Bush's eight years in the Whitehouse: the verdict

Published on Thursday 15 January 2009 22:30

THE GOOD The billions pumped into Africa to help in the fight against HIV/Aids gives the outgoing president a legacy of which he can be proud, writes Fred Bridgland

FUTURE historians may say that aid to Africa, especially funding to fight the continent's HIV/Aids pandemic, was the best thing George Bush did during his eight-year presidency.

Certainly, as his final days in office drain away, praise-singers are lining up to laud him for his help to a continent with multiple problems.

The previous presidency, Bill Clinton's, did little to help the fight against Aids in Africa, but in 2003, Bush launched a $15 billion (10 billion), five-year plan to expand prevention, treatment and support programmes in 15 hard-hit countries.

Twelve of the countries were in sub-Sahara Africa, where more than 22 million people carry the HIV virus that causes Aids, with at least another two million becoming infected each year. More than 1.5 million die of Aids-related infections each year in sub-Sahara Africa, and already there are more than 11 million Aids orphans in the region.

New infections outstrip those receiving life-prolonging antiretroviral drugs.

Last July, the US Congress gave plaudits to Bush by extending his President's Emergency Programme for Aids Relief (Pepfar) for another five years, tripling to $50 billion the money devoted to it. Even some of Bush's severest critics gave him brownie points for Pepfar: there were no votes in it, least of all from his core support among the ideological Right and Christian fundamentalists.

Mark Dybul, the United States' Global Aids Co-ordinator, said: "It is the largest health initiative in history for a single disease. In any other circumstances, he (Bush] would be getting a Nobel prize."

Current and former White House aides and independent analysts say Bush's interest in Africa is rooted in the profuse humanitarian crises that bedevil the continent, as well as in the growing importance of Africa in a world increasingly linked by economics and terrorist threats.

Michael Gerson, a former Bush aide who was a persistent and persuasive advocate for Africa, said: "I think there are two reinforcing trends here. One of them is the upside of foreign policy moralism. Another is the growing strategic significance of Africa: the conflict with radical Islam; the problem of failed states and terrorism; and the growing importance of Africa on the resource side: oil.

"I think increasing aid to Africa will be one of the things the president is most proud of when he leaves office. It doesn't fit the preconception, the caricature, that the president somehow has a preference for using the blunt instruments of force in international affairs when, in fact, on a variety of topics he has been a root-cause thinker in an unexpected way."

While it is widely acknowledged that the first Pepfar tranches of money have extended the lives of hundreds of thousands of Africans and helped to ease the sense of doom once experienced by millions of others, the huge initiative nevertheless remains the equivalent of a finger in a giant dam.

While only about 50,000 Africans living with Aids were receiving medication when Bush announced his Pepfar programme, the number is now approaching two million, thanks to Pepfar and numerous other initiatives, including an EU programme.

However, that still leaves some 20 million people beyond help.

Some of this is hardly the fault of concerned outsiders. In South Africa, a recent Harvard University medical study held the former president Thabo Mbeki and his controversial health minister, Dr Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, responsible for some 330,000 Aids deaths between 2000 and 2005, because they obstructed the introduction of antiretroviral drugs.

The study said 35,000 babies were unnecessarily born HIV-positive because Mbeki and his minister stymied mother-to-child prevention programmes. Mbeki and Tshabalala-Msimang denied the international scientific consensus that the HIV virus causes Aids, and they argued that antiretroviral drugs poisoned recipients, rather than prolonging their lives.

Many toiling in the trenches of Africa's Aids disaster also argue that there are too many moralistic clauses in the Pepfar legislation, inserted to satisfy the distant notions of US conservatives, rather than engage with African realities on the ground.

These include emphasis on sexual abstinence among the young, faithfulness between partners, distribution of condoms only to prostitutes and lorry drivers and withdrawal of funds to family planning organisations that advise young women on abortion – although the extent of these prohibitive conditions are sometimes exaggerated by the most strident Bush critics.

In Botswana, with the world's second-highest per-capita HIV/Aids rate, there is what Aids practitioners delicately describe as an "accommodating sexual culture" – meaning most people have multiple and concurrent sexual partners. The result is that 25 per cent of the population carries, and spreads, the HIV virus, while one study showed 69 per cent of women in their early thirties were HIV-positive.

The word "fidelity" does not even exist in Setswana, the national language.

One of the most strident critics of Pepfar's moral clauses is Beatrice Were, the founder of Uganda's National Community of Women living with HIV and Aids. She contracted the virus from her husband, a common occurrence in Africa, where women make up the majority of new infections and marriage is a primary risk factor.

"We are expected (by Pepfar's moralists] to abstain when we are young girls and to be faithful when we are married to men who rape us, who are not necessarily faithful to us, who batter us," she told a conference.

Whatever Pepfar's shortcomings, it has given US president-elect Barack Obama a strong base on which to build, a fact he acknowledged when he told a conference on global health: "I salute president Bush for his leadership in crafting a plan for Aids relief in Africa and backing it up with funding dedicated to saving lives and preventing the spread of the disease."

