"Bring 'em on!" he concedes, was not a suitable response to Iraqi insurgent attacks. (It was the Democrat governor of Louisiana's fault.) He is prepared to admit mistakes, but only on matters of presentation. Bush is highly selective, lavishing himself with praise for achievements (African aid programmes, for example) and doggedly reallocating blame for things that went wrong, such as the handling of hurricane Katrina. It is a sequence of episodes that are supposed to reveal the character of the man in the Oval Office. Ultimately, he left the nation diminished.īut Decision Points doesn't try to position Bush's presidency in a global or historical context. Bush reasserted its power in the most inchoate way and so squandered it. But the judgments made in pursuit of that goal detached the country from the normal rules of diplomacy and evaded international law. It is true that US territory was kept free from another spectacular atrocity. The absence of another terrorist assault on American soil, says Bush, is legacy enough. In each case, the commander in chief thought it better to be maverick and safe than multilateral and sorry. Military emergency makes rampant executive power expedient: the approval of water-boarding the surveillance of civilian communications the invasion of Iraq. The assumption of wartime duties gives the president extra authority under the constitution, and this is central to Bush's defence against the charge that he trampled traditional American values and freedoms in pursuit of homeland security.
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