Wednesday, November 10, 2010

This bid to rehabilitate Bush must be defeated: he left a trail of destruction


The former president's memoir may seem to be all about the past, but it is most emphatically about America's present

Jonathan Freedland
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 9 November 2010

".....So, with a loud voice, they have to stop this incipient attempt to rehabilitate Bush in its tracks. They need to remind the public of a record whose litany of failures is so inarguable, much of it can be evoked by names alone: Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantánamo, Katrina, Abu Ghraib, Lehman Brothers. They have to recall a world view that still condones torture – not "coercive interrogation" as the Times euphemised it – a "kick their ass" approach that never understood that by its actions it strengthened, not weakened, America's and liberty's most extreme enemies.

They need to recall an administration that cherry-picked intelligence, that misled a nation to war on false pretences, that ignored expert advice that it didn't want to hear, that invaded a country with barely a modicum of planning, then declared Mission Accomplished.

They need to remind the world of an economic policy that gave billions to the very richest in tax cuts and turned a healthy surplus into a ballooning deficit, that allowed a deregulated Wall Street to run riot and to crash the global economy....."

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