Bombs Speak Louder Than Words: The Liberal Reinvention of George W. Bush

Liberals are nostalgic for the kind of Republican who wasn’t afraid to be photographed with Muslims. (New York Times, 11/30/15)

A chorus of liberal media personalities and politicians is calling for a new perspective on George W. Bush’s legacy in light of the virulent anti-Muslim rhetoric coming from members of the current Republican presidential field. Following Donald Trump’s proposal for a national registry of American Muslims, political rivals and commentators are redirecting our attention toward the former president’s effort to draw a distinction between the “War on Terror” and a war on Islam (NBC News, 11/20/15).

Even before  Trump’s latest demagoguery reignited latent anti-Muslim sentiment in America, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton was using a refurbished image of Bush to illuminate her opponents’ xenophobic rhetoric. During CBS’s Democratic debate in November (11/14/15), Mrs. Clinton said that a legacy of friendly discourse “was one of the real contributions—despite all the other problems—that George W. Bush made after 9/11 when he basically said after going to a mosque in Washington, ‘We are not at war with Islam or Muslims.’”

As the demonization of Muslims once again gains currency in American electoral politics, liberal personalities are joining the call to return to the good old days when Republicans fielded candidates who talked sweetly to the community of over 1.5 billion Muslims around the world while at the same time ordering warplanes to bomb an ever-larger number of them.

Jamelle Bouie: “Bush worked hard to sow tolerance for Muslim-Americans” (Slate, 11/20/15)

Jamelle Bouie at Slate (11/20/15) suggested that “perhaps the only person who can stop it—or at least turn down the heat—is Bush.” “He just needs to remind his party that there’s more to politics than winning,” Bouie argued, reducing Muslim grievances to a simple problem of campaign rhetoric. The Guardian’s Lindy West (11/22/15) chimed in that “if you go back and watch the speeches of George W. Bush from the immediate aftermath of 9/11, he sounds downright progressive.”

Mr. Bush’s rehabilitation in progressive circles is only gaining steam. In December, Trevor Noah, heir to liberal hero Jon Stewart’s Daily Show (12/17/15), remarked to actor Will Ferrell that “George Bush was really respectful of Muslims,” after Ferrell—who is famous for his satirical impersonation of the former president—retrospectively called Bush “a sane choice.”

At Christmas, the Associated Press published an article (reposted by Huffington Post—12/25/15) showcasing this new, “unlikely” alliance between Democrats and their erstwhile adversary, citing Clinton’s comments, as well as those from the Democratic National Committee and President Obama himself, who said Bush’s actions made him “very proud after 9/11.” AP quoted the Council on American-Islamic Relations holding up the former president as an exemplar of political moderation, saying, “Bush sent a very powerful message to the world and American Muslims that backlash and attacks on this faith community will not be tolerated.”

Medhi Hasan of Al Jazeera confessed in a New York Times op-ed (headlined “Why I Miss George W. Bush”—11/30/15) that he has had to “revise” his opinion of the former president. In a telling passage, Hasan wrote, “Mr. Bush’s foreign policy may have harmed Muslims abroad, but at home he courted Muslim-American voters and refused to lazily conflate Islam with terrorism.” Glenn Greenwald (The Intercept, 11/30/15) pointed out that Hasan omitted a “wide array of radical abuses aimed at Muslims” in the United States perpetrated during Bush’s tenure.

The sight of so many liberal politicians and commentators casting a new light on their former archenemy, whose decisions have kept the nation at war with Muslim peoples for 15 years, suggests that the course of normalizing Bush’s policies has overcome even the most bitter divisions in America’s partisan politics.

Public dissatisfaction with the Bush administration reached a fever pitch in 2006–07, just as the process to decide his successor began, and few can forget then–candidate Obama’s centerpiece of “hope and change.” Yet no sooner had Obama taken office than he promised a supposedly forward-looking agenda that would preclude any substantive reflection on the legal, political and material fallout of the Bush presidency (New York Times, 1/11/09).

Aside from some notable exceptions—Obama’s prohibition on torture, for example—the new administration continued many core Bush-era policies, which has led to a series of bizarre scenarios culminating in the current latter-day praise by Democrats of their former nemesis.

In 2009, Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize largely due to his campaign’s tone and his rhetorical overture to the Muslim world at Cairo University earlier that year. Yet in his acceptance speech, he alluded to a continued escalation of the war in the Middle East; indeed, thereafter he stepped up operations in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and Syria, as well as Libya, leading the secretary of the Nobel Committee to express regret over its decision (BBC, 9/17/15). In his speech, Obama said that “modern technology allows a few small men with outsized rage to murder innocents on a horrific scale,” a poignant passage given his dramatic expansion of Bush’s drone program that has resulted in the deaths of hundreds of innocent Muslim civilians across Asia and Africa.

Nor is the effect of this cognitive dissonance reflected by liberals’ newfound affection for George W. Bush limited to Obama’s foreign policy actions. Even after former Vice President Dick Cheney was named in a criminal complaint over US torture filed by the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights, current Vice President Joe Biden lavished praise on his predecessor at the unveiling of Cheney’s commemorative bust in the US Capitol Building (CNN, 12/3/15). And during the latest round of debate over gun control, many liberals called for blocking gun sales to individuals on the infamous No-Fly List, an institution relentlessly criticized during the Bush years as ineffective and racist. (The Guardian‘s Trevor Timm—12/5/15—was one of a number of progressive commentators who pointed out this glaring ideological contradiction).

Given the various ways in which Bush’s policies were folded into mainstream liberal thinking by the Obama administration, perhaps it is not surprising that Democrats campaigning for the 2016 nomination have taken on this attitude, with a corresponding falling into line among liberal media outlets. Yet for those voters who are not so eager to reform Bush’s legacy, such apologist recollections might lead one to second-guess the supposedly alternative direction into which Democratic candidates promise to take the country—or at least to yearn for a media that takes a more critical view.

Political oddities aside, it seems to make little material difference whether the US government and American political discourse is operating in a mode friendly to Muslim sensibility. America is still at war, and there is very little in common among the various communities targeted by US military power aside from the fact that they practice Islam or live among those who do. Not even an anti-American agenda can lend homogeneity to this diverse group, as the US’s unwavering support of Israel, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, for example, affects Muslim communities who do not even aspire to be at odds with it, and invites their ire.

Source: Pew Research Center

Pew Research has conducted continuous polling of global attitudes toward the United States, and its findings—despite excluding many of the countries at the forefront of American military adventurism—do not indicate much of a change in opinion among Muslim societies over the last decade. In 2004, the year of Bush’s reelection campaign, Pakistan, Turkey and Jordan returned very high unfavorability ratings, and these remain high in a 2015 poll that also includes unfavorable results from Lebanon and Palestine.

The question becomes, then, for whose benefit is all this reckoning with George W. Bush’s legacy toward Muslims? Noteworthy communities in question have not changed their views very much, regardless of American political dynamics. Instead, this line of discourse appears designed to flatter American moderates in an attempt to lure them away from the current Republican presidential line-up. More troublingly, it cements an integration of Bush-era policies into mainstream liberal thought that began with Obama’s inauguration and, it seems, will continue going forward.

Spelling of Jon Stewart’s first name corrected.

John C. O’Day is a graduate philosophy student at Texas A&M.