Well, he’s dead at 94. He lived a long time, appears to have chosen his wife badly, and had kids of whom he may have been proud.
He was the best of the Republican Presidents from Reagan on, but still, overall, not very good.
His decision not to go to Baghdad was incorrect, and it allowed lot of Saddam’s enemies to get crushed after he encouraged them to rise. It would have been simple enough, even, to use American air-power to keep the Republican Guard down, and the rebellion would have succeeded. That would have avoided that big mess under his son, Bush, Jr., who appears to have wanted to get Saddam to avenge his father.
The Gulf War was questionable on its face, as Kuwait was created, basically, to keep oil from Iraq, and under the control of a small, very corrupt elite. The execution of the Iraq war included a lot of destruction of civilian infrastructure, including sewage systems. It was a war crime and led to a lot of death and suffering.
Meanwhile, Bush, Sr. was involved in the Iran-Contra scandal: clearly illegal. He won the ’88 election on the back of the Willie Horton ad, a clearly racially incendiary strategy.
He did do a decent job of shepherding the end of the USSR (the aftermath of which was fucked up beyond belief by Clinton, which has lead directly to the current US/Russia problems).
The best of a bad bunch, I suppose. Better than Reagan, his own son, or Trump, that’s for sure.
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Chiron
I read some articles from the period he was President that he tried to confront the Israeli lobby and some of the Neocons from the Reagan administration (the true masterminds of the Iran-Contra), many Neocons jumped ship to the Clinton team.
Ian Welsh
Yes, he did oppose the Israelis. He wasn’t all bad.
StewartM
Not so sure that Bush ’41 just didn’t just luck out on about the end of the USSR–the encouraging of its breakup (starting with the Baltic states) was mind-mindbogglingly risky if not stupid, given what happened with the newly created states carved out of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires after World War I (they immediately started to go to war with each other, including Poland invading the Soviet Union, and here the some of ex-Soviet states would have had nukes!). We lucked out that encouraging and unleashing decades of pent-up nationalist fervor didn’t blow up on us.
Nor was Bush’s policy “conservative” in the Edmund Burke sense; erasing some 70 years of Soviet rule by fiat is a radical, not conservative, approach. The conservative solution would have been to keep the Soviet Union together and reform it from within(more like Gorbachev’s plan). But Gorbachev’s plan was more to nudge the Soviet Union into something more like the social democracy of Scandinavian countries than going full-bore capitalist-y, and that course was unacceptable to US elites. So what I see from Bush ’41 to Clinton is mostly continuity, not change.
Willy
What do you get when you cross a corrupt lawyer with a crooked politician?
Chelsea Clinton. Back in those days I remember a lot of lawyer jokes. Another bit of common wisdom was “nobody in their right mind would ever want a job like POTUS.” Not so much anymore. These days, the common wisdom is that our guy was sent by God and your guy is Satans bitch. With no lawyer jokes. But same as yesterday, nobody much gets into what really motivates specific candidates to want a job like that.
Herman
I remember a lot of people criticizing Bush I for not taking out Saddam but if he did then we would have seen the same societal collapse and sectarian warfare that we saw after Bush II did take out Saddam so I see the decision to not go to Baghdad as a good one in an overall bad war. From what I understand many of the tales of Iraqi atrocities in Kuwait were exaggerated or even completely made up such as the false claim that Iraqi soldiers took babies off of incubators to let them die. The First Gulf War was a mistake although not as disastrous as the second one.
The end of the Soviet Union was also pretty disastrous for most people involved but I agree that Bush did an OK job on that issue although who knows what he would have done in a second term. Bush also signed NAFTA which is something that a lot of people seem to forget due to their understandable anger at Bill Clinton for supporting that agreement. There was opposition and support on both sides of the aisle but most Democrats opposed NAFTA and most Republicans supported it.
