Truth from Slate - "No Bush, No Trump - Our previous Republican president fails to own up
Our previous Republican president fails to own up to his responsibility for our current one."
by By Reihan Salam
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2017/10/without_president_george_w_bush_there_d_be_no_president_donald_trump.html
It’s long been an open secret that George W. Bush has little regard for Donald Trump. It’s hard to blame our previous Republican president for that stance, as our current Republican president hasn’t exactly covered himself in glory over the course of his brief political career. Nevertheless, after Bush gave an address in New York City that’s been widely interpreted as a rebuke to Trump’s distinctive brand of nationalism, I was left with a bad taste in my mouth, for the simple reason that had there been no Bush, there’d be no Trump. I realize this must sound like an oversimplification. But as I consider the many ways the Bush presidency has shaped and constrained all that’s come since, I find it hard to conclude otherwise.
To be sure, the former president did make a number of worthy points on Thursday. Bush denounced what he sees as a resurgence of isolationism in American public life, observing that “American security is directly threatened by the chaos and despair of distant places, where threats such as terrorism, infectious disease, criminal gangs, and drug trafficking tend to emerge.” I think he’s absolutely right. Moreover, I’m inclined to agree with his defense of U.S. engagement in the wider world, up to and including “the confrontation of security challenges before they fully materialize and arrive on our shores.”
What I found extraordinary, however, was that in a speech littered with references to Russia and China and to the ongoing challenges facing European democracies, Bush never saw fit to utter the word Iraq. In fairness to the former president, we haven’t been hearing much about Iraq from any of our politicians these days, as there have been other crises, in Syria and North Korea among other places, that have been commanding our attention. It just so happens that Iraq is a tinderbox, where sectarian violence is escalating anew. A number of informed observers, such as the military analyst Emile Simpson, warn that if Iraq does indeed come apart, the chaos that would ensue would dwarf what we’ve seen over the course of the Syrian civil war. One would think Bush would have had a lot to say about the sorry state of Iraq and how his decisions might have contributed to it. Alas, he chose to elide such questions.
Bush can’t be blamed for the failures of the Obama and Trump administrations to help Iraq achieve a more durable political settlement. But surely he can acknowledge that some of the backlash against the global engagement both he and I support stems from the fact that his war of choice in Iraq proved a discrediting disaster—so much so that when Trump falsely claimed to have opposed the invasion of Iraq from the start, it was enough to supercharge his bid for the GOP presidential nomination in 2016.
snip - more to read at the link above
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