Plenty of failures, but Bush got war on terror right

WASHINGTON, Dec. 26 (UPI) -- U.S. President George W. Bush remains convinced history will judge him less harshly than most of the American people now do in poll after poll.

In these columns, over the past eight years we consistently warned against the consequences of many of Bush's economic and national security policies when almost no one else in the mainstream media did. Applying that same useful principle of swimming against the prevailing pundits current, we now feel obliged to point out the areas where he did right.

Bush and his defense and national security teams were taken totally by surprise by the al-Qaida terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. But at first he reacted promptly and well to them. The blizzard of national security revisions contained in the USA Patriot Act has ensured -- at least so far -- that not a single significant terrorist attack by al-Qaida or other Islamist groups has taken place on the U.S. mainland since then. Immediately after Sept. 11, any prediction that Bush would leave office with this record would have been met with disbelief and even derision.

Bush's much-criticized policy of giving the U.S. intelligence services and armed forces a free hand to act aggressively and proactively to hunt down terror suspects and put them behind bars for an indefinite period served not only to protect the U.S. homeland but also the nations of Western Europe from more and worse terror attacks than actually took place.

The deterrent effect of his decision to send U.S. forces to topple the Taliban in Afghanistan also without doubt had an extremely positive effect in preventing many rulers who hate and resent the United States from harboring or funding al-Qaida and related groups.

It should also be noted that during Bush's years in office, the government of not a single Arab Sunni Muslim state in the Middle East was toppled by extreme Islamists, much as they wanted to.

Instead, al-Qaida's attempts to destabilize Saudi Arabia starting in 2002 were a miserable failure. The Saudis provided a classic example of how to withstand such a campaign and then to effectively crush it. At least five operational heads of al-Qaida in Saudi Arabia were hunted down and killed.

After a disastrous three and a half years of worsening security conditions in Iraq, Bush finally fired his much-criticized Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and replaced him with Robert Gates, a man who proved he could do the job. Gates acted at once to send Gen. David Petraeus, the only four-star general in the U.S. Army to have specialized in counterinsurgency operations, to command in Iraq. Petraeus wrote the book on counterinsurgency: He authored the U.S. Army's updated manual on it. And over the past two years, conditions in Iraq -- while still inherently violent, unresolved and unstable -- have certainly improved tremendously thanks to Petraeus's policies.

Bush also stuck by Israel when it was battling the Second Palestinian Intifada from 2000 to 2005. That was the most bloody and merciless terrorist assault on the citizens of the Jewish state since it was created: More than 1,000 died.

At first, the Israelis responded with massive retaliatory operations that killed more Palestinians than even Israelis had died. Things seemed only to get worse. But eventually Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon hit on the unfashionable and at the time much-derided concept of a security fence to prevent suicide bombers from entering Israel from the Palestinian Authority territories: It worked. Major nations like Saudi Arabia and India rapidly copied the long border fence policy to improve their own border security and eventually even the United States moved in that direction when Bush approved the boosting of U.S. border defenses with Mexico, though his critics charged he moved too little, too late in that area.

Bush at least managed to avoid any serious crisis with China in the years after Sept. 11, 2001, which was just as well since the Chinese State Bank ended up holding more than 35 percent of all U.S. Treasury bonds in circulation.

U.S. relations with Japan flourished under Bush as they had not done for more than 20 years after Japan's visionary and highly effective Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi turned to the United States to build dense and highly effective ballistic missile defenses with technology that it bought from the United States.

Relations with Europe improved, too. Bush established an unexpected but exceptionally close partnership with longtime British Prime Minister Tony Blair that has continued under his successor Gordon Brown. Major European leaders fiercely critical of Bush fell from power and were replaced by his admirers and allies -- Chancellor Angela Merkel in Germany, President Nicolas Sarkozy in France and Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi in Italy.

Bush pushed ahead with his much-derided ballistic missile defense program: BMD against intermediate-range ballistic missiles became a mature technology around the world on his watch, and there was also slow but real progress towards the much more difficult goal of building super-fast interceptors to defend against the threat of intercontinental ballistic missiles.

Bush also began the long overdue job of taking the continent of Africa seriously -- something no previous U.S. president had really done in the entire half-century since decolonization began. He approved the setting up of a separate Africa Command -- AFRICOM -- at the Pentagon and dramatically boosted U.S. investment in the struggle to contain and roll back HIV/AIDS.

The appalling bloodbaths in Darfur and Congo continued, but Bush worked hard with underrated success to diplomatically isolate dictator Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe and expose his human-rights abuses and disastrous economic policies.

At home, Bush's economic policies fell apart in the end, but no one complained when they were delivering prosperity, robust economic growth, a booming housing market and amazingly low interest rates for most of his presidency.

Bush and his political appointees, however, consistently gutted the regulatory procedures and powers of the departments they ran, and in the end this had a catastrophic effect on Wall Street. His chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, Christopher Cox, looks like going down in history as the worst ever.

Bush's final Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson was a disaster, too. He let Lehman Brothers die when reputable economists like Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman were convinced he should have saved it, and that set off the entire September Wall Street meltdown. Then Bush and Paulson panicked and pushed through a colossal $700 billion bailout package that gave political cover to the ruling Democrats in Congress to spend money like water, too.

Bush's historic failures were real, and no amount of denial or obfuscation by him or his remaining acolytes will change that. He inherited a dominant and robust Republican Party and conservative movement that looked set to maintain control of the House of Representatives for decades. He left with liberal Democrats firmly and confidently controlling both chambers of Congress and the presidency, and a conservative movement demoralized and disorganized as it had not been since the early 1960s.

However, if there was one big thing Bush did get right, it was the need to stand tall against extreme Islamist revolutionary groups and the eschatology-driven visions that inspired them. Where it mattered most, he did prove a tough, unyielding rock of stability in a dangerous world. In that respect, at least, he leaves big footprints for his successor to follow.