Bush’s Islamic Appeasement Greatly Damaged America

Last Thursday, President George W. Bush sat down with his former secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, to discuss the September 11, 2001, Islamic terror attacks on the United States. While reflecting on his actions twenty-five years earlier, Bush went out of his way to defend Islam: “I also made it clear that Islam was a religion of peace, not a religion of war, and that these people subverted their religion.” Bush’s absurd statement echoed a similarly absurd statement he made days after the attacks when he told the world, “Islam is peace,” even though the burned bodies of three thousand dead Americans strongly suggested otherwise. There have been 50,000 Islamic terror attacks since 9/11. Without question, Islam is a cult of conquest, misery, and war.

Bush’s Islamic appeasement angered me twenty-five years ago, and his continued appeasement infuriates me today. I cannot believe that the man who asked Americans to go to war against an Islamic menace that threatened (and still threatens) the world can be so intellectually shallow and morally obtuse. “Islam is a religion of peace,” is a disingenuous stock phrase that is too cute by half. President Barack Obama loves to tell the same lie.

While Americans fought and died in foreign lands in an effort to keep Islam’s homicidal evil from causing further harm to the United States, Bush and Obama resettled Muslims into America’s heartland. Twenty-five years ago, the sight of a woman wearing a burqa in the Midwest would have shocked and worried passersby. Today, it is too common for anyone to feign surprise. Both the number of Muslims and the number of mosques in the United States have more than doubled since the Islamic terror attacks that changed our country

Over the years I have devoted considerable thought to assessing George W. Bush and his presidency. That it was a failure few in this forum would deny. I have been preoccupied about what caused this essentially good man to disappoint so gravely.

Here is a series of replies written 16 years ago and earlier expressing my considered view:

The problem with George Bush is that he is not primarily a conservative, he is primarily a Christian, and he does not have a calculus that is congruent with yours or mine, even though both of us might be Christians. George Bush sees partisan politics as petty and ultimately meaningless. We see partisanship as the indispensable stuff of freedom. At election time the Bushes will hold their nose and dip into partisanship. But it is not in their essential nature to wage war for tactical political advantage.

George Bush wants what Bill Clinton wanted: To fashion a legacy. He does not want to be remembered as the man who cut a few percentage points from an appropriation bill but as the man who reshaped Social Security. I've come to the conclusion that the Bushes see politics as smarmy, fetid. It must be indulged in if one is to practice statesmanship but it is statesmanship alone that that is worthy as a calling.

They are honest, they are loyal, they are patrician. There would've been admired and respected if had lived among the founding fathers. But it is Laura Bush and Momma Bush who really and truly speak for the family and who tell us what they are thinking and who they are. There's not a Bush woman who does not believe in abortion. They believe in family, they live in loyalty, they believe in the tribe, but they do not believe in partisan politics.

I believe it is time for us to decide no longer to be used by the Bush family as useful idiots and instead to begin to use the Bushes as our useful idiots . I say this with the utmost admiration and respect for everything the Bushes stand for. Who would not be proud beyond description to have a father or an uncle who was among the first and youngest of naval aviators to fight in the Pacific and to be twice shot down. Not a stain or blemish of corruption or personal peccadillo has touched the family(except for the brother whom I believe was cleared of bank charges). They are the living embodiment of all that is good and noble in the American tradition.

But they are not conservative.

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FAITH TRUMPS PARTY

If one accepts that Bush’s Christian character is the key to understanding the man, it explains both your support of him and his virtues and my support of him and his virtues, but also my disillusionment with him-equally because of his virtues. If George Bush gives billions of our taxpayer dollars away to fight AIDS in Africa it is a noble gesture out of the impulse of a Christian heart. If he toasts Bill Clinton in the White House and by the gesture implicitly tells the world that the entire Republican effort to impeach Clinton was misplaced, he does so out of the Christian duty to love his enemy. If he panders to Teddy Kennedy in the White House, he sees himself not as sleeping with the enemy but as turning the other cheek. If he is “compassionate” in his conservatism, he sees it as the outworking of his Christian duty to give alms. Finally, if he consigns his whole administration to disintegration as he watches his approval numbers descend into the 20s because he declined Karl Rove’s advice to defend the administration’s Iraq policy and thus wrecks his administration along with his party’s chances, he does so because as a Christian he knows he will be called to account for his actions in another venue.

If George Bush and his family think that politics is “smarmy” and that party politics are even more smarmy, it comes from his epiphany with Billy Graham which made him a new man, a man which sees another world, a larger vision. The world of party politics is grimy and transitory and not a worthy place to store up one’s treasure. It is as nothing against the overwhelming contemplation of eternity.

Much of the blame for our dilemma can be laid at the feet of George Bush. I have published a vanity some years ago in which I asserted that George Bush regarded partisan politics as smarmy and that the true calling of the Christian- which animates Bush's calling to public service- is statesmanship. I think Bush regarded party politics as something that he must hold his nose and descend into if he were to be elected so that he could practice statesmanship which is something which is conducted above party. To the degree that I am right in this assessment, George Bush committed a fraud on the Republican Party. He solicited votes, support, volunteers, and money as a party man and a conservative but broke the bond with those people when in office. His acknowledgment while a candidate that he was a "compassionate conservative" does not in my judgment exonerate him.

Karl Rove conducted a press conference in which he was amazingly candid. He said that the greatest failing of the Bush administration was not to fight back after the WMDs were not found in Iraq in response to the Democrat attack that, "Bush lied people died." He further said that he advised Bush to fight his corner on this issue but Bush declined saying it was not worth it and would only distract from more important issues. I think this is fully in keeping with Bush's conception of himself as a Christian who rises above partisanship. He was content to let history judge him. But historians have very few votes. One can see much the same detachment play out in the comic bouffe around hurricane Katrina.

We all know about Bush's failure to wield his veto pen to halt spending and, worse, his actual affirmative support, for example, of massive entitlement programs and for sending billions to Africa. In his accumulated actions, Bush destroyed the philosophical foundation of his party and left Congress unled, undisciplined, and ripe for the corruption of K street. Under these circumstances, it was easy to predict the loss of the Congress in 2006 and many of us did predict it.

By the time the primary process rolled around, our party was philosophically and doctrinally bankrupt.

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