Everything Wrong with the George W. Bush Administration

On the campaign trail, the Texas governor sought to distinguish himself from the GOP primary field as a “compassionate conservative.” The concept had echoes of his father’s call for a “kinder, gentler nation,” but in practice, it would prove much more than a rebranding exercise. As Bush speechwriter and adviser Michael Gerson explained in 2007, “Republicans who feel that the ideology of Barry Goldwater — the ideology of minimal government — has been assaulted are correct.”^[2]

In his first annual message to Congress, Bush made clear he wanted to transcend the “old, tired argument [between] those who want more Government regardless of the cost” and “those who want less Government, regardless of the need.” The new president’s view was: “We have a responsibility that when somebody hurts, government has got to move.”

The big-​ticket domestic items came early in the Bush presidency. In January 2002, the president signed his signature education initiative, the No Child Left Behind Act. The product of an unlikely collaboration between Bush and the liberal “lion of the Senate,” Ted Kennedy (D-MA), NCLB repudiated the reigning Republican orthodoxy on education. As recently as 1996, the GOP platform had insisted, “the Federal government has no constitutional authority to be involved in school curricula…this is why we will abolish the Department of Education.” Now using the leverage of federal grants, it would undertake a massive effort to micromanage educational progress nationwide.

NCLB represented an unprecedented leap forward in extending federal control over an area constitutionally reserved to the states. The act mandated uniform standards and tests in each state and required “adequate yearly progress” to full math and reading proficiency for all students by 2014. It proved a spectacular failure in achieving those goals; by 2014, the law should have had all children performing at grade-​level in their states. Regrettably, less than half met this standard, despite the biggest hikes in federal education spending since Lyndon Johnson.^[3]

In December 2003, Bush signed the Medicare Modernization Act, the centerpiece of which, Medicare Part D, committed the federal government to trillions in future outlays to pick up the tab for seniors’ prescription drugs. It was the largest expansion of an entitlements program since Johnson’s Great Society.

Passage of the bill had been a close-​run thing, brought about under heavy pressure by the administration, which covered up cost estimates to push it through.^[4] Today, under Part D alone, the federal government pays for around 25 percent of all prescriptions filled in the U.S.^[5] The effect has been to subsidize comparatively wealthy seniors at the expense of current and future taxpayers, worsening our already unsustainable debt trajectory while redistributing from poorer non-​voters to relatively wealthy voters.

Along the way, of course, Bush burnished his “conservative” credentials by delivering two whopping tax cuts that, whatever their supply-​side merits, put more of the cost of current compassion on future generations’ tab.

In his 1996 State of the Union address, then-​President Bill Clinton had famously declared that “the era of big government is over.” Ironically enough, Clinton, a walking appetite of a man in his personal life, proved far less fiscally profligate than his teetotaling, ardently self-​disciplined successor. Nondefense spending shot up 21 percent in Bush’s first four years, nearly three times the rate in Clinton’s first term.^[6] On that metric, over Bush’s two terms, “43” spent at a substantially faster clip than the four presidents that preceded him.^[7]

If not for a lucky al Qaeda shot, George W. Bush might have been remembered mostly as another variation in a long line of free-​spending, tax-​cutting Republicans. But on the morning of September 11, al Qaeda crashed planes into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and a field outside Shanksville, Pennsylvania, killing almost 3,000 people. Before bedtime, everything had changed for Bush and for the country.

The president began the day as a prisoner: whisked from the Sarasota, Florida classroom where he’d learned the news, Bush found himself shuttled through evasive maneuvers on Air Force One, trapped by the security apparatus built to enclose and protect the president. But by the evening of the 11^th, Bush had returned to the White House. Over the next several days, he’d use the bully pulpit to shape Americans’ view of the conflict, describing it as a war, then defining that war in the broadest terms possible.

From the pulpit at Washington’s National Cathedral, at a televised memorial service three days after the attacks, the president proclaimed that America’s “responsibility to history is already clear: to answer these attacks and rid the world of evil.” The service concluded with the singing of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” Americans were used to hearing it in its softer, post-​1950 version, with the line “As He died to make men holy, let us live to make men free.” On September 14, however, the congregation opted for the more metal 1862 original: “As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free.”^[8]

In his address to a joint session of Congress on September 20, Bush declared: “We will direct every resource at our command…every necessary weapon of war to the disruption and to the defeat of the global terror network.” “The imperial presidency is back. We just saw it,” historian Michael Beschloss gushed in his post-​speech commentary for ABC—momentarily forgetting that the phrase was supposed to be pejorative. “The stage was set for Bush to be God’s agent of wrath,” the Weekly Standard’s Fred Barnes noted approvingly.

