Tuesday, April 23, 2013

Drezner on Bush: Was He a Disaster or just Out of His Depth?

Link


Drezner pushes back against revisionists who are trying to make Bush's legacy to be non-terrible:
At best, George W. Bush was a well-meaning man who gave the occasional nice speech and was thoroughly overmatched by events. At worst, he was the most disastrous foreign policy president of the post-1945 era. 
That's about the most charitable way one could put it...

The Bush administration was a disaster. It is, in a way, fitting, I think. We allowed the GOP to conduct a soft coup in the election of 2000. People should still be demonstrating in the streets about that. We allowed the Republican party to subver American democracy, and we paid a heavy price for it, including, iner alia, no seroius effort to stop 9/11, and a radically counter-productive war that could ultimately cost us $6 trillion. And that's to mention only the treasure, not the blood, nor the loss of moral authority. The Bush administration was a self-inflicted wound that might take a hundred years to heal.

1 Comments:

Anonymous Jim Bales said...

I think the two greatest comments on GWB came from Daniel Davies:

1)
The One-Minute MBA

2) A proposed competition
[C]an anyone, particularly the rather more Bush-friendly recent arrivals to the board, give me one single example of something with the following three characteristics:

* It is a policy initiative of the current Bush administration
* It was significant enough in scale that I'd have heard of it (at a pinch, that I should have heard of it)
* It wasn't in some important way completely f---ed up during the execution.


Best
Jim

10:58 AM  

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