Bush legacy tour hits Canada

George W. Bush took his first foreign trip this week, giving a speech about his presidency in the friendly confines of Calgary, Canada. Alberta is basically Canada’s answer to Texas - a conservative place where cowboys are a common sight and wealth flows from the oil industry, so it was pretty much a home game for Dubya. But still several hundred protesters turned up, including one dressed in Guantanamo-prisoner orange and another who brought along his shoe-flinging “cannon”, all of which prompted Bush to scurry into the convention center via an underground tunnel.

So what did Bush say to the folks who spent $4,000 per table to hear him speak? We’re not entirely sure - no cameras were allowed and no official transcript was released, though through reports published by Canadian news outlets the Toronto Globe and Mail and Maclean’s magazine, we can piece together the highpoints.

We learned that Bush (unlike Rush Limbaugh) wants Pres. Obama to succede; even if Obama wasn’t his first choice as successor, Bush now sees the historic importance of his presidency to the country. We also learned that Bush thinks Canada’s banking system is better than the United States’, given the recent meltdown on Wall Street (which Bush said “got drunk”), and that he thinks global warming “could” pose a major threat to the planet.

When it comes to foreign policy though, Bush stuck to his guns. Saddam Hussein was a grave threat to the world (even though at the time of the 2003 US invasion he only controlled about half his own country), Iraq is better off without him and Iraq’s democracy could be an inspiration for Iran. As for Afghanistan, Bush brushed off suggestions that the Iraq war negatively affected US efforts to capture Osama bin Laden. Of course the story of Tora Bora basically contradicts Bush on this one. In December 2001 US troops cornered bin Laden and the al-Qaeda leadership in a cave complex called Tora Bora. But there weren’t enough US forces to completely surround him, so Afghani warlords were called on to fill in the gaps. Al-Qaeda bribed the Afghans (the ones who weren’t star-struck just being so close to bin Laden in the first place) and slipped across the border into Pakistan - with the help of the Pakistanis. It’s a pretty clear example of what happens when you don’t send enough troops into a war zone, though the administration never fully staffed the Afghan war, largely because they were already gearing up for the invasion of Iraq.

But the revisionist history campaign is well underway by the Bush inner circle and his supporters - last week on MSNBC's Hardball Ari Fleischer stated that it was Saddam Hussein, not bin Laden, who attacked the US on 9/11; while Fox's Bill O'Reilly said that Bush has “basically won” the War on Terror - which must have come as news to the 150,000+ US troops currently deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan as part of that war.

Dubya might be looking to forget about the whole War on Terror thing though if his official Presidential Library biography is any indication - it has no mention of Iraq, Afghanistan or the WOT, though it does mention Bush’s dogs Barney and Miss Beazley.