George Bush has sabotaged the American Empire

I have always been a fan of George Bush, on the simple grounds that the American empire needs taking down several notches and George Jr has been the right man for the job.

It was always odd to listen to liberals and leftists howling about Bush's poor showing, how he'd reduced America's standing in the family of nations. Did the Goths fret at the manifest weakness of the Emperor Honorius and lament the lack of a robust or intelligent Roman commander?

On Bush Jr's fitful watch Latin America edged nervously out of Uncle Sam's shadow. Hugo Chavez of Venezuela and Evo Morales of Bolivia boldly assert their independence and thumb their noses at Uncle Sam. Thirty years earlier, and even when Bush Sr sat in the Oval Office, the 'strong leadership' craved by Americans of all political stripes would have seen Chavez and Morales briskly toppled, their estimable reforms swiftly aborted and the kleptocrats handed back the keys to the presidential office by the CIA and their local right-wing allies.

Barely a month went by in Bush Jr's second term but that some liberal pundit would predict a US attack on Iran. Lurid scenarios were drawn of the US and its local ally, Israel, unleashing the bombing sorties to Iran's nuclear complex. It turns out that the Israeli high command made numerous requests for clearance for its planes to overfly Iraq on their way to Iran, but were adamantly nixed by George Jr.

Jr's greatest single triumph in reducing America's standing was his insistence that the assembly elections in Iraq go forward as planned, in December of 2005. Bush Sr, it will be recalled, shrank from finishing off Saddam Hussein in 1991 because it would most likely have meant the Shia would take power, to the great benefit of Iran. When the invasion of 2003 did topple Saddam, seasoned counsellors advised Bush Jr to suspend the elections he'd pledged, for exactly the same reason.

Was this doggedly incompetent saboteur of empire an ‘accident’ of history?

But the 43rd president obstinately rejected these counsels, saying that he'd promised Iraqis the gift of democracy and nothing would deflect him from this course. The elections took place on December 15, 2005, in an astounding disaster for the US in the region and a mortal blow for its objectives in Iraq.

Was this doggedly incompetent saboteur of empire an 'accident' of history, born of hanging chads in Florida in 2000 and the ruthless competence of James Baker in out-manoeuvring Al Gore's efforts to claim the White House amid the Forida recounts?

Blame first his mother, Barbara Bush, an unpleasant creature who never forgave George Sr for dragging her from behind the lace curtains of respectability in Connecticut to West Texas where she endured the miseries of a frontier wife, helpmeet to a failed wildcatter. She let her hair go white, grieved for the daughter that died and snarled at the lads while her faithless husband gadded about the world.

It was Barbara who gave George his petty, mean-spirited vindictiveness and George Sr who passed on the relentless philistinism. It was Laura who took in hand the cocaine-snorter of the Houston years and nudged him into politics.

But no one ever took Jr seriously as a contender on the national scene until Republicans, aghast at the prospect that John McCain might seize the nomination in 2000, seized on Bush as the man who would save them from this fate. They scarcely dared dream that he might actually become president. That required the campaign skills of Al Gore, looming over the barely articulate Bush in so loutish a display of arrogant ill manners in that first debate that Americans gallantly rallied to Bush's cause.

Somewhere in late 2003, blaming everything on Bush became a national pastime and alibi. He took the hit for 50 years of venal failure by the city fathers of New Orleans to protect their city. He's even had to shoulder the blame for the Wall Street meltdown and the subprime crisis, for which Congressional legislators and overseers can far more justly be held responsible.

Bush leaves America a poorer but better place, more conscious of its blessings

He soldiered on, making so half-hearted an effort to 'reform' Social Security - the last defence of older Americans - that Wall Street, the instigator of the 'reform', remembered with profound nostalgia the man who was well on the way to destroying Social Security without even a bark of alarm from the watchdogs, until the Lewinsky scandal forced him to abort the mission.

Bush leaves America a poorer but in many ways a better place, more conscious of its blessings. Just as it took bad King John to force the drafting of the Magna Carta, on Bush's watch Americans have learned, amidst the threat of losing them, that they have constitutional protections.

A commander in-chief who made Jerry Ford sound like Demosthenes has given them a fresh sensitivity to language, even the dream that they might have a president who can speak in whole sentences.

Now Obama proclaims his mission of renewing America, always a sinister prospect. We're heading back in to the high country of moral uplift, and dispiriting talk of America's 'mission'. I live in hopes of an acrid manuscript from Laura Bush, blaming everything on Dick Cheney. ·