George HW Bush, 41st President of the USA

The death of the 41st President, George HW Bush will produce some interesting assessments. I cannot offer much more than a few here.

if there is a positive side to public service, one notes the 41st President over 40 years served in numerous posts, including the head of the CIA. It would be futile to compare him to the 45th President who seems to regard public service as proof that the man concerned is variously a fool, a liar, corrupt, useless and any other slur you can think of, to the extent that one wonders if he despises the USA. It is simply inconceivable that when campaigning for the Presidency GHW Bush would have appealed to the Russian government to help him defeat Bill Clinton, and the record shows GHW Bush was not a traitor to the USA.

Nevertheless, GHW Bush inherited a complex legacy from his father Prescott Bush, who went into business with W Averell Harriman in the 1920s that saw them expand their interests in shipping and minerals to both the USSR (the claim is that Harriman negotiated the deal on manganese with Trotsky and the head of the NKVD Felix Dzherzhinsky) and then in Germany with Thyssen later expading into joint ventures during the Nazi era before in 1942 the US Governmen seized the assets of the Union Banking Corporation (jointly owned by Bush and Harriman) and the Silesian-American Corporation that Prescott Bush managed. One could go further back to their ancestor the Englishman Thomas Walker who made a fortune as a slave trader but most early Presidents of the USA owned slaves.

The more diffcult legacy in domestic US politics is with race, for while the Bush family had a liberal approach and wanted more Black Americans to join the Republican Party, a freshman GHW Bush in the Senate opposed the 1964 Civil Rights Act because he thought it would undermine State's Rights, and, notoriously in the 1988 campaign Bush used a conviicted rapist Willie Horton in an attack ad to imply Democrats were soft on the law. Perhaps his more liberal attitude inspired him to nominate Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court, though this does not seem to have been regarded as a triumphal moment for Black Americans- let's just say Clarence Thomas is no match for Thurgood Marshall.

If there was a defining moment of the Bush Presidency, it was not the end of the Cold War, but the reaction to Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in 1990. I had been in the Middle East throughout the summer and left a few days before the invasion, having failed to convince the locals that Bush had been preparing the overthrow of Saddam Hussein since the end of the Iran-Iraq War. I consider this event to mark a watershed in the history of the Middle East because it broke the back of existing arrangements between both Middle Eastern states and their backers in the USA and the USSR as it was at the time.

When, in the period of Desert Shield the US cobbled together a 'coalition of the willing' it brought Syria into an alliance which had been thought inconceivable before, and it proved to be the final straw for the PLO that foolishly backed Saddam having lost its financial lifeline as a result of Gorbachev's reforms. These two movements led directly after the war to both the failed Madrid conference and the more successful Oslo peace talks that emerged from the debris of Madrid to become the 1993 treaty between Israel and the PLO.

But the crucial turn was the mere fact that using a Security Council resolution the USA directed a military campaign to reverse the illegal acquisition of territory by force, something that had not been done to reverse similar breaches of the law by Israel in 1948 and 1967, and by Turkey in Cyprus in 1974. When the US Foreign Secretary was asked why Iraq was being punished but not Israel or Turkey the reply was 'beause there isn't a Security Council resolution to do so'. Desert Shield then became Desert Storm, but was conducted in spite of the fact that Jordan's King Hussein had secured an agreement from Saddam to withdraw from Kuwait.

The simple fact is that Iraq had been in the cross-hairs of the US administration because it was potentially the largest and most powerful state in the region and a threat to Israel and through its oil reserves, the international energy market, even though the evidence showed Saddam was a useless leader who failed to develop Iraq as a modern industrial state and spent most of his time murdering the citizens of the country. As for the domestic impact of the war in Iraq, it led to a devastating bombing campaign in the South and also the Kurdish north, an increase in the round-up, torture and execution of anyone Saddam didn't like (or didn't even know -I was told by an ex-General seeking asylum in Switzerland that Saddam rounded up a random group of people once a month and had them executed just so local people would remain terrified) -and then there were the sanctions that crippled the economy and Iraq's social services -all factors that fed into the insurgency against the US after 2003 by an 'ungrateful' Iraq.

Crucial too was the aftermath, for just as Saudi Arabia had been paralyzed by Iraq's invasion and was incapable of doing anything on its own, it allowed US troops stationed in the Kingdom to remain, and thus became the target of a new generation of Islamic radicals who decided to directly attack the country. It is because of Desert Storm that al-Qaeda began to plot the attacks on the US that took place throughout the 1990s and culminated in 9/11.

GHW Bush, just another US President intervening in the Middle East and leaving it worse than it was when he entered office. Will the US ever learn from its mistakes? Apparently not.