In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, American irreverence was suspended, especially where the presidency was concerned. Leading up to 9/11, President Bush had been the most frequent butt of late-​night talk-​show host jokes; after the attacks, comics and commentators decided that making fun of the president just wouldn’t be prudent. On September 12, Slate suspended “Bushisms,” its running compilation of presidential malapropisms like “Rarely is the question asked: Is our children learning?” The president’s periodic difficulties with syntax were now off limits. Likewise, Comedy Central cancelled reruns of “That’s My Bush!” the 2001 sitcom lampooning the president produced by South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone. Vanity Fair editor Grayon Carter declared “the end of the age of irony.”^[9]

Word went out from the captains of the American entertainment industry to keep things patriotically correct. Clear Channel, the large radio station corporation, circulated a list of songs deejays shouldn’t play, including “Cities in Dust” by Siouxsie and the Banshees and Rage against the Machine’s entire catalog.^[10] Cable news stations played video montages of the destruction for weeks after the attack, festooned with slogans such as “America’s New War” or “A Nation United.”

Every aspect of politics, no matter how mundane, became about terrorism. In a speech to the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association in February 2002, Bush memorably explained the importance of the beef industry to national security: “It’s in our national security interests that we be able to feed ourselves. Thank goodness we don’t have to rely on somebody else’s meat to make sure our people are healthy and well fed.”^[11] Few figures in American politics saw anything amiss.

The president repeatedly used religious imagery to describe international politics. In his 2003 State of the Union address, Bush quoted from the Evangelical hymn, “There’s Power In the Blood,” which references the “wond’r working power” of the blood of the lamb, Jesus Christ. Bush’s speech innovated by replacing Christ with the United States, declaring there was wond’r working power in the “goodness and Idealism and faith of the American people.”

In announcing the war on terror to Congress, Bush declared that “[t]he course of this conflict is not known, yet its outcome is certain. Freedom and fear, justice and cruelty, have always been at war, and we know that God is not neutral between them.” Representing freedom and justice, the United States could count God on its side, if not Rage against the Machine.

The speed with which the Bush team moved was striking. Three days after the attacks, they’d secured a sweeping war authorization from Congress in a compact, one-​page resolution empowering the president to “use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons.” In October, the war in Afghanistan began in earnest, and by December, U.S. and allied forces had driven the Taliban from power and delivered a heavy blow to al Qaeda.

But even before the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, a variety of administration officials had set their sights on Iraq. As the Pentagon smoldered on September 11, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld wrote in his notes about the possibility of hitting both Iraq and Afghanistan, adding in shorthand that it would be “[h]ard to get good case. Need to move swiftly. Near term target needs—go massive—sweep it all up, things related and not.”^[12]

By September 15, Undersecretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz was advocating attacking Iraq, fearing that Afghanistan was too forbidding, and arguing that there was more to shoot at in Iraq.^[13] This unhappiness about the shortage of aim points in Afghanistan led the Bush team to look elsewhere for targets but did not seem to penetrate thinking about the potential problems this condition could pose to the mission in Afghanistan.

Conclusions about Iraq’s chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons capabilities preceded their careful assessment. The National Intelligence Estimate on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (WMD) had not even been ordered when Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney were making claims such as Cheney’s line to the VFW National Convention in August 2002: “There is no doubt [Saddam Hussein] is amassing [WMD] to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us.”^[14] When the National Intelligence Estimate was released in October, the administration kept key dissents classified, such as the State Department’s judgment that “Iraq’s efforts to acquire aluminum tubes is central to the argument that Baghdad is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program[, but] INR [the Bureau of Intelligence and Research] conclude[s] that the tubes are not intended for [nuclear] use.”

