Rebuttal: History Will Do Bush Justice

“It’s with the Bush Doctrine that we need to intervene in countries which are deprived of democracy.”

Corentin de Salle is a lawyer and a philosopher. Here, he expresses himself personally.

Would it be acceptable now to judge former President George Bush?

If we judge Bush, we must also judge all the members of Congress who voted for the military budget. We must also judge all the Americans who re-elected him for a second term even though he started the war. This question is rather symptomatic of the concept that has developed in a continent such as ours, where we live under an American-style security umbrella; and where we think that we live in a peaceful world. Here, we think that all conflict always has a judiciary solution. What hasn’t changed is that the world is tragic, and not everything can be solved in a strictly judiciary manner.

What we’re really reproaching him for, above all, is his use of torture.

I have several points: First of all, I absolutely condemn torture, no matter where it comes from or who’s doing it. Second, I think that Human Rights Watch absolutely did its job. Third, from a moral point of view, I condemn torture from a judicial angle, but I don’t know if we’re really fit to judge exactly what went on in Guantanamo. There’s a debate about what exactly constitutes torture. Fourth, a democracy like America is capable of punishing such abuse if it is happening. That was the case at Abu Ghraib, where there were some very tough sanctions. If there are acts of this kind going on, the American justice system will punish them sooner or later. Last, you also have to avoid the moral inversion of values. Even if there are acts of torture, which are probably true, we also have to remind ourselves that there are hundreds of Guantanamos within the dictatorships of the Middle East. We have to be careful about being selective in our protests. When we condemn torture happening in the United States, intellectual honesty obliges us to do the same for the other side, where it is, quite frankly, one hundred times worse.

Do the ends justify the means? Was the president on a legitimate defensive after September 11?

I hate that expression about means and ends, because what should always prevail is the defense of principles. Therefore, there are a certain number of impassable boundaries. As for the question of whether or not it was necessary to go to war, I think it was. And I don’t just see it from the angle of legitimate defense. The Americans felt unjustly attacked, and they fought back because they were afraid of what would happen if they didn’t. But that’s not the best argument for the war in question. What’s legitimate is the concept that guided this war: A concept that dates all the way back to the birth of the U.S., which is that “we must promote democracy.” Bush said that “the reason we are in Iraq is to plant the seeds of democracy so they flourish there and spread to the entire region of [the Middle East].” This got some backlash, of course, but Bush is very creative. He’s someone who is extremely easy to criticize and very hard-headed, but history will do him justice because his administration and neoconservatives were the architects of post-Cold War times. It’s with the Bush Doctrine that we need to enter into countries deprived of democracy. Europeans have followed suit recently with their Arab Spring, and were even first in line to overturn the Libyan dictatorship.