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No Regrets
- Why I'm not sorry that George W. Bush beat Al Gore and
John Kerry
By
Christopher Hitchens
Jan.
19, 2009, at 12:35 PM ET
Yes, yes, I was on
the downtown streets of Washington bright and early, mingling
with the bright-eyed and the wide-eyed. Yes, by all means I was
there on the Mall Sunday afternoon, feeling no more moist than
the next person but not much less moist, either (and getting a
strange lump in the throat at the rendition of—funny how these
things work—"American Pie"). And yes, that was me at the ball
given by The Root, making a mild fool of myself as I boogied
chubbily on down to the strains of Biz Markie, DJ to the
capital's black elite.
I wouldn't reconsider my vote for Barack Hussein Obama, in other
words, and when he takes the oath, I hope to have a ringside
seat. I already know something about "the speech" and its
Lincolnian tropes. (If you want your own understated preview,
take a look at what he said to the crowd in Baltimore Saturday,
as his whistle-stop train made its way from Philadelphia to
D.C.'s Union Station.) But, on the last day of his presidency, I
want to say why I still do not wish that Al Gore had beaten
George W. Bush in 2000 or that John Kerry had emerged the victor
in 2004.
In Oliver Stone's not very good but surprisingly well-received
film W., there is an unnoticed omission, or rather there is an
event that does not occur on-screen. The crashing of two
airliners into two large skyscrapers isn't shown (and is only
once and very indirectly referred to). This cannot be because it
wouldn't have been of any help in making Bush look bad; it's
pretty generally agreed that he acted erratically that day and
made the worst speech of his presidency in the evening, and why
would Stone miss the chance of restaging My Pet Goat?
The answer, I am reasonably certain, is that it is the events of
Sept. 11, 2001, that explain the transformation of George Bush
from a rather lazy small-government conservative into an
interventionist, in almost every sense, politician. The
unfortunate thing about this analysis, from the liberal point of
view, is that it leaves such little room for speculation about
his Oedipal relationship with his father, his thwarted revenge
fantasies about Saddam Hussein, his dry-drunk alcoholism, and
all the rest of it. (And, since Laura Bush in the film is even
more desirable than the lovely first lady in person, we are left
yet again to wonder how such a dolt was able to woo and to win
such a honey.)
We are never invited to ask ourselves what would have happened
if the Democrats had been in power that fall. But it might be
worth speculating for a second. The Effective Death Penalty and
Anti-Terrorism Act, rushed through both Houses by Bill Clinton
after the relative pin prick of the Oklahoma City bombing, was
correctly described by the American Civil Liberties Union as the
worst possible setback for the cause of citizens' rights. Given
that precedent and multiplying it for the sake of proportion, I
think we can be pretty sure that wiretapping and water-boarding
would have become household words, perhaps even more quickly
than they did, and that we might even have heard a few more
liberal defenses of the practice. I don't know if Gore-Lieberman
would have thought of using Guantanamo Bay, but that, of course,
raises the interesting question—now to be faced by a new
administration—of where exactly you do keep such actually or
potentially dangerous customers, especially since you are not
supposed to "rendition" them. There would have been a nasty
prison somewhere or a lot of prisoners un-taken on the
battlefield, you can depend on that.
We might have avoided the Iraq war, even though both Bill
Clinton and Al Gore had repeatedly and publicly said that
another and conclusive round with Saddam Hussein was, given his
flagrant defiance of all the relevant U.N. resolutions,
unavoidably in our future. And the inconvenient downside to
avoiding the Iraq intervention is that a choke point of the
world economy would still be controlled by a psychopathic crime
family that kept a staff of WMD experts on hand and that paid
for jihadist suicide bombers around the region. In his farewell
interviews, President Bush hasn't been able to find much to say
for himself on this point, but I think it's a certainty that
historians will not conclude that the removal of Saddam Hussein
was something that the international community ought to have
postponed any further. (Indeed, if there is a disgrace, it is
that previous administrations left the responsibility
undischarged.)
The obvious failures—in particular the increasing arrogance and
insanity of the dictatorships of Iran and North Korea—are at
least failures in their own terms: failure to live up to the
original rhetoric and failure to mesh human rights imperatives
with geo-strategic and security ones. Again, it's not clear to
me how any alternative administration would have behaved. And
the collapse of our financial system has its roots in a long-ago
attempt, not disgraceful in and of itself, to put home ownership
within reach even of the least affluent. So the old question
"compared to what?" does not allow too much glibness.
Inescapable as it is, "compared to what?" isn't much of a
defense. And nor has this column been intended exactly as a
defense, either. It's just that there's an element of hubris in
all this current hope-mongering and that I am beginning to be a
little bit afraid to think of what Wednesday morning will feel
like.
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