The 12 main failures of the Bush-Cheney administration: A terrible legacy

"I think as far as the adverse impact on the nation and around the world, this [Bush II] administration has been the worst in history." --Jimmy Carter, 39th U.S. President

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeating it." --George Santayana (1863-1952)

"There was never a serious debate that I know of within the administration about the imminence of the Iraqi threat." --George Tenet, ex-CIA Director under George W. Bush

"The power of the Executive to cast a man into prison without formulating any charge known to the law, and particularly to deny him the judgment of his peers, is in the highest degree odious and is the foundation of all totalitarian governments whether Nazi or Communist." --Sir Winston Churchill - (1874-1965)

The accomplishments of the Bush-Cheney administration are very few, if any, but its wrongdoings are numerous and comprehensive. This administration has been a virtual wrecking crew for anything it has put its hands on. Here is a summary of the twelve most glaring failures of this administration.

1. The Bush-Cheney administration has been an aggressive militarist and imperialist administration, reverting to the old gunboat diplomacy.

First of all, the central mistake of President George W. Bushwas to abdicate the function of governing to "steamroller" Vice President Dick Cheney, who then used his vast experience in government to create a parallel government. This administration will be referred to historically as the "Bush-Cheney administration", because the vice president has had more concrete influence in running the government than the incumbent President.

The rest follows: The Bush-Cheney administration, which gained power in 2000 with the help of a one vote majority of the U.S. Supreme Court (on December 10, 2000), after having lost the popular vote, will also be remembered as the one that adopted a hegemonic foreign policy and issued the totalitarian "Bush Doctrine" of preemptive wars,of international unilateralism, and of American assertive military supremacy around the world. If this hubristic doctrine is not officially repudiated soon, the United States will take its place in history along (Adolf) Hitler's Nazi Germany and (Joseph) Stalin's Soviet Union.

As a concrete step in implementing the infamous "Bush Doctrine", the Bush-Cheney administration then discarded any notion of law and morality and launched a war of aggression abroad in order to impose an imperial control of oil-rich countries that are neighbors to the state of Israel. Against the advice of military, legal and intelligence experts, but coaxed by Neocon ideologues who were anxious to promote Israeli interests,the Bush-Cheney administration violated the U.N. Charter and the Nuremberg Charter and launched an illegitimate, illegal and immoral war of aggression,a war of choice and not of necessity, against Iraq. This is a throwback to the dreadful days of the old and much maligned gunboat diplomacyof more than one hundred years ago.

And talking about a quagmire, White House's Neocons are even pushing the idea of having American soldiers in Iraq for thenext 50 years!

2. The Bush-Cheney administration has been an administration that has betrayed democracy because it has relied on lies, deceit, propaganda and manipulation in a way that would have been worthy of a totalitarian regime:

The illegal Iraq war was justified with lies and exaggerations about Iraq's so-called weapons of mass destruction and supposed links to al Qaeda. This is a war that has been marred with reliance on torture and by immoral behavior by American soldiers in Iraq. The result is a worldwide explosion of hatred against the United States. As a consequence, the reputation of the United States has been seriously damaged among free nations and all around the world.

Domestic examples of the Bush-Cheney administration's tendency to rely on deceit were exposed by the Jessica Lynch and Pat Tillman affairs. And former CIA Director George Tenet has confirmed that the Bush-Cheney White House was bent on "selling" a war against Iraq to the American public using lies and cooked intelligence data.

Such behavior is contrary to the basic spirit of democracy that dictates that rulers must justify their decisions to the citizenry by spelling out clearly the ends being pursued, the means chosen to achieve the ends, and the reasons for taking a chosen action. For a public official, to lie is to be undemocratic.

3. The Bush-Cheney administration has been an administration that has destroyed the more than two century-old American tradition of separation of church and state:

Soon after it gained power, President George W. Bush chose a theologian to write his speeches. This was followed by the Bush-Cheney administration entirely discarding the principle of separation of church and state by channeling billions of dollars of public money to religious organizations, thus insuring the support and votes of unscrupulous religious leaders.

Indeed, the Bush-Cheney administration created the Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, an outfit that helped sectarian religious charities receive $2.15 billion in federal grants in fiscal year 2005 alone, to be used for the benefit of their own particular group of believers in their own particular religion. George W. Bush stands alone among all American presidents for having done so.

4. The Bush-Cheney administration has been an administration accused of a criminal construct worthy of impeachment:

George W. Bush has flagrantly violated his oath of office, which requires him "to protect and defend the constitution."

Among the "high crimes and misdemeanors" that, under other political circumstances, would surely constitute the constitutional grounds for impeachment are these: the president and his top officials pressured the Central Intelligence Agency to put together a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iraq's nuclear weapons that both the administration and the Agency knew to be patently dishonest. They then used this false NIE report to justify an American war of aggression. After launching an invasion of Iraq, the administration unilaterally reinterpreted international and domestic law to permit the torture of prisoners held at Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad, at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and at other secret locations around the world.

Nothing in the U.S. Constitution, least of all the commander-in-chief clause, allows the president to commit felonies. Nevertheless, within days after the 9/11 attacks, President Bush signed a secret executive order authorizing the new policy of "extraordinary rendition," in which the CIA is allowed to kidnap terrorist suspects anywhere on Earth and transfer them to prisons in countries such as Egypt, Syria, or Uzbekistan, where torture is a normal practice, or to secret CIA prisons outside the United States where Agency operatives themselves do the torturing.

Within the USA, the Bush-Cheney administration undertook extensive spying on American citizens without obtaining the necessary judicial warrants and without reporting to Congress on these activities. These actions were in direct violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (and subsequent revisions) and of Amendment IV of the Constitution.

5. The Bush-Cheney administration has been an administration that has used fascist-like, McCarthyite tactics and suspended fundamental liberties at home, including the nearly millennium-old Right of Habeas Corpus.

When President George W. Bush ordered the National Security Agency to proceed with warrantless domestic wiretapping, he knew he was establishing an illegal wiretapping program to spy on Americans, and that he was placing himself in a situation of illegality. If this had not been illegal, his attorney general would not have felt obliged to cover up the entire affair in order to protect the administration. In fact, under Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, the U.S. department of Justice has lost its long-held tradition of independence, and embarked upon a long list of politicized operations.

Once a politician embraces illegality, there are no limits. For instance, George W. Bush has paved the way for exercising martial law powers, first by de-facto repealing the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act that forbids the deployment of soldiers on American soil for domestic law enforcement, and, second, by signing last October (2006) the Military Commissions Act of 2006(MCA: HR 6166). Under this act, the president has granted himself almost-dictatorial powers to arrest and detain indefinitely any American citizen, without constitutional protections.

To top things off, President George W. Bush has relied on signing statements to assert that he has the power to disobey newly enacted laws in a manner that no previous president would have ever thought of doing.