By Richard Palacios
I am writing this on the twentieth anniversary of the election of George W. Bush. Twenty years ago today ballot difficulties in the state of Florida clouded the result. After a ruling by the Supreme Court, Mr. Bush stumbled into office with a majority of the electoral votes. Remember the electoral college? Being an independent I had voted for Mr. Gore. The only comfort I could find in a Bush presidency was that they would mess things so badly that someone else, anyone else, would be elected next time.
I had misjudged this man. The Bush presidency started out with a few problems. A decline in the outlook for the economy followed by a downturn in stock prices filled the news. Corporate fraud and scandal threatened to taint the president. Despite these difficulties, our traditional American apathy remained intact.
Then on Sept. 11, 2001 the first World Trade Center’s dual towers were brought crashing down on our apathy. Thousands were killed and the heart of our republic was attacked by an enemy for the first time since the War of 1812.
This event “awakened the sleeping giant” and our president. In the spring of the following year we attacked Afghanistan. With the help of our allies and many countries around the world we occupied the country with an overwhelming ground force and disarmed any remnants of the Taliban and Al Qaeda and captured their leaders. The capture of Osama bin Laden was the high point of the first 100 days of this operation.
Many of the president’s advisors wanted to move on and attack Iraq and remove the despot Saddam Hussein. Instead the president addressed the world and spoke of the need to rebuild Afghanistan. With harsh criticism from within his own party and discord among his advisors he stood his ground. He insisted that Afghans be hired to help rebuild their country. He brought in companies from all over the world offering fair bid contracts to rebuild. As a result the countries where these companies were headquartered had an interest in helping the president both financially and politically complete his vision of a democratic Afghanistan.
The president called a worldwide conference of countries to coordinate security measures to fight the growing threat of terrorism. After the tragedy at the W.T.C., a majority of the countries in the world including China joined to fight terrorism. We used our vast budget surplus to beef up our intelligence services and create security apparatus to safeguard our power plants, strategic manufacturing, chemical and toxic stock piles, shipping ports and airports. Our intelligence agencies hired Arab and Muslim Americans to teach us their customs and language. The Arab-Muslim community and its leaders, seeing that our government valued their contribution, helped law enforcement identify and arrest terrorists in this country.
This did not happen over night. There were no splashy headlines and patriotic rhetoric — this was work. The president was getting pressure from big business and politicians but he stood his ground. He created the “World Security Conference” in conjunction with the United Nations. In the winter of 2003 weapons inspectors went back into Iraq supported by a large multi-national force. This force included all of our European allies, Japan, Russia, Australia, Egypt, Turkey and Saudi Arabia, who provided logistic support.
With information from the excellent “Middle East Intelligence Unit” we knew that Saddam’s forces would show little resistance. A multi-national military force was landed in northern and southern Iraq. Saddam Hussein’s domain was reduced to a small area around Baghdad. His military commanders secretly met with our forces and Saddam was deposed in September 2004. Using the same formula as Afghanistan to rebuild, Iraq became a jewel of the Middle East.
President Bush called for an end to proliferation of weapons of mutual destruction. The United States ceased being the world’s arms dealer, Iran and North Korea participated in multi-lateral destruction of nuclear weapons.
The changes here in the U.S. were truly a thing of legend. The president, with remarkable forethought, realized that energy costs were going to rise rapidly due to a lack of processing infrastructure and an increase in consumption. With his ties to the oil industry he started the ball rolling on the remarkable energy infrastructure we now enjoy.
Perhaps one of the most important decisions the president made was in the area of stem cell research. He pushed legislation allowing scientists access to thousands of embryos abandoned in fertility clinics. These frozen embryos, he argued, would either stay frozen or be destroyed. The president provided additional funding for embryonic and adult stem cell research. The advances in health care have been nothing short of extraordinary.
George Bush had the intelligence, vision and ability to turn a crisis into a world-changing event that will benefit humankind for centuries to come. He still works for prosperity, education and peace throughout the world.
George Bush could have been a contender.
WWW Downtown Express
