By Bill Murchison
Monday, April 22, 2013
While presiding over a war someone else started, George
W. Bush received abuse and vilification unprecedented for a U. S. president. He
still does, as a matter of fact, if you troll news sites featuring stories on
the Boston atrocity of last week.
The president's -- now the ex-president's -- offenses
were practically historic. He was a liar! He was a warmonger and torturer and
violator of civil rights, not to mention a cheap show-off (that "Mission
Accomplished" business)! If only we could be cleansed from the touch of
the man who stole the hanging chads and, with them, the election!
The George W. Bush Presidential Center opens this week in
Dallas, and the shouting, spitting, eye-gouging match over Bush's stewardship
of the nation from 2001 to 2009 can commence with renewed fury. Not the least
point of dispute will be the war on terror, which conflict we seem to be
re-fighting in the aftermath of the Boston slaughter.
On Monday, as the federal government levied criminal
charges against Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, newspapers and newscasts agonized over
potential mistakes in handling the case -- the subjects' Miranda Rights,
whether to prosecute him as a domestic criminal or a foreign enemy, what to
make of the Islamic connection to the Tsarnev brothers' plotting, what future
precautions to take against homegrown terrorists and so on. In respect of the
terror war, we are no more past the tumult and shouting and slander and rage of
the Bush years than we are past their most visible internal consequences --
mistrust and national division.
Among the George W. Bush Center's spacious missions is
that of evaluating the prospects for protecting and encouraging human freedom
around the world. It may take some time. I would venture all the same that out
in such a context, larger appreciation of Bush's fight against terrorism is
likely to be born.
I am saying neither of two ridiculous things: 1) that the
explicit game plan at the Bush Center is to make America's Iraq experience
smell as good as it did for a few heady days in 2003; or 2) that the experience
itself was exploited with peerless ingenuity and resolution. Neither point is
true.
What is true, I venture, is that our national trip into
the vortex of the Iraqi-Afghan-Muslim-terror-war whirlpool was predestined
under existing circumstances -- an aspect of fate; postponable, maybe, but
unavoidable.
A Muslim-directed terror war goes on, and we are the
targets. Boston was only in part the follow-up to 9/11; it was the follow-up to
the birth, following World War II, of seething, boiling hatreds among much of
the world's Muslim population. The hatred surely has less to do with religious
scruples than with antagonism toward winners (us) by losers (members of
stagnant Arab and Muslim cultures). "Losers" was in fact the word
used by the Tsarnaev brothers' uncle to characterize his nephews.
The roots of anti-Americanism are hard to get at. We
don't hate the people who hate us. We just know they do hate us and that
measures -- defensive and aggressive when occasion demands it -- are part of
modern life.
Second-guessing George W. Bush for a war supported in its
initial stages by two senators from Boston -- Ted Kennedy and John Kerry -- is
simplicity itself. It's enough for many to know there were no weapons of mass
destruction in Iraq. Conclusion: Bush lied. Liars are evil. Bush is evil.
The Bush Center, I believe, has no intention of making
out any kind of a case for a war marked by strategic miscalculations of the
gravest sort. I think -- I pray -- the center will serve as a forum, one of
many, for looking at both sides of the War on Terror question. We need such a
forum. Was Bush 43 always wrong? Hardly. Was he always right? Same answer.
This he knew, even so --- Our generally honorable nation
can come under the gaze of killers, and that the law of mankind has left us an
unchallengeable precept -- kill or be killed.
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