The administration’s claims of links between al Qaeda and the Iraqi government were similarly forceful and similarly tendentious. One emblematic example is Rumsfeld’s claim in September 2002 that he had “bulletproof” evidence of links between Iraq and al Qaeda, coupled with the hedge that “if our quest is for proof positive, we probably will be left somewhat unfulfilled.”^[15] Cheney never relented on the question, telling NPR in January 2004, “I think there’s overwhelming evidence that there was a connection between al-​Qaeda and the Iraqi government,” but retreating, when pressed for evidence, to claims of Saddam Hussein’s dalliances with terrorists in the early 1990s.^[16]

Regarding the number of troops that would be required to change the Iraqi regime, the Bush administration leadership was certain it would not be very high but also asserted that it was unknowable. After informing the House Budget Committee in February 2003 that the higher-​end estimates of forces needed to secure the country were “wildly off the mark,” Wolfowitz shrugged that, “fundamentally, we have no idea what is needed unless and until we get there on the ground.”^[17]

In sum, then, an urgent threat posed by Iraq’s WMD and its ties to al Qaeda, both of which the administration allegedly had precise intelligence on, required an invasion that in all likelihood would be cheap and easy but whose cost was ultimately unknowable. In this sense, the administration’s intellectual framework for the invasion was something like the inverse of the precautionary principle: not being able to prove a negative and not knowing the consequences of the war justified war rather than warning against it.

In the run-​up to the war, the Bush team publicly floated the idea that the president could launch a full-​scale invasion of Iraq without so much as a by-​your-​leave from Congress. “We don’t want to be in the legal position of asking Congress to authorize the use of force when the president already has that full authority,” an unnamed senior administration official told the Washington Post in August 2002.^[18] The Office of Legal Counsel memo on that subject divined that authority from Article II’s “executive power” and “commander in chief” clauses, while arguing that Congress had already pre-​approved a 2002 war in Iraq when it passed the 1991 AUMF for George H.W. Bush’s Gulf War 11 years earlier.^[19]

In the end, the administration decided to go to Congress for approval, while denying any authorization was needed. In a speech in Cincinnati three days before the House vote on the 2002 AUMF, President Bush warned: “We’ve also discovered through intelligence that Iraq has a growing fleet of manned and unmanned aerial vehicles that could be used to disperse chemical or biological weapons across broad areas. We’re concerned that Iraq is exploring ways of using these UAVs for missions targeting the United States.” As U.S. Air Force intelligence recognized at the time, Iraq’s “drone capability” consisted of a small fleet of reconnaissance gliders with a range that made it an unlikely threat to the United States.^[20] And given the two-​decades-​and-​counting drone-​war era inaugurated by the Bush War on Terror, as one commentator later remarked, “In the annals of projection, the US claim that Saddam was building tiny remote-​controlled death planes wins some kind of prize.”^[21]

That scholars are still puzzling over precisely why the Iraq War happened suggests the war was overdetermined.^[22] The WMD/​nonproliferation, counterterrorism, humanitarian, and regional-​transformation arguments covered the waterfront of possible justifications, and for the administration they all pointed to war. The central argument for the war involved WMD, but that always looked more like an assumption than a conclusion resulting from careful review of the evidence. The administration did not develop a concern about Iraq or its alleged WMD because administration principals consumed bad intelligence. Their conclusions existed prior to and independent from the intelligence.^[23]

It was difficult to disentangle the revolutionary aspects of American policy from the ostensibly realist justifications. President Bush’s National Security Strategy in September 2002, for example, described itself as being “based on a distinctly American internationalism,” which aimed “to help make the world not just safer but better.”^[24] In an interview by Vanity Fair magazine, Paul Wolfowitz noted that regarding Iraq “there have always been three fundamental concerns. One is weapons of mass destruction, the second is support for terrorism, the third is the criminal treatment of the Iraqi people.”^[25] For the principals involved, the justifications were manifold. Even if one argument missed, the others would hit the mark.

There is no indication that principals in the Bush administration grappled seriously with counterarguments, policy alternatives, or even areas in which their own goals conflicted. The most careful effort to isolate a moment when a decision was made to invade Iraq could not pin one down.^[26]

Having worked assiduously for more than six months to make its case, the Bush administration got its war on March 19, 2003. It was a rare opportunity to test social-​scientific ideas in the real world.

The early returns pleased the war’s architects. The Iraqi military collapsed like a pyramid of beer cans, and the few predictions of tough conventional fighting were proved wrong. Even the failure to discover caches of chemical or biological weapons or an advanced nuclear program did not bother the pro-​war camp. In a particularly grotesque episode at the 2004 White House Correspondents’ Dinner, Bush would play the missing-​WMD issue for laughs. He ran through a slide show from the podium, with pictures of himself hunting around the Oval Office: “Those weapons of mass destruction have got to be somewhere,” Bush joked. “Nope, no weapons over there…maybe under here?”^[27] The great and the good assembled at the event in tuxedos and evening gowns roared with laughter.

