Defending Bush
by Dalitso Njolinjo
How do you defend the indefensible? How do you defend the modern day villain?
How do you defend someone that is seen in the mind of the public (UK) as a caricature of evil itself? Is he a diabolical evil mastermind? Well no, he is just a man who was thrown into an impossibly difficult position.
America seems to mythologize the occupant of the Oval office so much that they forget one very important fact; he is only human – fallible and susceptible to mistakes just like the rest of us. Yes, Katrina was an unforgivable tragic moment in American history, a moment that will probably haunt Mr Bush along side that faithful day in September 2001.
I remember sitting in front of the television, on my school lunch break, screaming at my mother to come downstairs to look at the news.
“What are shouting for Dalitso?” She responded annoyed as she descended the stairs while kissing her teeth and walked into the living room.
“Buildings are on fire in Amer…” I tried to explain being interrupted by a plane flying into one of the burning towers.
I will never forget any of the images I saw on 9/11. I will never forget the images of people jumping from a suicidal height and I will never forget the image of the towers collapsing. Here in England, the July 7th bombings are as equally etched into our collective minds, but we were never subjected to the images as gruesome as the ones shown in real time during 9/11. Till this day, what happened on that day really doesn’t seem real at all. That was the event that shaped the 43rd president of the United States. Everything that he did from that day forth was to ensure that what transpired on that day never happens again on his watch.
Now does this defend pre-preemptively going to war with a sovereign nation under false pretenses? Well, yes and no. Yes because there has not been another strike against the United States since and no because he has widened the pool of hatred against the United States in an already volatile region. But don’t forget the part in which the United States Senate played in the decision making process to go to Iraq.
The above paragraph might cause a lot of blood boiling amongst some readers, but give me a little more room to explain my chain of thought. The dirty little secret that no one wants to admit about George W Bush is that legislatively and communicatively, he was an exceptionally effective President.
For a time, George W Bush was a reflection of the United States itself.
When the towers fell, you could feel the US rage from all the way back here in the UK. George Bush embodied that rage and directed it to who he believed the American people assigned blame to, all things anti-America. ‘Axis of evil’, ‘war on terror’, ‘smoking gun in a shape of a mushroom cloud’, ‘you’re either with us or against us’, these phrases show that George W Bush was no dummy, he knew the world had changed and he realized it changed along time before 9/11.
His acts were not acts of a psychopathic villain, lusting to suspend habeas corpus, they were acts of a man that was deeply effected by what he saw on September 11th, just like me.
When trying to evaluate George Bush, I am reminded of William Clinton’s reply when asked whether Obama was ready to president during the recently passed election, he said something along the lines of, “I don’t believe anyone is truly ever ready or prepared to be president until you’re actually in the job.”
I would like to use that argument to defend Bush: if you can never be ready to become president until you’re in the job, how can you prepare for the horrors of such an event as 9/11?
Dalitso Njolinjo lives in Northamptonshire, England. He is an aspiring writer and communications consultant. He writes that he “enjoys all things politics, sports and French. The ungodly trinity.” He also writes on his own blog.