Decision Points

Stephen Glover writes:

Whatever we think of George W. Bush, there can be no doubt that he is a patriotic man who strove to do his best for his country at home and abroad. How far he succeeded will ultimately be, as the former President admits in his new autobiography Decision Points, a matter for history. But there is a mountain of evidence which suggests that he did little to advance the interests of his country domestically, and damaged America’s reputation in the world.

Take ‘waterboarding’. The British Government regards it as torture. So, too, does President Barack Obama, who banned it shortly after assuming office. But in excerpts from his book published yesterday, as well as an interview he gave to a newspaper, Mr Bush makes clear that he thinks waterboarding is legal and morally defensible. He believes it is legal because his lawyers told him so. How a deeply religious and supposedly decent man can persuade himself that the practice is ethical passes all comprehension. The victim is either stretched on his back or suspended upside down, a cloth is pushed into his mouth, and a plastic film may be placed over his face. Water is then poured on to his face which gives him the feeling that he is suffocating or drowning.

Mr Bush claims in his interview with The Times that the waterboarding of the captured Al Qaeda commander Khalid Sheikh Mohammed led to the extraction of information which helped to break up plots to attack Heathrow, Canary Wharf and ‘multiple targets in the United States’. What he does not say is that the man was waterboarded more than 160 times, which suggests that any information the CIA got out of him came after very prolonged torture. The former President almost certainly greatly exaggerates the number of foiled plots, but he is at least partly right about Canary Wharf. In 2003 the American authorities informed the British Government of a plot, still in its infancy, to fly hijacked planes into London’s docklands.

MI5 claims it was unaware that the information was obtained by torture. Earlier this year, its former chief, Eliza Manningham-Buller, told the House of Lords that when she asked the Americans why Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was talking so freely she was told that he was boasting because he was so proud of what he had done. If MI5 had known he had been tortured, it would have still had to make use of the information it received about a plot. But that is obviously no justification of torture. Some people, such as the Tory MP David Davis, argue that torture does not work. I’m not sure whether it does or it doesn’t. There are plainly two views. Either way, torturing suspects is wrong, as Sir John Sawers, MI6’s new boss, reiterated in a speech a couple of weeks ago, saying it was ‘illegal and abhorrent’. By its use of waterboarding — as well as its practice of handing over suspects to friendly governments which then cheerfully tortured them — the Bush administration undermined America’s reputation. According to the former President, waterboarding was used on only three victims. If true — a big ‘if’, I agree — that suggests that the CIA, and even Mr Bush, knew in their hearts that it was wrong.

The United States embarked on its invasion of Iraq by seizing the moral high ground and arguing a moral purpose. It ended up, albeit in relatively few cases, by lowering itself to the level of its enemies — and dismaying many of its friends and admirers. Mr Bush’s shameless championing of torture reveals his limited moral vision. Yet this man did not come to office wearing the badge of extremism. He was supposed to be a ‘compassionate conservative’. It was the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centre on September 11, 2001 which transformed him — and changed the world. Mr Bush fell under the influence of real extremists, and cleverer men, in the shape of Vice-President Dick Cheney and the Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, both of whom believed that Saddam Hussein should be destroyed. The immediate retaliation against the Taliban and their Al Qaeda allies in Afghanistan was brilliantly successful, but the President’s wrong-headed obsession with Iraq led him to switch the focus of his interest, with the result that the Taliban began a comeback that continues to this day.

Looking back, it is very difficult to see how George W. Bush’s ‘war against terror’ was advanced by the invasion of Iraq. It was, of course, based on a gigantic miscalculation — or lie. He says he was ‘sickened’ by the discovery that Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Yet, like Tony Blair, it does not occur to him to apologise for taking his country to war on a false premise. Mr Bush writes that the ‘cause’ of removing Saddam Hussein is ‘eternally right’. He is entitled to believe that, but the supposed existence of WMD, and the (actually highly unlikely) prospect that they might be passed on to Al Qaeda, were the justifications put forward by the Bush administration for the invasion of Iraq. After the deaths of tens of thousands of civilians, and of the 4,229 Americans who died under his command, shouldn’t he be apologising in his book for so egregiously misleading the American people, even if he pronounces himself happy with the outcome?

It was into the hands of this confused and limited man that Mr Blair threw himself — and this country — in the summer of 2002. It goes without saying that Mr Blair is cleverer. Unsurprisingly, Mr Bush thinks the world of him, comparing him, utterly ludicrously, to Churchill, and praising his ‘wisdom and strategic thinking’. The former President repeats in his autobiography what we already know — that he made the Prime Minister an offer which only a man of his self-delusion and vanity could refuse, namely that Britain should opt out of sending troops to Iraq. The truth was, as Donald Rumsfeld said on a separate occasion, that the United States had no need of British arms. But Mr Blair, determined that Britain should play the part of world power, and that his own role as an international statesman should be secured so that he could lucratively strut the stage when he had left office, was prepared to spill British blood as part of George W. Bush’s misconceived adventure.

This book, like Tony Blair’s equally self-serving memoirs, will not throw further light on what is already known. And what is already known about George W. Bush is the slightness of the man. He is certainly not someone readily to admit fault. He blames others for ‘blindsiding’ him — not keeping him fully informed — over economic developments with the apparent intention of not taking responsibility for having presided over the worst recession since the war. The former President says: ‘It doesn’t matter how people perceive me in England. It just doesn’t matter any more. And frankly, at times, it didn’t matter then.’ Unfortunately, what he did mattered a great deal to us. Not just in Britain, which has suffered more than most countries as a result of this man, but also in the wider world, and I suspect much of the United States, George W. Bush will be remembered as a bad President who let down the country he loves.