Bitter Retirement for Bush

On January 20th, George Bush will leave the reins of the United States to Barack Obama. On Monday, during a long interview for the American channel ABC, the American president ruminated over his eight years spent in the White House. It was an occasion for him to express regrets about a national economy in crisis, but also and especially about the Iraq fiasco.

In less than two months, George Bush will abandon his eight years of mandate to the claws of history. It will show itself no doubt merciless, whatever it says about it the American president. On Monday, in front of ABC journalist Charlie Gibson, the current tenant of the White House explained that in spite of records of unpopularity, he will leave his functions on January 20th of this year with his, “head held high.”

In a corner by the fire, comfortably installed in a wide brown sofa, the American Head of State, alternating between moments of gravity and more relaxed passages, tried to keep up appearances, notably saying the he hopes [people feel he is a guy that] “didn’t sell his soul for politics, had to make some tough decisions, and did so in a principled way.” The transplant, however, will be hard to take. George Bush knows that he leaves to Barack Obama a country that is both in crisis and at war, a situation to which he is not completely unfamiliar. Obama agrees there.

The intelligence failure in Iraq

“I’m sorry it’s happening, of course,” he conceeded to his fellow countrymen about the current economic slump, and this, at the moment that the National Bureau of Economic Research announced that the American economy had been in a recession since December, 2007. But Bush locates his main regret on the other side, in Iraq, where more than 4,200 American soldiers died in the past five years. For the first time, the American president admitted that the invasion of the country in 2003 was guided by deceptive imperatives. “The biggest regret of all the presidency has to have been the intelligence failure in Iraq. A lot of people put their reputations on the line and said that the weapons of mass destruction is a reason to remove Saddam Hussein,” he asserted openly, acknowledging that the latter, as facts later showed, never existed. Would he have, as his father before him, gone to war in Iraq if he had known that Saddam Hussein did not possess such an arsenal? Bush returns the volley: “that’s an interesting question. That is a do-over that I can’t do. It’s hard for me to speculate.”

He cannot go back to his eight years spent in the White House, at the head of a country traumatized by the September 11 attacks and that led him, according to his terms, to lead a “global war on terror.” Even there, Bush says his mea culpas. And he agrees that he was simply not, for the United States, the right person at the right time. “I think I was unprepared for war. In other words, I didn’t campaign and say, ‘Please vote for me, I’ll be able to handle an attack.’ In other words, I didn’t anticipate war,” the one who was so badly elected in 2000 against the Democrat Al Gore stripped himself bare. This was insufficient, however, to convince him to repatriate the American soldiers in Iraq, to which his successor, Barack Obama, solemnly committed. “I listened to a lot of voices, but ultimately, I listened to this voice: I’m not going to let your son die in vain; I believe we can win; I’m going to do what it takes to win in Iraq,” explained Bush. “Head held high,” in spite of everyone.