Like Bush, but in Reverse

A mediocre president can leave a powerful footprint and influence the future of his country as much or even more than other more brilliant presidents. This is the case with Bush, as his successor Barack Obama is proving at every moment. In addition to the difficulty of ending the wars left open in Iraq and Afghanistan, there is the legal mess that served to launch his global war on terror: Obama still has not succeeded in disentangling himself, something that causes him many headaches, as is being demonstrated with the Guantanamo Bay prison where 100 prisoners on hunger strike have obliged him to resuscitate his promise of closing it.

The ideas that shape the era weigh into the presidential legacy more than the legal changes and getting out of difficult wars do. The United States, thanks to Bush and in spite of Obama, continues its war against terror, an indefinite war that keeps authorizing the commander-in-chief to take actions against international law, or even national law, such as assassinating fellow citizens suspected of terrorism from a distance.

The shadow of the ex-president casts itself over his successor even when the latter is going in the opposite direction, as is happening with the Syrian crisis and Bashar al-Assad, in comparison with the Iraq of Saddam Hussein. The same theoretical principle — that the use of chemical weapons by the regime could justify a military intervention by the United States — is taken as rationale. But where Bush declared a smoking gun to be unnecessary in order to have evidence of the crime, the current president demands full certainty that this type of weapon has been used and even wants to know exactly who it was used on, in case it was the fault of the resistance and the blast was carried out on the regime.

All that were conditions for facilitating going to war in one are difficulties in the other. Bush did not have the patience to wait for the complete results from the investigations of United Nations inspectors. The false evidence fabricated by the CIA was enough for him; he organized a coalition of volunteers in which Blair and Aznar accompanied him, without the need for approval from the U.N. Security Council. Obama will take into account the U.N. inspections; he wants the international community to have the certainty that there is a smoking gun and that the decision deduced is not unilateral, that is to say, that it has international legal coverage.

Obama does not want to stick his country in a war for the third time in this explosive zone after the disastrous experiences of Iraq and Afghanistan. The adventure of war requires an intense appetite that the U.S. has completely lost after sacrificing so many lives and so much money on two wars whose results are debatable. Thus he would prefer to limit his commitment to supplying weapons to the most pro-West opposition forces against the Syrian regime — like Bush, but in reverse.