Craiglist for Washington DC is filled with incessant postings regarding the availability of accommodation in and around the city. As Inauguration Day draws near, the population size of the US capital is swelling as people from all over come to celebrate the event. It is a celebration of a beginning, a continuum and an end on the same day. The eight years of the Bush presidency are finally coming to an end and that is a relief. It is a great relief particularly for me because the Bush administration was riddled with disappointment, outrage and the betrayal of ideals.
With so many voting for Barack Obama on November 4, 2008, January 20, 2009 will surely be different from the Inauguration Day that fell on the same day exactly 8 years ago.
It was raining on January 20, 2001 and the newly-elected President Bush was received by a hostile crowd in the capital. The result of the 2000 presidential election ended so closely that the Supreme Court had to come in to settle the hotly-disputed political contest. Elections of national proportions are naturally divisive but the decision of the court only cemented the division for years to come.
The bitter division was observed on the very first day of the Bush administration. The journey through Pennsylvania Avenue was not pretty for the new President. Angry protesters pelted the presidential motorcade with trash. That forced the new President and his entourage to hurry up rather than enjoy the day meant to celebrate the Office of the President of the United States of America.
Roughly two years earlier, Vice President Gore visited Malaysia in 1998 for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Kuala Lumpur. “Democracy confers a stamp of legitimacy that reforms must have in order to be effective,” he said.
“And so, among nations suffering economic crises, we continue to hear calls for democracy and reform in many languages — people’s power, doi moi, reformasi.”
He, of course, was referring to the political turmoil of the late 1990s in Malaysia that led to the incarceration of the former Deputy Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim. Al Gore was clearly sympathetic to Anwar Ibrahim, reflecting what the position of the US was in the whole issue. The Barisan Nasional-led government under the combative former Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad naturally was not amused with the remark.
With Bush’s victory over Gore, somewhere at the back of my mind there is a memory of the former PM almost celebrating it. I am unsure if that memory is made up but I am certain that supporters of BN made no bones about expressing how they welcomed Gore’s defeat: a payback to his speech in Kuala Lumpur in 1998. I somehow feel that the same individuals would have preferred Gore to Bush in retrospect.
I do not remember much of the first more or less eight months of the Bush administration but I do vividly remember September 11, 2001. I had just begun my freshman year in an American university and I woke up at around 9am on a Tuesday only to be greeted with cancelled classes and closed offices. Just as I was trying to adjust to my new life, the World Trade Center in New York collapsed after being rammed by two hijacked passenger airplanes to unveil a new world. Al-Qaeda claimed credit and Osama Bin Laden, the head of the organization and a guest of the Taliban-led Afghanistan, was a likely candidate for Time’s Person of the Year.
September 11 is, without doubt, the single event that made everything the Bush administration is today possible.
Shocked, a divisive society came together behind Bush with a majority of the world offering goodwill unconditionally. The political will shown in Washington made retribution swift. An ultimatum was issued: surrender Bin Laden or face military action. Afghanistan refused and the rest is history. The US now occupies the landlocked country with a US-supported government in place.
Then, there was Iraq. Suddenly, weapons of mass destruction was the buzzword and Saddam Hussein of Iraq was accused of maintaining it. Iraq said that it did not have it anymore. Bush maintained otherwise and was prepared to disarm Iraq forcefully. Secretary of State Colin Powell tried to convince the world that there were WMD in Iraq. The United Nations, however, was unconvinced and refused to sanction any military action of the level Bush advocated.
Frustrated, the US forged the Coalition of the Willing and invaded Iraq. Unity within the US and goodwill of the world crumbled as swiftly as it was born immediately after September 11.
Sooner or later, the wars were positioned as a conflict between the Muslim and Western worlds. Understandably, many within the US Muslim community feared of becoming the victims of hate crimes. Several of my Malaysian friends warned me to watch my back. While their concern was comprehensible, I did not suffer any of it and I tend to view warnings with skepticism. Rather, my fear was based on something else entirely.
Reports were coming out that the US government was spying on thousands of individuals in the United States and allegations of telephone conversations and email exchanges being tapped made its way around the internet. It was later proven to be true. More distressing was that Bush had the audacity to defend it, even when the secret was out in the open. I however could never be certain if I was ever bugged; a large part of me is confident that I was a victim. After all, as Bush had emphasized in defending the secret tapping program, only calls made to overseas were monitored without a court order.
Some Malaysian friends had to report to the newly-created Department of Homeland Security at regular intervals. It was as if they were ex-convicts on parole. I would have felt humiliated if I had been treated like that. So much of my time would be wasted just reporting to the office in Detroit.
While I was spared of that, profiling by the US government ensured that I went through more rigorous security inspections compared to others.
Every time I took the plane, the security personnel would pull me aside and say “Congratulations, you are selected for further security screening.” I hate having to take off my shoes and to loosen my belt just so they can use the metal detectors. And I hate strangers going through my bags looking for weapons or bombs, just because I am a Malaysian.
In many ways, I was not harassed by US citizens. They were kind to me. I instead was harassed by the US government. In the land of the free, it did not feel like the land of the free. Liberty was curbed in the name of security. Sacrifices had to be made, they said.
The talk of pro-war itself was suffocating. It was either you are with us or against us. Oh, the arrogance!
In the end, Saddam Hussein was executed with unholy haste for the unholy crimes he committed. But there was no WMD to be found. Somebody lied and people died just like that. Thus, the credibility of the US went down the drain. For a world power that could have done some good, it was a shame.
It was shame also that the US sacrificed the moral high ground it took in the wake of the Asian Financial Crisis to save its financial as well as the automotive sectors. If a Democratic administration maintained the moral high ground in economy, surely one would expect a Republican administration would do better. But no, the US government under Bush made sure it did everything necessary to prevent institutions from failing as it should under a free market.
There is no atheist in the foxhole and there are no libertarians in a financial crisis. Bah!
What was politely called unorthodox in the late 1990s quickly became the orthodoxy. Government intervention is the order of the day. As a result, the size of government grew tremendously that one would wonder if it was a Republican President sitting in the Oval Office. Coupled with war spending, the beast was on the loose. The small government ideal, supposedly part of the Republican Party, was betrayed.
So pervasive were the tentacles of government that even scientific reports were censored just to support the political position of the White House on several issues, especially on climate change. In one particular case, a lawyer with little background in science, edited facts presented in a report prepared by climate scientists. He was caught and resigned to save Bush from further embarrassment. Shortly after that as if he had nothing to regret, he joined ExxonMobil, an energy company that vehemently rejected the idea of climate change until only very recently.
Yet, after all the wrongs and more, Bush is right in saying it is history that will judge him. “There are things I would do differently if given the chance. Yet I have always acted with the best interests of our country in mind”, he appealed.
Perhaps but whether it was good enough is another matter.
This article was first published in The Malaysian Insider on January 19 2009.