Is George Bush the Manchurian Candidate?

Is George Bush “The Manchurian Candidate?” -- by Robert Buzzanco/History News Network

If enemies of the United States had gotten together a few years ago to devise a plan to damage America and undermine its global position–-diminish its power and credibility, drag it into a stubborn war, harm its relations with allies, create international financial disarray, run up huge deficits, create political openings for the Europeans and China to exploit and become equals in global economic matters, motivate terrorists, bring the U.S. image in the Middle East to its nadir, restrict civil liberties at home, and so forth–-they would have been hard-pressed to create a program that would be more effective than the Bush administration’s policies on these issues of war, terrorism, and global economics have.

Indeed, if one is an “enemy” of the U.S., then he/she would have to be heartened that Bush has pursued this agenda and would have to be elated that the war in Iraq continues today. Given enough rope, Bush may hang not only himself, but American influence and credibility, and the global economy. Like a “sleeper” agent, or Laurence Harvey’s famed character, Sgt. Raymond Shaw, in The Manchurian Candidate, George W. Bush, the ultimate insider, is doing more to damage America than Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, Hassan Nasrallah, the Syrians, the Iranians, or any other enemy du jour, ever could.

In the immediate aftermath of 9/11 the United States had the sympathy and respect of much of the world. The outpouring of goodwill was unprecedented in the post-Vietnam period, and the United States stood alone as a military and economic power. When Bush responded to the September attacks a month later with the invasion of Afghanistan, where al Qaeda leaders were hiding out, the world community and U.S. populace supported him.

But, beginning in mid-2002, when he returned to his obsession with Iraq, the worm began to turn. Using politicized intelligence and outright lies, the Bush administration, congress and the media all went along with the invasion of Iraq, beginning in March 2003. Consequently, in what we can now see was a remarkably short time, the amity and power accrued after 9/11 melted away.

Although today much of the criticism of Bush and his policies comes from liberals, and Bush is quick to take shots at the “cut-and-run crowd” or “Defeatocrats,” what’s most striking is how much harm his military and economic policies have done to our national interests. Indeed, the number of conservatives now publicly repudiating Bush is testimony to how far he has strayed from the values he claimed to profess himself with regard to keeping America strong. If anything, George Bush has pursued a program inherently hostile to the conservative ideals he boasted about when running for office, and we have all suffered as a consequence.

Bush’s legacy is already particularly troubling with regard to America’s credibility and image in the world, our national security and the so-called war on terror, and the U.S. and global economy. In these areas, U.S. policies, in particular since September 11th, 2001, have left us precarious and vulnerable.

The U.S. standing in the world has probably never been lower than it is now in the wake of the dismal war in Iraq. Not only is anti-Americanism rampant in the Middle East, but U.S. enemies like Bin Laden and Nasrallah now dominate the political discourse of the region with great credibility on the so-called Arab Street. Even in Europe, the American image and influence is fading, and travelers may feel uncomfortable abroad, or, more seriously, American tourists and businesses fear boycotts or actual violence, as in Madrid or London in the past few years, and that seriously dampens the U.S. ability to influence other nations.

Ironically, Bush claimed to have launched the war in Iraq to protect American security, but it has had the opposite effect. American troops are stretched thin and lack adequate supplies, and the U.S. is facing its worst manpower crisis since the Vietnam era. Meanwhile, the number of military officials publicly speaking out against this administration’s war in Iraq is staggering, discomfiting and unprecedented.

Even more frightening, Bush has actually increased the global threat of terrorism. In October 2002, well before the invasion of Iraq, the Central Intelligence Agency warned that military action in the Middle East would foment serious resistance and actually recruit more terrorists. By going after Iraq, the Agency warned, the U.S. would be ignoring the “root causes” of terror–such as continued crisis in Afghanistan, the Israeli-Palestine conflict, and internal dissent in Saudi Arabia and other Muslim countries–while getting tied down in a peripheral area.

By 2004, that prediction had come true, with even the CIA Director Porter Goss admitting that Iraq had become a “cause for extremists” as daily attacks in Iraq had already more than doubled over the previous year. Just this past Spring, the State Department was more bleak, identifying over 11,000 terrorist incidents in 2005 which killed almost 15,000 people, a four-fold rise over 2004 and were mostly the work not of al-Qaeda but new, smaller and “difficult to detect” groups, which were able to exploit the war to entice new members.

While Bush’s policies in Iraq daily bring reports of Iraqis and Americans killed and abducted, some of the worst consequences are yet to be fully felt, namely the potentially devastating economic effects of the war. Bush and Rumsfeld promised a war on the cheap, somewhere in the area of 100 but no more than 200 billion dollars. Already, those figures have been surpassed and economists are now estimating that the costs of operations in Iraq, along with costs for rehabilitating wounded American soldiers and reconstruction, could easily reach the one trillion, or more, mark.

Despite these huge appropriations, Chief of Staff Peter Schoomaker charged this past September the army did not have enough money to fight the war in Iraq. More ominously, as the war in Iraq drags on, the U.S. position in the global economy has become more precarious. To pay for the war in a period of massive tax cuts for the rich, Bush has borrowed more than any president in history and run up record deficits, a strange approach for an alleged conservative. The U.S. debt ceiling has risen to a stunning $9 trillion, the current accounts deficits rose above $200 billion, and trade deficits jumped to record highs, as have gas prices at home.

Much of the U.S. debt is held by China, whose own economy has erupted and now presents a serious challenge to U.S. influence in markets all over the world. In fact, China has just reached $1 trillion in currency reserves, more than one-fifth of all global reserves. While the U.S. is spending about $8 million per hour in Iraq and its foreign reserves are being depleted by about $80 million per hour, the Chinese are hourly adding $30 million. China could now purchase all the gold sitting in the vaults of the world’s central banks, twice over, according to the Economist .