President Bush made his famous “Mission Accomplished” speech on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln on May Day, 2003, declaring that

Bush also pledged that as of May 2003, “the war on terror is not over, yet it is not endless. We do not know the day of final victory, but we have seen the turning of the tide.” Many thousands of tides later, “endless war” has become an impotent rallying cry for opponents of the global war on terror, as the laws and institutions stood up to prosecute the war remain almost entirely intact.

During the Constitutional Convention in 1787, James Madison argued that “the means of defense against foreign danger have always been the instruments of tyranny at home.”^[28] Not all of the consequences of U.S. foreign policy during the past 20 years remained overseas or contained among members of the military. The wars poisoned America, from its politics to its policing to the ways Americans’ government surveils them.

Even before Bush invaded Iraq, his lawyers were busy implementing a constitutional theory that gave the CINC nearly unlimited power. The core of that theory can be found in the first such document to leak, the key “torture memo,” drafted by the Office of Legal Counsel’s John Yoo and publicly revealed in 2004. For the first 30-​odd pages, Yoo labors mightily to narrow the scope of the federal statute defining torture as the intentional infliction of “severe physical or mental pain or suffering”—before concluding that, ultimately, the law didn’t matter. The president’s constitutional powers as Commander-​in-​Chief allow him to override any mere statutory restrictions when, by his lights, he’s acting in the name of American national security. As Yoo put it, “Congress can no more interfere with the president’s conduct of the interrogation of enemy combatants than it can dictate strategic or tactical decisions on the battlefield.”^[29]

What’s more, the “battlefield” was everywhere. In a war without front lines, administration officials argued that the laws of war applied to the home front. Tapping Americans’ phones in New Jersey became “gathering battlefield intelligence.” Seizing an American citizen on American soil and holding him indefinitely in a military brig, without charges or access to counsel, became “capturing an enemy combatant.”

The administration put the latter theory into practice in the summer of 2002, after federal agents arrested Brooklyn-​born Jose Padilla at Chicago’s O’Hare airport and held him on a material witness warrant. Two days before the scheduled hearing, the president declared Padilla a “grave threat” to American security and ordered him transferred to a naval brig in South Carolina. “We have captured a known terrorist who was exploring a plan to build and explode a radiological dispersion device, or ‘dirty bomb,’ in the United States,” Attorney General John Ashcroft explained. The administration would go on to argue in federal court that the power to unilaterally designate an American citizen an outlaw to the Constitution and lock him up for the duration of the war on terror was “a basic exercise of [the president’s] authority as Commander in Chief.”^[30]

Padilla eventually got a civilian trial three and a half years later, when, nervous about their chances in the Supreme Court, the Bush DOJ transferred him out of military custody and brought charges unrelated to the initial “dirty bomb” claim. But the administration initially contemplated much broader use of the claimed power at home. In addition to Padilla, Newsweek reported in 2004, the Bush team “privately debated whether to name more Americans as enemy combatants—including a truck driver from Ohio, a group of men from Portland, Ore.,” and six Yemeni-​Americans from Lackawanna, New York. “They are the enemy, and they’re right here in the country,” Vice President Cheney fumed. Surprisingly enough, it was Attorney General Ashcroft, an unlikely civil libertarian, who convinced the president to pursue American terrorist suspects through ordinary legal processes.^[31]

But if the battlefield extended to the U.S. home front, such processes were, strictly speaking, optional. Restrictions on domestic surveillance, for example, could be trumped by the exigencies of national security. As John Yoo declared in a November 2, 2001 memo for the Attorney General: “We do not believe that Congress may restrict the President’s inherent constitutional powers, which allow him to gather intelligence necessary to defend the nation from direct attack.”^[32]

That memo rationalized a secret order, issued by Bush the month before, that allowed the National Security Agency to evade the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which Congress had passed in 1976 to rein in domestic spying. That purported authorization spawned a program code-​named “Stellarwind,” which involved, among other activities, the so-​called Terrorist Surveillance Program, tapping Americans’ international phone calls without the warrants required by FISA; and two programs involving dragnet collection of Americans’ phone and email records. The “metadata” involved in the latter programs can be used to ferret out the sort of information authoritarian governments have historically used to blackmail and control dissenters: who’s leaking to reporters, how political opponents are organizing; who’s sleeping with whom.^[33] At the president’s command, the NSA had constructed what Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR), later described as a massive “human relations database,” ripe for abuse—or, as NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden termed it, a “turnkey tyranny.” It was an extraordinary risk to take with American’s liberties—and for precious little gain in terms of public safety.⁠^[34]