House vote: http://articles.latimes.com/1993-11-18/news/mn-58150_1_trade-pact
Senate vote: https://www.nytimes.com/1993/11/21/us/senate-roll-call-on-trade-pact.html
That doesn’t absolve Clinton and the pro-NAFTA Democrats for their support for the agreement but not all Democrats were on board with NAFTA. It was really a bipartisan agreement with significant opposition from some Democrats and smaller opposition from some Republicans. In the 1992 election both Clinton and Bush supported NAFTA and Ross Perot was against it and of course the media lambasted Perot as a crank but it turned out that he was right.
I see Bush I was basically another neoliberal president. Perhaps Bush was not as bad as the others but that is likely because he only had one term. I think if he had two terms more people would dislike him especially because NAFTA might have been passed under his administration and not Clinton’s so Bush would own the NAFTA legacy and not Clinton.
Mallam
No, Ian’s correct: not going to Baghdad was a mistake. There wouldn’t have needed to be an occupation, and it wouldn’t have been resisted like Shrub’s adventure because the Americans actually would have been “welcomed as liberators”. Completely different contexts. Plus, if you encourage people to rise up and then leave them hanging, you have blood on your hands, and inevitably it leads to resentment. It’s the same as Obama sitting on his hands as demonstrators were gunned down in Egypt and Syria. There wouldn’t be such calamity if it had been dealt with when the opposition controlled territory. It would still be chaotic, but not hundreds of thousands of dead bodies in the street like we see today, and like we will continue to see for the foreseeable future. This is what “realism” means; propping up dictators which are easier to control to facilitate weapons and arms sales. It’s conservetive imperial foreign policy, and shouldn’t be taken up by the “left” that fights for liberation. If Saddam or Assad weren’t able to use their helicopters, the opposition easily would have won.
EverythingsJake
He was an awful man. A CIA trained liar, who seems to have believed he was American royalty in the worst French sense. Russ Bakker has raised very persuasive questions about his involvement in the assassination of Kennedy, Watergate, and other matters. Even Lee Atwater, whom Bush treated as little better than a house servant, seems to have come to have greatly regretted his role in getting the man elected. May he rot in hell, where his wife is assuredly already serving her sentence.
nihil obstet
G.H.W. Bush was a monster. We don’t know that he was as monstrous as the man whose consiglieri he became or as his son, but then, he was the head of the American secret police for years and that gives him lots of resources to cover his tracks and those of his family until they became public figures (see G.W. Bush evidence of military service).
Iran-contra: it’s a rather anodyne way to refer to running death squads, supporting the assassination of church leaders, peddling drugs to poor Americans and then imprisoning them for buying, selling weapons to your country’s enemies, and colluding with those who are holding your country’s diplomatic staff as hostages to affect the domestic election.
As an opponent of our practice of dropping humanitarian bombs on the people who live in countries governed by the Hitler of the week, I don’t have anything good to say about the first Iraqi war. I’m not sure how he shepherded the breakup of the USSR, except in promising that NATO would not expand eastward, a promise that he did not get into U.S. law or NATO treaty.
Domestically, he continued the return of discriminatory and authoritarian practices.
And then, there’s the other question. What good thing did he accomplish? Is there any legacy, short-lived or continuing, that make us or the world a better place? I can’t think of anything.
EverythingsJake
Also, we should not forget that the Iraqis were withdrawing from Kuwait. Bush, fuming, was not going to get his war. Colin Powell, another person seriously deserving of whatever hell awaits him, suggested that Bush give the Iraqis fewer than the four or five days needed to withdraw, a plan Bush gleefully implemented. I can vaguely comprehend best of the bunch I suppose, but when the bar is so damned low, the phrase seems drained of any real meaning.
different clue
@StewartM,
I don’t remember Elder Bush as having shepherded the breakup of USSR. I remember Yeltsin and the Presidents of Ukraine and Belarus doing that, as their response to the “hard liner coup” which “kept” Gorbachev “captive” on his vacation for a few days. Yeltsin and the other two decided that the Communist PartyState was unfixable and the only way to topple it was to crack and break the USSR pedestal upon which it stood.
