When I began work on this book, George W. Bush was at the height of his popularity. In March 2003, when he ordered US forces to attack Iraq, over 70 per cent of Americans approved of the way he was doing his job. His Republican Party supporters controlled both houses of Congress, and the mainstream media treated him with such respect that, as noted in the pages that follow, they did not report some extraordinary gaffes that should have cast doubt on his grasp of the issues he was dealing with as president.
Now the tide has turned. In this, the incompetence with which the Bush administration responded to the disaster of Hurricane Katrina played a role. Michael Brown, director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, had had no emergency management experience before joining FEMA in 2001—in fact his previous job was as commissioner of the International Arabian Horse Association, and he had resigned from that position under pressure, leaving the organisation virtually bankrupt. But he was a Republican, and had been a close friend of Bush’s campaign manager. Amidst stinging criticism of the way in which he was handling the rescue of New Orleans, he was forced to resign. Then it emerged that the Bush administration, focusing on big tax cuts that went mostly to the wealthy, had slashed by more than 80 per cent funding requested by the New Orleans district of the US Army Corps of Engineers for building levees.
Disillusion over the Iraq war, however, has been the biggest factor in undermining support for the president. The moral failings of Bush’s policy, noted in this book, have combined with the realities facing US forces on the ground to erode confidence in what Bush says and what he does. The farce of the premature ‘mission accomplished’ celebrations, the failure to find weapons of mass destruction, the revelations about how intelligence was massaged and misrepresented to build the case for war, the lack of any clear indication of when, or how, the war will come to an end, and the steadily rising toll of US soldiers—now surpassing the number of people killed in the terrorist attacks of September 11 2001—have finally sunk in. (The vastly larger toll of Iraqi civilians killed may also be having some impact, although in the US it still receives relatively little media attention.)
Many of the most vocal advocates of the policies followed by the Bush administration, have now resigned or been forced out of office, including Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, his deputy Paul Wolfowitz (who has since also had to resign from his next job, as President of the World Bank), John Bolton (who held a brief, abrasive, and notably unsuccessful appointment as US ambassador to the United Nations), and Bush’s closest political adviser, Karl Rove. Vice-President Dick Cheney remains, but he has lost his own chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby. Libby was saved from serving two and a half years in prison by Bush’s commutation of the sentence he received after being convicted of lying to FBI agents and grand jurors investigating the unmasking of Valerie Plame. Plame was a CIA operative and the wife of Joseph Wilson who, as described below, discredited the administration’s claim that Saddam Hussein had been trying to buy uranium from Niger. That commutation was a flagrant case of doing favours to friends that made nonsense of the Bush administration’s highly public tough stance on the need for long prison sentences to deter crime.
Bush’s approval ratings have fallen below 30 per cent, making him the most unpopular president since Richard Nixon. The Democrats have a majority in both houses of Congress. Three-quarters of Americans disapprove of the way Bush is handling the situation in Iraq. Even many Republicans agree that going to war in Iraq was a mistake, though some want to stay until ‘victory’ is achieved, and others think it is time to get out.
Not only Bush’s approval, but also that of the United States, has plummeted during his administration. The 2007 Pew Global Attitudes Project shows approval of the US is down to single digits in Turkey, long an American ally, and is only 30 per cent in Germany. Of particular concern for the war against terror is the abysmally low US image in most Muslim countries. In Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon and the Palestinian territories—all places where the US, under Bush, has attempted to intervene, militarily or politically, in favour of democracy—civil strife, rather than democracy, prevails. The Bush policy of American preeminence and a Pax Americana is in tatters.
For all the terrible consequences of the war in Iraq, when scholars debate the history of the Bush presidency in the mid-twenty-first century, they may well see his deepest moral failing as his complacent and fundamentally selfish attitude to climate change. Under Bush, seven years have been wasted. That is time that the world could not spare, if it was to forestall the worst effects of climate change. The delay may cause rains to fail in areas of land that now feed hundreds of millions of people and cause rising sea levels to render tens of millions of people homeless.