Over its two terms, as the Washington Post documented in its 2010 series “Top Secret America,” the Bush administration erected an enormous “Intelligence-​Industrial Complex” filling up nearly three Pentagons’ worth of office space, vomiting up some “50,000 intelligence reports each year—a volume so large that many are routinely ignored.”⁠^[35] The new cabinet department the Bush administration stood up in 2003 would prove a major contributor to that sprawling bureaucratic archipelago. A dog’s breakfast of 22 federal agencies covering everything from aviation security to border control, the Department of Homeland Security has done little to enhance public safety and much to encourage a pernicious politics of fear.

Overall, in the decade after 9/11, domestic expenditures on homeland security surged by more than $1 trillion.^[36] Yet evidence of a terrorist threat sufficient to justify this massive expansion of federal power simply never materialized.^[37]

Before the Iraq War, Secretary of State Colin Powell had warned Bush that invading Iraq would “suck the oxygen out of everything, this will become the first term.” If anything, Powell understated the point. The Iraq War became a fire that consumed most of the Bush presidency—and much else besides.

By the time Bush won reelection in November 2004, it was becoming difficult to defend the idea that the war was going well. U.S. casualties had roughly doubled during the war’s first year, and although the administration fought against the idea that Iraq was in the throes of an insurgency, one was clearly unfolding. The administration, which was incapable of running Iraq in peacetime, now needed to manage that feat under the shadow of an insurgency it had to deny existed.

A disaster the president didn’t create added to Bush’s second-​term political woes. In late August of 2005, Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans with Category-​Five force, causing $100 billion in damage and over 1,800 deaths. The president’s new Homeland Security department thoroughly botched its part of the job. A bipartisan House report on the disaster noted “a complete breakdown in communications that paralyzed command and control,” leading to hundreds of millions of dollars in undelivered supplies.^⁠[38] By mid-​September, Bush’s approval rating had dropped to 40 percent, a new low.

Bush, predictably, responded by seeking more power: changes to federal law empowering the president to fight a militarized federal War on Hurricanes using combat-​ready U.S. troops. He even got that power, for a time, when administration allies slipped the requested amendments to the Insurrection Act into a 2006 defense budget bill. The new Congress reversed the changes in 2008. Had they not, America’s COVID-19 experience might have been even more harrowing, given that the new authority also allowed the president to impose military quarantines in “serious public health emergencies.”^[39]

The twin debacles of Iraq and Katrina punctured the president’s post-​9/​11 aura of competence and command. And as the Iraqi insurgency grew worse, so did the fates of Republicans in general and of Rumsfeld in particular. Immediately after the “thumping” Republicans suffered in the 2006 midterm elections, Bush accepted Rumsfeld’s resignation.

The central act of Robert Gates’s tenure as defense secretary was the implementation of the “surge” strategy in Iraq. Before taking office, Gates had judged that there was a way to achieve his goal: to “stabilize Iraq and to bring it to a place where the United States’ eventual departure would not be seen as a strategic defeat with either regional or global consequences.”^[40]

Even by Gates’s unmeasurable standard of success, it is unclear why the surge should be seen as worth the cost. At home, by 2014 the public had shifted to believing by a margin of 52 to 37 percent that the United States had “mostly failed” to achieve its goals in the country.^[41] The war’s conclusion did not have major regional or global consequences, but there is little evidence that the surge prevented those consequences or that the public or elites credit it with having done so.

George W. Bush’s lame-​duck period followed a by-​then all too familiar pattern: the announcement of an unprecedented crisis followed by demands for unprecedented powers.

By mid-​September 2008, the collapse of the U.S. housing market had reached a critical stage with the implosion of Lehman Brothers, after which, as Bush later noted, “all hell broke loose.” The administration pushed Congress for $700 billion to take toxic mortgage-​backed securities off failing banks’ balance sheets. On October 3, the president got that authority, in the form of the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), at that point the largest bailout in U.S. history.^[42] Under TARP, Congress gave Treasury the power to buy “troubled assets” from “financial institutions”; Bush soon deployed it for purposes Congress never envisioned.

