Bush legacy spin-o-rama

Expect to see a lot of articles in the next couple of weeks defending the record of President Bush, I read two just this morning, the worst of which being this gem from the New York Post "Bush's Better World", by Peter Brookes, a fellow at the Heritage Foundation (a conservative think-tank). Brookes' main point is that Bush was a successful leader because he "kept us safe" in the seven years following 9/11.

Of course what this argument ignores is how Bush utterly failed to "keep us safe" before 9/11. The Bush Administration had ample warning that a major al-Qaeda attack was coming, including a briefing given directly to Bush in August of 2001, yet they never seemed to take the threat seriously. One excuse offered up by then National Security Advisor Condi Rice on why the US failed to stop the 9/11 attacks was that we couldn't have imagined that terrorists would ever strike in such a way. But this is utter nonsense. We knew of numerous plots in the past to specifically use commercial aircraft was weapons of terror, including plans to attack the Eiffel Tower and CIA headquarters from the air, along with a failed attempt back in 1974 to use a hijacked commercial airliner to assassinate Pres. Richard Nixon. The meeting of the G7 nations in July 2001, which Bush attended, included anti-aircraft missiles as part of its security perimeter because of an alleged plot to kill the gathered heads of state by crashing an airplane into the meeting, this was just two months before 9/11, so spare me the "we couldn't have imagined..." argument.

Bush also failed to respond to the al-Qaeda attack on the USS Cole in Yemen, an event that Osama bin Laden took as another sign of America's weakness in the face of terror. The Cole was severely damaged and 17 sailors aboard were killed when al-Qaeda operatives blew up a small boat packed with explosives next to its hull. The attack came in December 2000. Then Pres. Clinton felt that it wasn't right for a lame duck president to commit the US to military action, so he deferred to Bush to respond. You can argue that this was a stupid decision, but he did pass the buck to Bush, who then did nothing - except blame Clinton in hindsight for not forcefully responding to a terror attack against America. You have to wonder if Bush had actually done something in relation to the Cole attack if that would have made bin Laden reconsider giving the green light for 9/11.

Bottom line - making the argument that Bush has kept us safe these past seven years can't mask his ineptness at keeping us safe during the first year of his presidency.

And just to quickly run through a few of the other ways Brookes says Bush has given us a better world: he says that because of Bush " 30 million Afghans no longer labor under terrorist Taliban rule", something that will come as great news to our military commanders in Afghanistan who have been sounding the alarm that the Taliban is growing more powerful and controlling larger and larger parts of the country; he argues that the president got North Korea to "agree to end all its nuke programs", even though the Bush Administration itself doesn't believe North Korean claims that they have in fact stopped pursuing nuclear weapons, not to mention that relations between North and South Korea are at their worst point in years; finally he praises Bush for recognizing the independence of Kosovo last year, even though the recognition ran against all established principles of international law and has been used by Russia to justify their recognition of South Ossetia and Abkhazia as independent nations and may be used by Bosnian Serbs to bolster their claims of independence from that country as well.

If you want to argue that Bush was in fact the greatest president of all time, go ahead, that's your right. But remember, while everyone is entitled to their own opinions, you're not entitled to your own facts.