Initially, Bush refused to accept that human activity was causing climate change, or that anything needed to be done about it. His political appointees, without expert qualifications themselves, rewrote scientific reports commissioned by goverment agencies, seeking to exaggerate the uncertainties about climate change. Then, at the meeting of the leaders of the eight major industrial powers in Heiligendamm, Germany, in 2007, Bush appeared to change course. He agreed, with the other G8 leaders, to seek ‘substantial’ cuts in greenhouse gas emissions and to give ‘serious consideration’ to the goal of halving emissions by 2050. Bush’s participation in this agreement was hailed as a triumph by German Chancellor Angela Merkel and the outgoing British Prime Minister, Tony Blair.Yet the agreement commits no one to any specific targets, least of all Bush, who will no longer be in office in 2009, when the tough decisions have to be made.
Bush has always justified his refusal to sign the Kyoto protocol by referring to the fact that that treaty did not commit China and India to mandatory emissions limits. Now in response to suggestions from Bush and other G8 leaders that the larger developing nations must be part of the solution to climate change, Ma Kai, head of China’s National Development and Reform Commission, has said that China will not commit to any quantified emissions reduction targets, and India’s foreign minister, Navtej Sarna, also said that India would not accept mandatory restrictions on its output of greenhouse gases. Spokespeople for China and India have consistently pointed out that our present problems are the result of the gases emitted by the industrialised nations over the past century. That is true: most of those gases are still in the atmosphere, and without them the problem would not be nearly as urgent as it now is. China and India claim the right to proceed with industrialisation and development as the developed nations did, unhampered by limits on their greenhouse gas emissions. Nevertheless, it is also true that if China and India keep increasing their output of greenhouse gases, they will eventually undo all the good that would be achieved by the industrialised nations making deep cuts in their emissions. This year or next year, China will overtake the United States as the world’s biggest greenhouse gas emitter—on a national, rather than a per capita, basis, of course. In twenty-five years, according to Fatih Birol, chief economist at the International Energy Agency, China’s emissions could be double those of the United States, Europe and Japan, combined.
For the future of our planet, it is essential that the world’s nations resolve this conflict of views about which nations should make the deepest cuts in greenhouse gas emissions. My proposal in Chapter 6 offers a solution that is both fair and practical.
In proclaiming the United States of America’s 230th anniversary of independence in July 2006, Bush said that the patriots of the Revolutionary War believed that all men are created equal, and with inalienable rights. Because of these ideals, he went on to say, the US ‘remains a beacon of hope for all who dream of liberty and a shining example to the world of what a free people can achieve’.
While the president was making these remarks, the administration over which he presides was holding approximately 400 prisoners at the US Naval Base at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba. Although the ‘trial’ and repatriation of the Australian, David Hicks, has reduced Australian media coverage of Guantanamo, there are, at the time of writing, still 375 prisoners there. Some have now been held for more than six years without ever being put on trial, or charged with an offence.
The prisoners at Guantánamo are suffering from more than indefinite detention. The FBI has released documents showing that one of its agents witnessed, ‘on several occasions’ detainees who were ‘chained hand and foot in foetal position to floor’ without a chair, or food or water. In these conditions, ‘most urinated or defecated on selves’. They were left there for eighteen or twenty-four hours, or more. At one time,‘the air-conditioning was turned so low that the barefooted detainee was shaking with cold’. On another occasion the room was unventilated, the temperature over 100 degrees Fahrenheit, and the detainee was almost unconscious on the floor with a pile of hair next to him—‘he had apparently been pulling it out throughout the night’.
Several of the detainees told the FBI agents that they had no connection with terrorism and had no idea why they had been abducted and taken to Guantánamo. Many prisoners were not captured fighting in Afghanistan. Some were picked up in Bosnia, Indonesia, Thailand, Mauritania, and Pakistan.
