and Bush’s policy that were “of a minimal if not ephemeral character.”

Obama wrung his hands over denial of habeas corpus to terrorists in Guantanamo but has upheld the Bush position on denying habeas corpus regarding detainees’ conditions of confinement in Afghanistan’s Bagram prison, which is sort of a Guantanamo Express.

More recently, Obama revived military tribunals for Gitmo detainees after having called them an “enormous failure” and sworn to end them (the tribunals, not the detainees).

Finally, last week Obama changed his mind and decided he would oppose the release of photos documenting abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib.

It shouldn’t be this way for the former Bush administration.  After seven-and-a-half years of doing the right but unpopular thing, suffering precipitous drops in their approval ratings, and enduring uninformed screaming from every corner of the media about their Nazi-like tendencies, Bush and Cheney shouldn’t be dependent for their legacy on the eleventh-hour conversion of an irresponsible, wet-behind-his-big-ears neophyte who isn’t adult enough to serve as Commander in Chief.  The Bush policies should have been praised all along for keeping us safe, and any candidate who ran headfirst against them should have been defeated in a landslide.

But at least Bush’s “rehabilitation” is happening sooner than we could have hoped—just several months into the subsequent administration.  Any honest commentator must admit that it is happening squarely on the back of the feckless Obama.