I do remember hearing that ReaganBush gave Gorbachev a “gentleman’s promise” not to expand NATO eastward from Germany. Of course Clinton betrayed and doublecrossed that promise along with so much else. Clinton fucked it up deliberately and with malice aforethought.
Ian Welsh’s fellow Canadian journalist/novelist/past-blogger has too many clarifying posts about Elder Bush on his Rigorous Intuition 2.0 blog to post links to them all, or even very many of them.
Here is one: http://rigorousintuition.blogspot.com/2005/02/life-and-moonie-times-of-george-hw.html
Here’s another. http://rigorousintuition.blogspot.com/2004/09/why-do-people-say-such-terrible-things.html
There are many more, scattered around among the blogposts.
S Brennan
And let’s not forget Bush [The 1st] successful effort to purge the CIA of those operatives and analysts who sought to restrain the agency to it’s original purpose. That purpose, to be a clearing house for intel that would then supply the ELECTED president with accurate and actionable info.
different clue
On the plus side, here is a comment from the NaCap comments section about Elder Bush supporting keeping the USSR republics united into one country.
Peter
December 1, 2018 at 12:41 pm
What W. H. Bush got right:
“I come here to tell you: we support the struggle in this great country for democracy and economic reform. In Moscow, I outlined our approach. We will support those in the center and the republics who pursue freedom, democracy and economic liberty. Americans will not support those who seek independence in order to replace a far-off tyranny with a local despotism. They will not aid those who promote a suicidal nationalism based upon ethnic hatred.
“Bush told the members of the Verkhovna Rada not to seek independence, but to stay in a union with Russia and other soviet republics. Bush was advised by the realist Brent Scowcroft and it showed. The speech was drafted by Condoleeza Rice but Bush personally edited it to empathize his main point: Ukrainian independence was dangerous as it would lead to fascism.”
From MoA: https://www.moonofalabama.org/2018/12/what-poroshenko-gets-wrong-hw-bush-and-the-ukraine.html#more
Reply ↓
Olga
December 1, 2018 at 2:11 pm
As the blog entry (above) states:
“Bush refused to encourage Ukrainian efforts to break free from the Soviet Union in summer of 1991 and warned of “suicidal nationalism” on the part of Ukraine.”
Suicidal indeed, unfortunately, it’ll be the little folk, who’ll pay the price, not the idiots at the top.”
It almost sounds as if Elder Bush and his advisers foresaw a version of the Hotsie-Totsie Banderazi
takeover of Ukraine.
Hugh
Bush’s bumbling Ambassador to Iraq April Glaspie signaled a hands off US attitude toward an Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. Of course, Saddam Hussein should have sought a higher level confirmation, but he didn’t.
For a few billion dollars, we could have eased the USSR’s transition away from communism and into the Western system. Bush and the Washington Establishment instead chose to let it twist slowly in the wind.
Again Yeltsin did not break up the USSR for economic or political reasons but for ethnic ones. By cutting the SSRs loose he solidified the ethnic Russian majority in Russia proper.
Important to remember that after correctly describing Reaganomics/supply side economics as voodoo economics, he turned around as Reagan’s VP and embraced this wealth transfer to the rich.
As Reagan’s VP per his wiki, he headed the administration’s efforts on deregulation and War on Drugs.
With regard to Iraq, he miscalculated in thinking that Hussein would be so weakened by the war as to be overthrown internally. But there was no mandate for his taking out Hussein’s regime and no planning for an occupation. Any attempt to do so would have run into the same ethnic and sectarian divisions that Dubya later faced in his occupation.
