On Wednesday Mundtadhar al-Zaidi will go on trial in Iraq, charged with throwing his shoe at George W Bush. In Istanbul, entrepreneur Ramazan Baydan has had 300,000 orders for the same shoe. He is renaming it the “Bye Bye Bush.” In Washington, the President of the United States has just 23 days left in power and an approval rating of 28 per cent, the lowest in recent White House history.
There is much about his reaction to the shoe-throwing that illuminates the real George W Bush. If his initial response (“So what if the guy threw a shoe at me?”) smacks of the casual disdain for Arab customs that his critics blame for his foreign policy mistakes, there were also shades of the presidential candidate who charmed Americans with an easy humour eight years ago. “I didn’t know what the guy said but I saw his sole,” he quipped to journalists on his flight home.
Bush’s allies are already seeking to shape the first draft of a history that will judge the President positively, making the case that Bush helped prevent another terrorist atrocity after 9/11, successfully changed a failing strategy in Iraq, and did what was necessary to prevent total economic meltdown.
On one thing his friends and enemies agree. As Vice-President Dick Cheney puts it: “He’s been a very consequential president.”
Peter Feaver, who served as special adviser for strategic planning on Bush’s White House National Security Council, agrees: “He’s had a once-in-a-century natural disaster, Hurricane Katrina, a once in a history of the Republic terrorist attack and he’s had a once-in-a-century financial crisis. Any one of those would be a pivotal moment. To have three is extraordinary.”
In his response to each of those crises, Bush and his presidency were driven in large part by his personality and, Jacob Weisberg, author of The Bush Tragedy argues, by his relationship with his father.
“His father was a great athlete, a great student, a war hero, went into the oil business and made a lot of money and then succeeded in politics,” explains Weisberg.
“Bush tried to emulate him and failed. It was very frustrating for him. It fuelled his drinking and this anger he has which is very close to the surface. He had a mid-life crisis moment [when he awoke from a severe hangover on his 40th birthday], decided he wanted to be his own man and things started to go better.”
But when Bush entered the White House in January 2001, he still needed some form of family. David Frum, the speech writer who helped coin the phrase “Axis of Evil”, believes Condoleezza Rice and Karen Hughes, Bush’s chief image maker, were sister-mother figures, while Weisberg sees Dick Cheney as his political father.
In the aftermath of the seismic shock of 9/11 that shaped Bush’s presidency, Cheney “had a world view ready to go”, a long-held constitutional vision that, in a war, the president’s hands should not be tied by Congress, the judiciary or the United Nations.
This appealed to Bush because it differed from his father’s approach. “The second Bush followed a reverse playbook of the first,” says Weisberg. “He gravitated to the neo-conservative view of foreign policy, which is heavily moralistic, heavily idealistic, interventionist, militaristic and aggressive, and very much defined in counterpoint to the realist diplomatic policy of the first George Bush.”
His father’s failure to oust Saddam Hussein in 1991, his critics argue, predisposed his son to complete the job.
Weisberg argues that the younger Bush rebelled against his father’s style as well as his policies. “His father thought decisions were matters of probability,” Mr Weisberg said. “The son thought problems were matters of moral certainty. He made decisions quickly and never revisited them. He saw open discussion as a challenge to his authority.”
This is the most eloquent version of the widely held critique of Bush: impulsive, simplistic, uninquisitive. The Bush camp says in key respects it is wrong.
“There are some on the Left who think that unless you are constantly conducting a college seminar, which was the way Bill Clinton governed, that you’re not engaged, you’re not up to it intellectually,” says John Bolton, former ambassador to the United Nations. “That’s just false.”
There is much more and If my readers would like to read the full article, they can visit the Daily Telegraph, UK website.
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