The Bush administration says that the detainees are ‘enemy combatants’ in the global war against terror—a war that is, apparently, being waged around the world, and that could last for decades. The commander of the Guantánamo task force, Rear Admiral Harry B. Harris Jr, recently defended harsh treatment of his prisoners with the comment that ‘They’re all terrorists; they’re all enemy combatants’. But the CIA has made mistakes before. Many prisoners have been released without being charged. For example, Murat Kurnaz, a German-born Turkish man, was held in Guantánamo for four years before being released in August 2006. The case of Khaled el-Masri, a German citizen of Lebanese descent, appears to be another of these errors. Seized by the CIA in Macedonia, he was taken to Afghanistan and interrogated for five months before being released without charges. A German court has now issued arrest warrants for those involved in his abduction.
If there are any human rights at all, then the right not to be locked up indefinitely without trial is surely one. The US Bill of Rights puts considerable emphasis on that right, specifying in the Sixth Amendment that in all criminal prosecutions, ‘the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury’ and ‘to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him’. None of the Guantánamo inmates have been granted these rights. Therefore it has never been proved, by the standards laid down in the US Constitution, that any of them are terrorists.
But the administration holds that the Sixth Amendment does not apply to the Guantánamo prisoners, because they are not citizens of the United States and are in a facility that is not, technically, part of US territory (although it is totally under the control of the US government). The United States Supreme Court has finally seen this stance as raising an issue of constitutional law that it cannot escape considering. After initially declining to review a lower court decision that the detainees had no rights under the US Constitution, the court has agreed to hear the detainees’ appeals and to consider if they have the right to challenge their detention in US courts. The Court’s verdict is not expected before December 2007. Whatever US courts say about it, however, abducting people all over the world, locking them up for years without establishing that they are guilty of anything, and subjecting them to harsh and abusive treatment, is all a flagrant violation of international law. By any standard of justice, it is also just plain wrong.
Tom Paine, the great American revolutionary and author of The Rights of Man, wrote: ‘He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach himself.’ As long as President Bush ignores Paine’s wise words, his professed ideals will continue to show only the depths of his hypocrisy.
When Bush leaves office, he will bequeath to his successor a series of immensely difficult challenges.
First, there is the restoration of the United States’ reputation in the world. For this to take place, the US must show that it is going to listen to other nations, and will respect decisions of the United Nations Security Council. The war on Iraq must somehow be brought to a close, and a more balanced effort made to achieve peace between Israel and the Palestinians. The US must take the lead on climate change, instead of pointing to China and India as an excuse for its own inactivity. The increase in US carbon emissions during the Bush presidency makes the need to do something substantial more urgent, and the task of avoiding serious economic damage more difficult, than would have been the case in 2000.
Next, and complicating the problem just mentioned, is the fact that Bush will leave the US budget deeply in the red. All the major Democratic contenders for the presidency are talking about the need to end the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, but it isn’t clear if that will be enough, especially as they also want to do something about health care—under Bush, the number of people with no health insurance, private or public, has risen to a record 47 million. Reversing the Bush tax cuts for the middle classes will be politically difficult, but may prove necessary.
Finally, it will be necessary to restore good governance and respect for the law, both international and domestic, and for civil liberties. Guantánamo must be closed, for it is a symbol of the nation’s lawlessness, deliberately constructed outside the reach of the nation’s courts—or so the administration has asserted. Administrative appointments must be made on the basis of competence, not ideology. And the various agencies must be allowed to research and publish their reports on the basis of science, without political censorship or interference.
If these tasks can be accomplished, the presidency of George W. Bush will eventually come to be regarded as that of a nonentity who proved not to be up to the task of the office. But if the challenge proves too great for the next president to pull off, we may look back on the election of 2000, decided by a handful of votes and a narrow majority of a politically partisan Supreme Court, as the fateful moment when the world began to spiral downwards into a crisis that, by combining uncontrolled climate change, economic instability, religious fanaticism, and the breakdown of global law and order, deferred indefinitely our hopes of making progress towards a better world.
Peter Singer
September 2007