I see him as part of the downward trajectory of failed American Presidencies.
highrpm
seem’s most of the discussion is foreign affairs. simply because that category is easier to muck in while appearing necessary than managing homeland affairs. until leadership promotes government for the people over for weapons capitalism the next generation than any country worthy of respect should invest its maximun resources in suffers. jfk was the last president worth a hoot. fuk the rest.
ps,
let’s reset by forgiving all the payday student loans. and making post secondary education affordable w/o buying debt! the universities and professors and all their employees and functionaries should be ashamed of themselves. for participating in a system that takes the next gen to the cleaners.
McMike
I heard the ayatollah sent a condolence cake
And his palbearers will be a half dozen nicarraguan nuns
McMike
Is there any way the head of the cia (and the rnc for good measure) wa not a thoroughly corrupt and despicable person?
S Brennan
Hugh plants yet another NYTimes/WaPo lie, what a hack…telling one more whopper…
“Bush’s bumbling Ambassador to Iraq April Glaspie signaled a hands off US attitude toward an Iraqi invasion of Kuwait.” – Hugh
Serious people who followed events at the time know that she was following Bush [The 1st]’s instructions…to the letter. Below,
“It[‘s]…clear that Glaspie is simply following the instructions she had been given.”
– https://foreignpolicy.com/2011/01/09/wikileaks-april-glaspie-and-saddam-hussein/
Bill Hicks
The Gulf War was more than just “questionable,” and putting it that way does a disservice to those of us who protested against it. It was the first step along the way to America’s never ending wars, a way to erase the American people’s objections to using their military where America was not threatened, which was briefly the consensus after Vietnam.
Bush’s wanton invasion of Panama was also a war crime. The last American president who was a decent person and not an inhuman monster was Carter, and when he dies the last shred of America’s moral conscience will die with him.
Eric Anderson
All in all he was just …
Another brick in the wall.
StewartM
DC
Thanks for the quote from NaCp. I had not heard of that, at least in regards to the Ukraine.
The problem is, though, when we started supporting the Baltic states right to exit, then of course all the other nationalists (Ukraine, Belarus, Georgia, Moldavia, Kazakhstan, etc) would of course be encouraged to follow. I do remember Bush and Co encouraging those, which again seems to indicate blindness. The breakup of the USSR was almost entirely completed in Bush ’41’s term, so whatever praise or blame can be assigned to US policy his administration merits.
And Bush was right to emphasize that fascism in these new states was a very real possibility, as was the issue of ‘who controls the nukes?’
StewartM
Hugh
For a few billion dollars, we could have eased the USSR’s transition away from communism and into the Western system. Bush and the Washington Establishment instead chose to let it twist slowly in the wind.
And also insist what “help” that would be given would only occur if they ‘reformed’ (made full-bore capitalist) their economy, all the while imposing unequal treaties on Russia (they have to pull their military forces out of Eastern Europe, while we get to keep all our guys in Western Europe–why?) and to a varying extent, gloating over their distress and downfall.
After dragging Russia through the mud all this while, then we wonder why a strongman like Putin becomes popular?
StewartM
Oh, and topical today b/c of Iran-Contra (and the 1980 October surprise):
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2018/11/30/1759582/-George-Herbert-Walker-Bush-dead-at-94
(Yes, I know it’s a Kos article, but I thought this interesting)
On that same Christmas Eve when he handed over his diary notes to Walsh, Bush pardoned Secretary of Defense Caspar W. Weinberger just 12 days before he was to go to trial. He also pardoned former National Security Adviser Robert C. McFarlane, former Assistant Secretary of State Elliott Abrams, former CIA Central American Task Force Chief Alan D. Fiers, Jr., former CIA Deputy Director for Operations Clair E. George, and former CIA Counter-Terrorism Chief Duane R. Clarridge. Bush noted in issuing the pardons that he had done so because the independent counsel’s prosecutions amounted to a “criminalization of policy differences.” Chapter 28 of the Walsh report states:
“The Weinberger pardon marked the first time a President ever pardoned someone in whose trial he might have been called as a witness, because the President was knowledgeable of factual events underlying the case.for any part they might have played in the Iran-contra affair.”
