Following the 1991 American-led war to liberate Kuwait from Iraq, people in the Gulf used to joke about George Bush the father. They said if Bush was nearby, you could sleep soundly in your house. Now, in light of what is going on in the region, people are saying if Bush the son is near, you had better flee your house. The departure of Colin Powell, the only rational voice in the administration, and the naming by Bush of his iron-lady national security advisor, Condoleezza Rice, to replace him, is a clear message to every one that Bush is not afraid of engaging in new wars.
If we think this is a matter of temperament or disposition we must consider the elation Bush must have felt over his re-election. He won 60 million votes in the election and that means he has a popular mandate. The American people elected him despite the numbers of dead in Iraq and Afghanistan and despite the Guantanamo scandals, the rift with the Europeans and Al-Qaeda’s visible activity. Bush won despite Michael Moore’s movie, Fahrenheit 911, which ridiculed the US president by its searing examination of his administration’s actions in the wake of Sept.11. Bush won although the film set box-office records when shown in theaters across the US. He won even though many musicians, singers, actors and the media were against him.
In winning a second term, Bush proved all scientific readings and historical precedents wrong. He won despite the fact that he sat in the White House waiting for results against the advice of his aides who warned him that waiting at the White House was bad luck and that no president had ever been re-elected if he stayed in the White House waiting for the election results. Bush defied all the fortune-tellers who said no president could be re-elected if, in the same week, the Washington Redskins were defeated. That week saw the team defeated and Bush winning the election. People began asking Bush’s victory was some kind of miracle.
The truth of course has nothing to do with miracles and wonders. Bush won in an open election with the possibility of losing always present. It would thus be wrong to assume that what happens in the next four years will have to do with disposition and temperament since strategies are always greater than individuals.
To understand what could happen in future we need to make a comparison between Bush and the late President Reagan who also won a second term and stayed in the White House for eight years. Much has been said against the Reagan era that was characterized by rising confrontation and tension, increased American arming and overseas engagement. What we should remember is that Reagan’s policies led to the collapse of the Soviet Union at the beginning of the 1990s, less than two years after the end of the Reagan era. The Reagan policy was not, as has been naively described, a policy of an ignorant president riding a wild bull. It was rather a state strategy with the man sharing a chessboard slowly moving toward the Soviet castle to bring to an end the waning days of the Cold War.
If we are to guess what Bush will think about during the coming four years, we can simply say he will want to win all the battles he began during his first four years in office. He will want to consolidate his country’s position within an international coalition that is slowly taking shape. It is unlikely that Bush will let regional challenges stand in the way of his empire fulfilling its objectives, whether regional or international.
