Tuesday 4 December 2018

George H.W. Bush: A tainted legacy


George H.W Bush, the 41st president of the United States, died on Friday at the age of 94
While several publications and media figures used his death to glorify his legacy, and sing his praises,  saying that he was a patriot, who  served  his country with honour and distinction in Office and during the Second World War. While the establishment celebrates the life of the former president and Americans line up to mourn their fallen leader, the facts that are being reported in the mainstream media are far different than the legacy he is leaving behind. Others are pointing to his dark human rights record and his responsibility  for war crimes. Many millions in the Middle East, particularly in Iraq, will  have great cause to curse him, now that he has shuffled off this mortal coil.
Let us not forget that  as a member of the Reagan administration, he opposed sanctioning Apartheid South Africa. whilst the Willie Horton ad he used in his Presidential campaign is rightly seen as a precursor to Donald Trump’s race-baiting politics. And any full accounting of Bush’s legacy has to include his appalling record on LGBTQ issues. “Bush was as captive to the evangelical right on social issues—and thus a decidedly Republican president—as was his predecessor, Ronald Reagan, who cultivated religious conservatives as a potent political force and bowed to their anti-LGBTQ agenda as the AIDS epidemic mushroomed in the 1980s,” Michelangelo Signorile writes in the Huffington Post. On a host of issues—ranging from AIDS funding to the ban on gays in the military to collecting data on the prevalence of teen suicide among young gays—Bush sided against the LGBTQ community.
In 1988, Bush was elected president defeating Michael Dukakis of Massachusetts. Within his first year in office Bush’s approval ratings began to slip due to his inability to deal with Manuel Noriega, the Panamanian leader he previously aided while serving as head of the CIA. Bush responded by deciding to invade Panama, and on December 20,1989 he deployed 25,000 troops to the tiny nation. Bush justified the invasion— code named operation just cause— on the grounds of national security. The president mislead the country by claiming Noriega had threatened the US, a claim which turned out to be untrue. After two weeks the conflict ended, resulting in the deaths of twenty American soldiers and as many as 2,000 Panamanians.
 Less than a year after the invasion of Panama, Bush once again found himself responding to another foreign policy debacle. On August 2, 1990 Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein began an invasion of nearby Kuwait. In response, President Bush and the American media used the testimony of a 15-year-old Kuwaiti girl, known only by her first name of Nayirah to justify US intervention in Kuwait. However, Nayirah was later discovered to be the daughter of a U.S. ambassador, who was being coaxed by military psychological operations specialists. Thirteen years before his son George W. Bush lied about weapons of mass destruction to justify his invasion and occupation of Iraq, George H.W. Bush made his own set of false claims to justify the aerial bombardment of that same country, the end result being horrific civilian casualties.
Under George H.W. Bush, according to the New York Times, the United States dropped a staggering 88,500 tons of bombs on Kuwait and Iraq. Seventy percent of the bombs “missed” their targets, killing thousands of civilians.  The administration deliberately targeted civilians and essential infrastructure.from electricity-generating and water-treatment facilities to food-processing plants and flour mills. This was no accident. As Barton Gellman of the Washington Post reported in June 1991: “Some targets, especially late in the war, were bombed primarily to create postwar leverage over Iraq, not to influence the course of the conflict itself. Planners now say their intent was to destroy or damage valuable facilities that Baghdad could not repair without foreign assistance. … Because of these goals, damage to civilian structures and interests, invariably described by briefers during the war as ‘collateral’ and unintended, was sometimes neither.”
 By January 1992, Beth Osborne Daponte, a demographer with the U.S. Census Bureau, was estimating that Bush’s Gulf War had caused the deaths of 158,000 Iraqis, including 13,000 immediate civilian deaths and 70,000 deaths from the damage done to electricity and sewage treatment plants. Daponte’s numbers contradicted the Bush administration’s, and she was threatened by her superiors with dismissal for releasing “false information.
In the aftermath of the Gulf War, Bush also used the United States' diplomatic clout to lead the United Nations to impose one of the most devastating sanctions regimes in history. Child mortality rates up to 1996 alone were half a million deaths and were justified by the Clinton administration's Madeleine Albright who said, "We think the price is worth it." Millions more Iraqis were affected by the sanctions that Bush instigated and laid the foundations for.
Eminent jurists, professional legal organizations, and human rights monitors  around the world have since declared that President George W. Bush  to be a war criminal for his overt and systematic violations of such international laws as the Geneva and Hague Conventions and such US law as the War Crimes Act, the Anti-Torture Act, and federal assault laws.Bush’s CIA disappeared countless people to secret detention  to be tortured.
 After leaving office in 1993, George H.W. Bush retired with his wife Barbara and built a home in a community near Houston, Texas.  Though retired, the former president would still face controversy.
 Last year, during the height of the #MeToo movement, at least five women claimed they were abused  by him. In an interview with Time Magazine, a woman named Roslyn Corrigan claimed Bush sexually assaulted her in 2003 when she was only 16-years-old. At least five more women have accused Bush of sexual assault, including an unnamed Michigan woman who came forward claiming the former president groped her in 1992 at a campaign event.
Bush leaves this world having evaded being arrested or prosecuted for the crimes that he was  responsible for. When media figures try to redeem him, or portray him as lovable-but-flawed, they ignore the actual record. In fact, Bush never atoned for his actions, on the contrary, he consistently defended his decision-making, and the illegal doctrine he espoused. George W. Bush intentionally offered false justifications for a war, that destroyed and devastated an entire country, causing thousands of  innocent deaths.A war that needn’t have been fought in the first place. Bush set the stage for a mess with which we are still  dealing with today.Any way you look at it, Bush  left the world worse off than it was. This is his damning  tainted legacy.

The Ignored Legacy of George H.W. Bush

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 George H.W. Bush - I don't care what the facts are.




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