Will Bush have a legacy?

The late William F. Buckley - described as the father of the modern conservative movement - was once asked by an interviewer: What would George Bush's legacy be? He said: "There will be no legacy," because Bush failed to follow up on his promotion of a democracy agenda.

In fact, Bush will have a legacy and he is concerned about it - as any president would be. For one thing he leaves office as possibly the most disliked president in recent memory.

A New York Times examination of Bush's final days pointed out the low esteem in which his presidency is generally held by the American public. "To say that Bush is unpopular," wrote the Times, "only begins to capture the historic depths of his estrangement from the American public. He is arguably the most disliked president in seven decades".

Lately, Bush started a campaign to promote the virtues of his administration's policies. In a speech to a Washington audience, Bush immodestly compared himself to some distinguished presidents. He claimed that his crusade for the promotion of democracy in the Middle East and elsewhere was rooted in the intellectual legacy of such historic figures such as Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt.

This outlandish claim lacked credibility if only because his so-called 'freedom agenda' was brought to the fore as a way of justifying the unpopular and unjustifiable invasion of Iraq after the failure to find weapons of mass destruction.

The claim left the influential media indifferent. The only television cameras in the audience that listened to Bush's self-aggrandising speech in Washington were the government's cameras. The Washington Post ignored the speech, and the New York Times gave it only one and a half paragraph in a piece otherwise devoted to the latest Barak Obama address.

In media interviews Bush gave, he often came under attack even from people he expected to give him an understanding ear. An Israeli reporter criticised him for waiting seven years before getting involved in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

In a speech given in Washington in early December he painted a picture of the Middle East at odds with reality: "The Middle East in 2008 is a freer, more hopeful and more promising place than it was in 2001," he said, only to be contradicted by the latest Israeli assault on Gaza.

In early December he told an American television interviewer that he regretted, not misleading the American people about the Iraq war, but the "mistaken intelligence". Under the heading Deluder in Chief, the editors of the New York Times reacted sharply: "Mr Bush said he will 'leave the presidency with my head held high'," they wrote, "And, presumably, with his eyes closed to all the disasters he is dumping on the American people and his successor."

Even his belated designation of three large areas of the western Pacific as national monuments did not rehabilitate him in the eyes of the New York Times, which dismissed the belated attempt at salvaging some legacy as "not nearly enough to offset eight years of Mr Bush's bad environmental policies..."

Bush hopes that history will be kinder to him. He described to an Egyptian interviewer how he thought historians would judge his presidency: "I think history will say," he stated, "George Bush clearly saw the threats that keep the Middle East in turmoil and was willing to do something about it..."

In fact, historians have already begun formulating their judgments on the Bush presidency. And they are saying something entirely different.

George Mason University's History News Network conducted an informal survey of historians' view of the Bush presidency. Eight in ten historians considered it a failure. One historian said: "His presidency has been remarkably successful in its pursuit of disastrous policies."

Another historian said that the Bush presidency had been the worst since Reagan in terms of economic damage, since Teddy Roosevelt in terms of imperialism, and since Richard Nixon in terms of dishonesty in government.

The Commission of Inquiry on Crimes Against Humanity rendered a unanimous verdict. The Commission found "the President of the United States and his administration guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity".

The administration's actions, the verdict read: "Shock the conscience of humanity" in five areas - wars of aggression, illegal detention and torture, suppression of science and catastrophic policies on global warming... and the abandonment of New Orleans before, during, and after Hurricane Katrina."

Benjamin Ferencz, a former chief prosecutor of the Nuremberg Trials, observed that a "prima facie case can be made" that the Bush administration "is guilty of an illegal war of aggression against a sovereign nation".

Attempts to impeach

Although Bush escaped attempts to impeach him - despite popular support for impeachment - because the Democratic leadership was afraid the action might backfire, he may not escape accountability.

Unless completely and unconditionally pardoned by the new president, Bush and his administration may still be held accountable for the known and still yet to be discovered breaches of law they committed.

Accountability may have already been set in motion. A South Texas county court indicted US Vice-President Dick Cheney and former Attorney-General Alberto Gonzales on state charges involving federal prisons. Cheney is charged with "engaging in an organised criminal activity" related to his investment interests in private prison companies running the federal detention centers, and "at least misdemeanor assaults" on detainees.

Gonzales is accused of "using his position while in office to stop an investigation in 2006 into abuses at one of the privately-run prisons."

The indictment of such senior figures of the Bush administration may or may not be a harbinger of things to come, but it will surely be part of the legacy of the Bush administration.

Adel Safty's new book, Might over Right, is endorsed by Noam Chomsky, and published by Garnet, England. 2009.