George W. Bush says he doesn't care about the polls or his stunningly-low approval ratings. Does anyone believe that? Why all these self-serving exit interviews if he isn't trying to get them up a tad before he goes off to claim his post-presidential financial rewards from all the corporations he made rich?
Here's one contradiction, and I'm not the first person to point this out. Asked about regrets and mistakes, he always mentions the "disappointment" of not finding Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq. Now, on one level, that shouldn't be have been a disappointment. That meant that the sanctions and peaceful methods of disarmament had worked and that Saddam Hussein was not as grave a threat as some thought. Isn't that kind of a good thing?
Before we invaded, there were those saying it would be like Waco; that the madman would set his compound on fire and just start killing everyone if he was going down. People were afraid ol' Saddam would use those Weapons of You-Know-What before we could secure them and that a lot of our soldiers would die as a result. Shouldn't we be relieved that that didn't happen? As it was, way too many lives ended without W.M.D. in the mix.
In any case, Bush has said on several occasions that he would have ordered the invasion even if he'd known there were no Weapons of Mass Destruction there. So, uh, then what was the problem with not finding any? If we would have gone to war anyway, then the main effect of not finding W.M.D. is that George W. Bush was embarrassed. He looked clueless and reckless and uninformed as a leader. That "disappointment" is not about the people who were killed or about the destruction or about the fates of the U.S. or Iraq. It's that George Bush looked foolish.
Pressed by Charlie Gibson to name a regret in connection with Hurricane Katrina, Bush mentioned no regret that his appointments had turned FEMA into such an ineffective agency, no regret that New Orleans had been a lake for a couple of days before he even seemed to recognize that people there were dying and needed help. What he said instead was…
I've thought long and hard about Katrina. You know, could I have done something differently, like land Air Force One either in New Orleans or Baton Rouge? And then your questions, I suspect, would have been, "How could you possibly have flown Air Force One into Baton Rouge, and police officers that were needed to expedite traffic out of New Orleans were taken off the task to look after you?"
Look at that reply. It's not about the people who suffered. It's about criticism of George W. Bush, defending the fact that he did a flyover days later and didn't land and stage a proper photo-op to show concern. He thought long and hard, sure…about which course of action would bring him less criticism. For that matter, most of the praise — self-praise and external — for his actions on 9/11 have to do with him giving good speeches, standing on the rubble with his arm around a fire fighter and vowing to bring Osama to justice. It's amazing how many people still count that a high point of his presidency, despite the lack of follow-through.
America is very, very happy to be rid of this man. And while his approval rating may be upped a bit in the future just because we're a forgiving people, I doubt it will climb much. Can anyone imagine anything that could happen that would make the handling of Katrina seem competent or even compassionate? Can we gin up any scenario that will make people say, "Thank God Bush left us that deficit"? Toppling Saddam might eventually look like a wise course of action if Iraq becomes a stable democracy but that's not likely to happen…and if it does, it'll be because of grand diplomacy and engineering by Bush's successors. Even then, I think most Americans will conclude the gains are not worth what they cost us.
I don't think we're going to see Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld (et al) charged with war crimes. That would mean a trial that would involve quizzing Senators, many of them Democratic, about what they were briefed about and why they didn't stop this or that. The Bush administration ain't the only ones culpable…and Obama has way too much to do to disrupt the Senate like that, to say nothing of alienating a lot of needed allies there. We may just have to settle for Bush and his guys going down in history as men who destroyed everything they ever touched. Except Halliburton.