Obviously, the U.S. is in a much more delicate and dangerous position today–politically, militarily, and economically–than it was prior to the Iraq invasion. National prestige and national security have suffered, and the economic impact will be felt for years. At home, the emphasis on Homeland Security and the Orwellian-titled Patriot Act have restricted our freedoms and liberties. The United States, its soldiers, and its people have suffered because of this war, because of Bush’s entire program. Meanwhile, American enemies and rivals–in the Middle East, in China, and elsewhere–have more power, prestige, and wealth than any of us could have imagined just a few years ago.

Given these conditions, there is now great reason for all Americans, including, if not especially, Republicans and conservatives, to demand an end to these policies in Iraq and at home that are making life more dangerous and costly. Some years ago, during the Vietnam War, Richard Nixon said that “Vietnam cannot defeat or humiliate the United States. Only Americans can do that.” It seems like George Bush has accomplished precisely that all these years later.

(Mr. Buzzanco, Professor of History, University of Houston, is the author of several books and articles on Vietnam War.)


2. Was Nixon Worse? -- by Jon Wiener

Is George W. Bush the worst president in U.S. history? Or is it Richard Nixon? That question is being debated by historians ranging from Eric Foner and David Greenberg in the Washington Post to Sean Wilentz in Rolling Stone . Usually Bush is named worst because, although Nixon abused the power of the presidency, he also did some good things, like opening relations with China and approving the Environmental Protection Agency. Bush in contrast not only started the Iraq war; he also approved the use of torture; he claimed the right not to follow laws he disagrees with; and he abolished fundamental rights for the accused, including trial by jury.

There is, however, one extremely simple measure of who was worse, summed up in the question that antiwar demonstrators asked LBJ back in the 1960s: How many kids did you kill today? We can compare the number of casualties in wars that are unjust and disastrous. If we compare the death toll in Vietnam under Nixon with the death toll in Iraq under Bush, it appears that Nixon was worse.

American deaths in war are counted carefully. For Nixon’s presidency, 1969-1974, the official Vietnam war total is 21,041. American deaths in Iraq (as of Dec. 10) total 2,932. By this measure, Nixon was far worse.

Of course the deaths of Vietnamese and Iraqis should also be counted. The U.S. is not counting Iraqi casualties, but the best estimate of Iraqi deaths (as of July 2006) is 650,000. That’s the figure Johns Hopkins demographers reported in The Lancet in October, using the most advanced survey research and statistical techniques.

Bush might defend himself by arguing that, according to The Lancet study, the majority of the 650,000 Iraqi deaths were not caused by the U.S. He’d be right about that—but Iraqis wouldn’t be engaged in a civil war now if Bush had not invaded in 2003.

For Vietnamese deaths, Robert McNamara , secretary of defense under John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, gives the total for the war as more than 3 million. He got that figure from the Vietnamese. Nixon took office in January 1969 at what turned out to be approximately the midpoint of the American war. If half of the total casualties in Vietnam occurred after Nixon took office, the toll under Nixon was about 1.5 million Vietnamese deaths.

One and a half million is a lot more than 650,000. On the basis of this figure, Nixon was a lot worse.

However, the figure of 3 million for Vietnam has been challenged. The Vietnamese have not made their sources or records available to independent researchers. American demographers using the most advanced survey research and statistical methods published their conclusions in Population and Development Review . They did a survey in 1991 of 921 Vietnamese, with interviews conducted by trained Vietnamese interviewers,. (That may seem like a small number for a country of 80 million people, but American political surveys are based on 1,200 interviews for a country of 300 million people.) This Vietnam survey concluded that the total number of deaths in the American war is closer to 1 million.

If Nixon was responsible for half of those, that means Bush’s 650,000 deaths is worse.

But the Nixon death toll wasn’t limited to Vietnam. He ordered the bombing and invasion of Cambodia, and also a secret war in Laos. Cambodian civilian deaths from the B-52 bombing probably total 100,000 to 150,000, and Cambodian wartime deaths from all causes in the Nixon years (1970-75—pre-genocide) probably total 300,000 to 500,000, according to Ben Kiernan of the Yale Cambodian Genocide Program . If we take the lower figure, that brings Nixon’s total to 800,000, which makes him worse than Bush. And that does not include Laos, where the U.S. fought a secret war for many years.

Nixon would object that he didn’t start the war in Vietnam, and he’d be right about that. But he ran for president in 1968 promising that he had a secret plan to end the war. The Paris Peace Talks had already started when he took office. And yet the war continued for four more years, during which half a million Vietnamese died—along with 21,000 Americans.
Nixon might also object that the Vietnamese dead include victims of the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong. He’d be right about that too. But without the Americans, there never would have been a Vietnam War. There never would have been a South Vietnam.

This comparison of war casualties in Vietnam and Iraq has one flaw: The war in Iraq is not over. Bush says he has no intention of ending it promptly. He wants U.S. forces to remain until “the terrorists” are “defeated.”

It took eight years to kill a million Vietnamese, while it’s taken only three years for 650,000 people to be killed in Iraq. And the rate there has been accelerating: In 2004 the total was only 100,000. At that rate—assuming a total now of somewhat more than 650,000— the death toll for Iraqis could top the death toll for Vietnamese by the end of next year. The Iraqi death toll could top the figure for all of Southeast Asia by the time Bush leaves office in January 2009.

Then there will be no more debate. Then historians will agree that, even under this most elemental measure, Bush is the worst president in U.S. history.

(Jon Wiener is a contributing editor of The Nation and professor of history at UC Irvine.)