At Least Bush Kept Us Safe - Enough, already

I fought the war,
I fought the war,
I fought the war,

But the war won't stop for the love of God.

I fought the war,
I fought the war,

But the war won't stop for the love of God.

I fought the war,
I fought the war,

But the WAR WON!

-Metric


“At lease President Bush kept us safe for the last 7 years”

This gem has been making the rounds in recent days, and it deserves a thorough debunking. The suggestion is typical of the short-sighted approach Bush took to *all* problems, and this failure disguised as a success deserves to be unmasked.

When I was an orchestra conductor I used to tell my musicians, “Playing all the right notes isn’t the most important thing.” Of course I believed it was important, but during the time when I began in music, the recording and editing technology had made live performers obsessive in their attempts to emulate “perfect” recordings. The “live” part of live music went almost extinct during that time, and I felt it my duty to restore the vitality associated with living performances to classical music.

“If your only goal is to play all the right notes,” I would tell my group, “then if you play only one wrong note, then your entire performance was a failure and you go home dejected. But if your goal is to inspire people, move people, discover beautiful phrasing, interpret, play dynamics and clear articulations, then you have a much more exciting goal set. And should you accidentally play a wrong note, it won’t sink your entire performance- both you and the audience will go away enthused and inspired.”

As a New Yorker I am loathe to say this, but American could have handled another attack these past seven years. A unified nation, bound by shared sacrifice, shared courage, and shared ideals could have rebounded- and would have been supported by virtually every country on earth. In that moment the terrorists would have lost and America would have shown its tremendous strength and resilience to lead the world into the 21st century.

Instead we showed our tremendous weakness by cowering behind our bombs and our detention centers and by spewing the kinetic energy of our armies in the greatest ‘petit mort’ in history.

So Bush played all the right notes, right up until Tuesday. But one wrong note on Wednesday and the whole thing would have been for naught. And the wrong note will come, some day; Bush all but guaranteed it by ramping up the resentment that caused the 9/11 attacks in the first place. Only this time there will be no resilience to buoy it, no international outcry to condemn it, and no bombs left even to attempt to annihilate it.

Vision. It’s what leadership is all about.

The endless small-ball, 51% strategy of the Rove gang and its short-sightedness which saw only as far as the next poll lowered the bar for tolerable cynicism in America. The utter lack of long-term vision in favor of cheap-skate point scoring was the true failure of the Bush years. It permeated everything, from the steel tariffs to the War in Afghanistan to the War in Iraq to Abu G to New Orleans to going to Mars to Alternative Fuels Promises and on and on and on and on and on. Keeping us safe for another 24 hours day after day was one more failure, because short term thinking is an endless expenditure of energy, sucking possibility from every other potential endeavor. Endless fear and endless possibilities down the tube. Could there be a more perfect way to wreck a country?


Below is an open letter to Andrew Sullivan at the Atlantic:


The argument that Bush has kept us safe for 7 years is specious. 7 years is not a very long time. Sensible policies after 9/11 would have guaranteed our safety for much longer without the constant threat that any day now the 'winning streak' might end. The enormous increase in anti-American sentiment in the Middle East and indeed the entire Muslim (and much of the non-Muslim) world has only increased the likelihood of a terrorist attack at some point in the future. The best Bush has done was to hold back the behemoth he created in the world for a few years while all but guaranteeing that it would explode somewhere down the line.

An intelligent policy after 9/11 would have been to harness global good will (including Middle Eastern good will) and domestic unity to suss out the root causes of terrorism as stated by bin Laden himself. As many said at the time, an investment in a sane energy policy with the subsequent withdrawal of much of our Middle Eastern meddling would basically have done the trick at a fraction of the cost. The stated (eventually) goal of spreading democracy in the Middle East would have happened not at gunpoint but under the manpower of the region's own people.

This would have taken the charge off of much of the issue of terrorism instead of ramping it up even further. Allowing those countries to readjust themselves to their own needs without the constant interference of US oil interests would bring the wave of Democracy that Bush hoped for much quicker and with much less unnecessary U.S. bloodshed.

So I am unimpressed by Bush's keeping us safe for a measly 7 years - and by the way, does anyone honestly think that even the most peacenik Democrat (including Jimmy Carter) wouldn't have done the same? It's not like Bush was out there himself surveilling Waziristan. We do have a fairly capable military and intelligence agency that will do its job no matter who is in office. And no reasonable person after 9/11 would have instructed them to dial down their efforts at weeding out terrorists. Ramping up anti-terrorism efforts after 9/11 was a no-brainer- and perhaps that's why we credit Bush with having gotten it right.

So let's put that one to rest. The Bush presidency has been an abject failure. The fact that Americans' minds are not at ease 7 years after 9/11 is the evidence of that. The perpetual war he started was unnecessary and foolish. Instead of talking about having kept us safe, let's talk about the squandered opportunities that our endless distraction with Iraq has cost us. When we understand that we could have stayed safe, promoted national and international unity, created a new energy future for the world, and helped democratize the Middle East by Leaving Them Alone (!), had we had a thoughtful president in charge - then will we begin to realize the extent of the catastrophe that has been "the past 7 years." Keeping us safe was child's play.