So Trump not only won’t be the first President to sell out country for party and power, he also won’t be the first president to pardon everyone who could have implicated him. Heck, Cheney had seen that angle back during Watergate as the way out (encourage underlings to be the fall guys, then pardon them immediately after conviction) and argued for just that during the Scooter Libby affair.
StewartM
Oh, and topical today b/c of Iran-Contra (and the 1980 October surprise):
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2018/11/30/1759582/-George-Herbert-Walker-Bush-dead-at-94
(Yes, I know it\’s a Kos article, but I thought this interesting)
On that same Christmas Eve when he handed over his diary notes to Walsh, Bush pardoned Secretary of Defense Caspar W. Weinberger just 12 days before he was to go to trial. He also pardoned former National Security Adviser Robert C. McFarlane, former Assistant Secretary of State Elliott Abrams, former CIA Central American Task Force Chief Alan D. Fiers, Jr., former CIA Deputy Director for Operations Clair E. George, and former CIA Counter-Terrorism Chief Duane R. Clarridge. Bush noted in issuing the pardons that he had done so because the independent counsel\’s prosecutions amounted to a \”criminalization of policy differences.\’\’ Chapter 28 of the Walsh report states:
\”The Weinberger pardon marked the first time a President ever pardoned someone in whose trial he might have been called as a witness, because the President was knowledgeable of factual events underlying the case.for any part they might have played in the Iran-contra affair.\”
So Trump not only won\’t be the first President to sell out country for party and power, he also won\’t be the first president to pardon everyone who could have implicated him. Heck, Cheney had seen that angle back during Watergate as the way out (encourage underlings to be the fall guys, then pardon them immediately after conviction) and argued for just that during the Scooter Libby affair.
Christopher Holbrook
Why do you say he chose his wife badly?
Tom W Harris
“Yes, he did oppose the Israelis. He wasn’t all bad.”
Buh BYE!
steven augustine
Speaking of Willie Horton (and suppressing the urge to do a kilometers-long rant against the decomposing patriarch of the lipless Bush-lizard clan), few know that Horton was actually a self-aware entity with opinions of his own… and not merely a jug of boogieman-juice of incredible political potency:
“WH (Willie Horton): I was the perfect scapegoat. I was black. I was initially convicted of murder. I escaped while on furlough from Boston. I was later found guilty of raping a white woman. Bush’s Democratic opponent was Michael Dukakis, the Governor of Massachusetts. He supported the furlough program. And he opposed the death penalty. The Vice President’s strategists unearthed the perfect target. The ads portrayed a brutal criminal. I would have hated him, too–that is, if he weren’t created out of whole cloth.
“JE (Jeff Elliot): But the fact remains, you were convicted of murdering an unarmed 17-year-old gas-station attendant, as well as raping a woman and assaulting her fiance. Isn’t that true?
WH: I don’t dispute the fact that I was convicted. I do deny, however, that I am guilty. In most cases, the American justice system works quite well. But it isn’t perfect. Mistakes are made. Given who I am, what I am, and the harsh realities of race and politics, I didn’t have a chance. I repeat: I am not guilty. I desperately want the opportunity to prove my innocence. Unfortunately, the Republican bigwigs didn’t give a damn about the facts. And they didn’t care that they were damaging my chances for an appeal. They were willing to trash me night after night–and distort the facts of my case–in order to achieve their objectives. What about my rights? Don’t I have any rights? Don’t I have the right to a fair trial? Don’t I have the right to defend myself?. They took those rights from me. At the same time, the President took an oath to defend the Constitution. The Constitution applies to me, too. …”
—Elliot, Jeffrey M. “The ‘Willie’ Horton Nobody Knows.” The Nation 23 Aug. 1993: 201- 205
Stirling Newberry
It is interesting that the dirty tricks are ignored. Black people? Not important, we needed tax borrowings from the future.