In December 2008, two of the “Big Three” American automakers, General Motors and Chrysler, tottered on the brink of bankruptcy while Congress debated legislation to provide $15 billion in taxpayer funds to keep them alive. A week after the bailout bill failed to pass a key procedural vote in the Senate, President Bush announced that he’d decided to lend the money anyway, Congress be damned, using TARP funds. As a White House spokesman explained, by failing to authorize the auto bailout, “Congress lost its opportunity to be a partner because they couldn’t get their job done.”^[43] Bush at least sounded somewhat sheepish about the whole affair: “I’ve abandoned free-​market principles to save the free-​market system,” he explained, “I am sorry we’re having to do it.”^[44]

The same month, Bush made his last trip to Iraq to finalize the status-​of-​forces agreement (SOFA) the administration had negotiated with the Iraqi government. The Iraqis had insisted that the SOFA provide terms for the complete removal of U.S. troops—a point of contention with the Americans on which the Iraqis prevailed. The U.S. side later argued successfully that tens of thousands of American forces could stay in the country as trainers and advisers to Iraqi forces, but the SOFA itself made clear that the days of America’s war in Iraq were numbered.

In his final visit to Iraq, President Bush held a press conference with his Iraqi counterpart. Bush, referring to the SOFA as “a framework for the withdrawal of American forces in Iraq,” nonetheless pronounced that the war was ongoing and “there is still more work to be done.”^[45] At the conclusion of his remarks, an Iraqi journalist threw his shoes at the U.S. president, shouting, “This is your farewell kiss, you dog! This is for the widows, the orphans, and those who were killed in Iraq!”.^[46] Thirty-​seven days later, Bush left office.

There is no truer saying in Washington than that Personnel Is Policy. The people with whom Bush surrounded himself had a plan of attack for the Middle East even before 9/11. After they made a hash of things with Iraq, torture, and domestic surveillance, however, with the partial exception of Donald Rumsfeld, no one was held accountable for the administration’s failures. In contexts where the stakes are extremely high and power is concentrated in the hands of a few, accountability is vital. Instead, Jerry Bremer, Iraq’s second viceroy, was feted in the Washington Post with a 2005 article discussing his love of cooking. Iraq War planner Paul Wolfowitz became head of the World Bank until he abruptly exited under the cloud of a nepotism scandal involving his lover, who worked at the bank. Bush himself took up portraiture at his ranch in Texas, winning accolades for his paintings of warriors wounded in his ruinous war. Decent cultures would shun or exile figures who ran such a disastrous social science experiment.

The Bush administration also contributed to Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine and the growing prospect of an Iranian nuclear weapon. At the 2008 Bucharest summit, the Bush administration pressed for Georgian and Ukrainian accession to NATO. European NATO members were horrified; the countries were militarily indefensible and granting them a so-​called Membership Action Plan (MAP), a roadmap to NATO, was likely to invite Russian attack. Looking to “lay down a marker” for Bush’s legacy, the administration wrangled a compromise in which NATO declared that “these countries will become members of NATO” without granting them a MAP. In response to that move Russian President Vladimir Putin immediately announced that

The Bush administration waved off Putin’s response. The Russian president proceeded to goad the mercurial Georgian president into attacking Russian-​backed forces on Georgian territory, which set the stage for a Russian invasion. Georgian forces were routed, and the country’s NATO accession was immediately off the table. Russia would later annex the Crimean peninsula from Ukraine in 2014 and then invaded the country outright in February 2022.

The administration also created powerful incentives for Iran to seek nuclear weapons. By lumping Iran into the “axis of evil” with Iraq and North Korea, the conclusion was almost unavoidable. As one hawkish Middle East scholar admitted in 2006, “We didn’t invade North Korea because they had a nuclear weapon. We did invade Iraq because they didn’t have a nuclear weapon, but we thought they were trying to get one. If you’re Iran, what is the logical lesson?”

Bush sidled out of the White House with an approval-​disapproval rating of 34-61, which had rebounded from the low of 25-70 just two months earlier. Americans tend to forgive their presidents. History should not. The Bush administration’s war on terror wound up costing taxpayers more than $8 trillion and more than 7,000 killed in action and hundreds of thousands wounded, not to mention just under a million foreigners killed in the wars.

If Adam Smith was right that there’s a great deal of ruin in a nation, there was a colossal amount in the unipolar United States. George W. Bush did his level best to use up as much as possible. The Book of Proverbs warns us that “where there is no vision, the people perish.” The Bush administration reminds us that failing to distinguish vision from delusion can harm the people just as badly.