Jonah, W, and Barack

Jonah Goldberg makes the case that if Barack Obama is elected and stabilizes Iraq before pulling troops out, it will make the Bush presidency look better in hindsight. He's probably right, but I don't find that particularly noteworthy. Any president's legacy is, to a certain degree, dependent on his successor; usually when one president ties up another's loose ends, it makes the first look better. Eisenhower's acceptable conclusion of the Korean War made the conflict less of a blight on Truman's record. Likewise, if George H. W. Bush hadn't handled the end of the dissolution of the USSR so expertly, and if Yugoslavia had been just one in a series of civil wars, then Reagan's Cold War management would not be the point in his favor that it is now.

Goldberg also says:

But whether it is ultimately deemed a failure or a success, there is one inconvenient fact of the Bush presidency that should prove dismaying to those who've invested so much in demonizing it: It isn't that special.

Many of its supposedly radical features fit neatly in the mainstream of American presidential history. Extraordinary rendition? That practice (in which we send terrorists to foreign countries to be interrogated under laxer rules) began under President Clinton. Aggressive interrogations, for good or ill, surely predate 2001. Holding prisoners indefinitely at Guantanamo without benefit of a trial? As terrorism expert Andrew C. McCarthy notes in National Review, we were doing that under the first President Bush and under Clinton to innocent Haitian refugees, who got even less due process than we give captured enemy combatants.

Even the invasion of Iraq will probably seem to historians, in part, as a continuation of trends begun in the Persian Gulf War and extended by Clinton's (and Britain's) attacks in 1998.

Needless to say, I think Goldberg sells Bush's specialness short, even if you grant him the points about Guantánamo and rendition, and ignore all the other stains on Bush's legacy (Katrina for starters). Aggressive interrogations surely do predate 2001, but Bush went beyond that in establishing a legal framework to justify the systematic violation of the Geneva Conventions. The invasion of Iraq may have been the culmination of a long-term conflict with Saddam, but does anyone think we'd be in Iraq now had Al Gore been elected in 2000? Who but the most hawkish think we are better off for having invaded? Is there anyone outside of the White House who thinks that invasion and occupation were not incompetently handled?