In the months and weeks preceding the Iraq invasion, the cereal box United Nations headquarters was constantly buzzing with one phrase: Weapons of mass destruction. Almost anyone who had heard the Security Council debates or had a chat with Hans Blix, the Swedish diplomat who as chief UN weapons inspector headed the hunt for Saddam Hussein's hidden arsenal, was convinced that it didn't exist in the form Bush & Co. insisted. Blix had photographs, data, interviews. But that failed to sway Bush, then vice president Dick Cheney and his defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld. That was the singular folly that went on to change how the world looked at America and how America responded to those glares.
Bush isn't the first American president to put national security above everything else. But the belligerence with which his administration did it pockmarked the world. True, Osama bin Laden had shown that short of an all-out response, nothing would stop him from spreading further mayhem. Hence, US troops wading into Afghanistan to crush the Taliban were welcomed. That was an opportunity and could have provided a roadmap to containing terrorism. But Bush clearly squandered that with his Iraq adventure, something that he has now admitted was done based on "the intelligence failure in Iraq".
"President Bush and his war lieutenants who have directly or indirectly executed the invasion of Iraq have misled the American people, committed men and money to an illegal war, resulting in more than 4,000 deaths and unnecessarily put tens of thousands of Americans in harm's way," said Ayman El-Amir in a recent appraisal of the Bush years for the respected Egyptian weekly Al-Ahram. And the monetary cost: More than $2 trillion, according to Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz.
While his war on terror actually failed to prevent a spurt in attacks across the globe, the sharpened rhetoric led to a civilizational chasm of sorts, widening the gulf between how world perceived America and how the Bush team viewed themselves and the world through the neo-conservative prism. Asian allies were embarrassed and traditional friends in Europe were alienated.
While Iraq will count as the emblematic failure, Bush's damage trail extends also into the economic and environmental arena. The impact of the go-by given to regulation by his team has left the US economy in tatters and sent several healthier ones across the world into a recessionary tailspin. And as the moghuls of US high-finance go scot-free, US tax-payers are left to fund huge bail-outs.
On the environment, again as Stiglitz puts it in a recent article on Bush's seven deadly sins, Dubya tried to persuade Americans that global warming was fiction. "For eight years we did nothing," Stiglitz said.
But through all this, India has little to complain about. Since Leonid Brezhnev's bear hug days, India has never benefited so much from a superpower embrace. His foreign office took a few years to de-hyphenate India-Pakistan, but once that happened, Manmohan Singh was singled out for special treatment by Washington. The nuclear deal became a personal agenda for Bush as his political and diplomatic commandos pushed it through the Hill, Brussels and Vienna. While that has opened India to a new world of technology and promise of more sustainable electricity, Washington's acknowledgement of India's regional role has helped our dealings at both bilateral and multi-lateral forums. Even as his ratings plummeted to record lows at home, Bush was being toasted in India as a true friend. It's safe for him to consider it a retirement home.
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