Condoleezza Rice Defends President Bush's Failure Legacy

It is beginning to seem as if Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice cannot help but make a fool of herself, her role in the Bush administration, and the Bush administration itself simply by trying to defend the historical significance of each in interviews in the waning days of the Bush presidency. Only the most diehard of Bush supporters believe that Bush's presidency was anything other than one of the worst - if not the worst -- presidential tenures in history, but Rice (and a few others, like the president's wife, Laura Bush), possibly due to her proximity to the president and the fact that "worst" tends to have a spillover effect on her role, has taken to making statements in defense of the man who appointed her to a more important position despite her poor performance as National Security Advisor. And those defensive statements do not make, nor do they even help, her case.

Rice appeared on CBS "Sunday Morning" December 28 and spent a good deal of time defending the outgoing president and his failed policies.

Rice's Defense

Rice said, "I think generations pretty soon are going to start to thank this president for what he's done. This generation will."

Rice makes the doubtful assumption that "this generation will" forgive a president that has singlehandedly destroyed a budgetary surplus, sunk the nation's economy into catastrophic debt, oversaw an unpopular war where the intelligence data chosen as justification for invasion was cherry-picked (some of it by Condoleezza Rice herself) to advance an ill-advised neoconservative agenda, and pushed for the biggest corporate welfare plan in history (that has seen $350 billion dollars disappear). Thanking "this president" might be the last thing "this generation will" want to do when referring to "this president."

Rice went on: "Because I think the fact that we have really made foreign assistance not just an issue of giving humanitarian aid or giving money to poor people, but really insisting on good governance and fighting corruption. I think the fact that this president has laid the groundwork for a Palestinian state, being the first president, as a matter of policy, to say that there should be one, and now, I think, laying the foundation that's going to lead to that Palestinian state - I can go on and on."

Bush may be the first president to push for the two-state solution "officially," but to say he laid the groundwork for such a solution begs everyone, historians and casual observers alike, to deny the "groundwork for a Palestinian state" done by presidential administrations going back decades. The mere fact that the Bush administration's Middle East policies can be likened to last-minute legacy repair more than anything else will more likely be history's judgment on the George W. Bush's policy with regard to the Palestinian-Israeli issue. That Rice would even offer up such a weak example of the "effectiveness" of Bush's foreign policy only underscores how ineffectual it actually was (is). That Rice would make that statement just hours after Israel attacked Hamas strongholds in the Gaza Strip shows her predilection for selective denial and ridiculous spin.

Lauding president Bush's "humanitarian aid or giving money to poor people" not only sounds condescending to the foreign aid programs' recipients but also ignores the great "humanitarian" response of the Bush administration to Hurricane Katrina and the "poor people" in his own country.

To say that the Bush administration insisted on "good governance and fighting corruption" completely denies the ludicrous fiasco that was the H. Paul Bremer governance of Iraq during the interim government of the Central Provisional Authority. Tales of mismanaged money, government corruption, and governing ineptitude abound in the pages of expository books like Thomas E. Ricks' Fiasco: The American Military Adventure In Iraqand Rajiv Chandrasekaran's Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone. Add to that the incongruity of the$4 billion spent through foreign aid projects to the Sudan and eastern Chad since 2004, "insisting on good governance" while allowing the depotic government in Khartoum to wage nothing less than genocide against the peoples of Sudan.

Despite historical refutations to her argument, Rice insists that she could "go on and on."

To adopt the farcical and channel Jon Stewart of "The Daily Show", exaggerated tone included: "Do go on!"

Embarrassingly, Rice does.

Defending The Indefensible With The Ridiculous

"When you look at what this president took on in terms of AIDS relief and foreign assistance to the world, when you look at the number of countries ... and the number of people that this president has actually liberated - you know, I really am someone who believes that you don't want to pay too much attention to today's headlines."

The words "you don't want to pay too much attention to today's headlines" could be the unofficial motto of the Bush administration. From disclosures the Downing Street memo with regard to foreknowledge of the September 11 attacks (previously denied by the Bush administration) to disclosures of illegal National Security Agency wiretappings of American citizens, the Bush administration has made headline after headline that not only belied the official line coming out of the White House but offered an insight into the secretive, manipulating, and sometimes illegal abuse of powers employed there. From the debacle of the response to Hurricane Katrina to the political firings of federal prosecutors (some of whom had recently been commended), there is little doubt that the Rice and her Bush administration colleagues would want Americans to not "pay too much attention to today's headlines."

And when someone looks "at all the countries and the number of people that this president has actually liberated," they generally find that he has invaded two countries, one in conjunction with the United Nations, and that liberation is a relative term. Retaliatory measures taken against Afghanistan for harboring the mastermind of September 11 have resulted in a seven-year occupation. An unjustified war to further an extreme idealistic ideology in Iraq resulted in a civil war and an occupation. Liberated in this sense must mean that the peoples of both countries no longer are ruled by Saddam Hussein and the Taliban, both despotic regimes. But "liberated" ends there, if one wants to be charitable and call the actions taken "liberated." Perhaps it should read more like "retaliated" (Afghanistan) and "occupied" (Iraq).

Rice's "all the countries" also suggests that Bush is some great liberator of many nations. He invaded "all" of two countries.

And Rice continued on...

Another Ridiculous Defense

According to the Associated Press, Rice pointed out that while Germany was reunified in 1990, the work to make it possible was started in the 1940s, "when things did not look so rosy."

Rice's revision of history is par for the course for the Bush administration. Rewriting the original reasons and justifications for invading Iraq became a full-time job for thousands of spin doctors in the years following the 2003 invasion of Iraq. To say that the reunification of Germany began in the not "so rosy" 1940s is nothing more than a simplistic historical reference to the fact that the German people never wanted to be divided into two states to begin with. To use the reunification as an example of how Bush's programs might bear fruit in the future presents us with a desperately grasping Condoleezza Rice, willing to say just about anything to make her president look good.

Rice also stated that historians making judgments now about the Bush administration and its Middle East policies are not very good historians. "I mean, for goodness' sakes, good historians are still writing books about George Washington."

Summing Up The Defense With A Poor Comparison

To invoke the image of the presidency of George Washington seems like an egregious display of desperation. It is also unfortunate. Nothing about George W. Bush in any way resembles the first president of the United States, except in sharing the same first name. In fact, the two men could not seem more diametrically opposed. A war hero, George Washington had to be persuaded to take the job of being the nation's first president. George W. Bush, a man who avoided war and showing up for duty during his National Guardsman days, told his fellow church-goers that god wanted him to run for president. George Washington believed in limited government and spoke of remaining free of "foreign entanglements." George W. Bush more than doubled the number of federal employees during his administration (the creation of the Department of Homeland Security being the largest portion of increase) and entangled the nation in two foreign wars, not to mention threatening the invasion of Syria and Iran as well.

It seems that a good or a bad historian could pass an unfavorable opinion upon the tenure of George W. Bush.

This writer merely has a Bachelor's Degree in History and, like many Americans, find the Bush administration's tenure among the worst presidencies endured by the American people. As for examples, this writer could go on and on...

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Sources:

Associated Press

"Sunday Morning," CBS Television