THE BAD

When Bush walked into the Oval Office, he had two big ideas. Incompetence meant he failed on both – and on a whole range of other things too, writes Chris Stephen

A FEW days after the 2001 World Trade Centre bombings, amid a rush of sympathy at home and abroad, George Walker Bush got a record 90 per cent approval rating in opinion polls, making him the United States' most popular president, ever.

Seven years later, with the country shaken by banking meltdowns, a recession and two interminable foreign wars, those same polls gave Bush a record 71 per cent disapproval rating, making him the United States' most unpopular president, ever.

Sandwiched between those opening and closing chapters is a story of bungling, incompetence and chaos that will leave historians scratching their heads about how one man can get it so terribly wrong.

Bush, the former Texas governor, arrived in the White House in 2000 full of hope: the federal budget was in surplus, the world was largely at peace and he was surrounded by a group of radical Republicans who called themselves neo-conservatives, or neo-cons. They had two big ideas: first, that the free market would work best if it was freed from regulators; second, that the US, as the world's only super-power, could go it alone on foreign policy with no need to court allies.

The second idea was first to hit the buffers. The neo-cons, led by the vice-president, Dick Cheney, the then-defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, had published a plan in the 1990s calling for an invasion of Iraq to topple Saddam Hussein and install a democracy. The shock of 9/11 gave them their chance, and the invasion was justified by the assertion that Iraq possessed so-called weapons of mass destruction. In fact, it had none.

Ordinary Americans could have lived with this hiccup, if the invasion had, indeed, brought democracy and, therefore, peace to the Middle East. In fact, it triggered a brutal and continuing civil war that has left 4,000 US dead, tens of thousands of dead Iraqis and an $8 billion-a-month bill for the taxpayer.

In 2004, voters gave Bush the benefit of the doubt on Iraq and, grateful that there had been no further terrorist attacks on US soil since 9/11, re-elected him.

The U-turn in public opinion came a year later. In August 2005, Hurricane Katrina came wheeling off the Gulf of Mexico to slam into New Orleans. Forecasters had given plenty of warning, but Fema, the federal disaster agency, failed to order an evacuation, and then bungled rescue attempts after the city was flooded. The sense of shock over Katrina was profound as Americans watched on their TV screens scenes of anarchy and chaos, with their government incapable of action. Many blamed cronyism: Michael Brown, the head of Fema, had no experience in disaster relief, having previously been a lawyer for the International Arabian Horse Association, but he got the job due to his friendship with Bush's election campaign manager.

Critics began to notice Bush spent a record amount of time on holiday, with reports circulating that Cheney had the true power in the White House.

Those who doubted his basic competence noted Bush rarely gave press conferences. When he did, he seemed to have problems with the English language, as when he told one questioner: "Rarely is the question asked, Is our children learning?"

Allegations that the Bush administration favoured the rich were bolstered when, backed by a Republican-controlled Congress, he made steep tax cuts that overwhelmingly benefited the top 1 per cent of earners – including many of those congressmen.

And criticism that the White House operated outside the law came when a Cheney aide, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, leaked the name of a CIA operative, Valerie Palme, after her husband, a nuclear weapons inspector, wrote of his doubts about the intelligence used to justify the Iraq invasion. Libby was convicted of the leak by a federal judge, only for Bush to give him a presidential pardon immediately, excusing him from jail.

International opinion had, meanwhile, soured over the use of Guantanamo Bay to hold terrorist suspects with no access to a fair trial and the torture inflicted on prisoners at the US-run Abu Ghraib jail in Iraq.

Back home, the dysfunctional nature of the Bush administration, with a weak president and competing barons spending federal funds, saw government borrowing shoot upwards.

Last year, the economy began to unravel. It happened first in the housing market, spreading quickly to the banks who, free of regulation, had made wild bets on complex financial instruments whose value imploded like a house of cards.

Critics began to see a common thread linking Iraq, Katrina and the banking meltdown: "It was basic incompetence, at all levels," said Bill McPherson, a Washington political analyst.

By the end of his presidency, Bush's two big ideas – a go-it-alone foreign policy and a deregulated market – were in tatters. The US is still fighting two wars, while Wall Street's bankers have shown they will merrily go waltzing over a cliff, taking the rest of the economy with them.

Bush himself is unrepentant, insisting the Iraq invasion will spread democracy eventually and that the Katrina response was a success: "Don't tell me the federal response was slow when 30,000 people were pulled off roofs." Critics continue to wonder what those 30,000 people were doing on their roofs in the first place, when an evacuation plan could have whisked them out of the city in good time.

All politicians rush to defend their actions, but Bush's critics say something more is at work – the sign of a man who never established the "grip" that his job required.

His immediate legacy is a long list of problems for the incoming administration of Barack Obama. But the president himself insists he has a "good strong record" and future generations will "better understand and appreciate" his presidency.

Maybe. But the consensus among the current generation seems to be that future historians will puzzle not over whether Bush was a bad president – that is a given – but rather, given the advisers and resources at his disposal, how he managed to get things so catastrophically wrong.