Short on detail and offering few revelations, the Middle East nevertheless looms large in former US president George W Bush's new memoir, writes David Tresilian Decision Points, George W Bush's presidential memoir, was greeted with considerable curiosity when it was published in the United States in November. What would Bush, internationally one of the most unpopular American politicians, have to say about the defining events of his presidency, including the US-led invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the sidelining of international opinion, the use of torture by US forces, the refusal to engage with efforts to tackle climate change or establish a international criminal court to try those accused of war crimes or crimes against humanity? As it turns out, the answer is not much that is new, and readers looking for insights into Bush's sometimes baffling character are likely to go away from Decision Points empty handed. The book contains nothing on climate change and nothing of substance on the sidelining of international opinion and international law. The international criminal court doesn't get an entry in the index. What Bush has to say about Afghanistan and Iraq adds little to what came out of the US administration at the time. On the other hand, there is quite a lot on the Bush administration's domestic education and social security policy, though US domestic affairs that hit the international headlines during the Bush years -- such as the response to Hurricane Katrina or the US Supreme Court's decision to award the 2000 presidential elections to the Republicans -- do not receive satisfactory discussion. In Decision Points, Bush says that the Democratic Party governor of Louisiana was to blame for failures in responding to Katrina and that the Supreme Court justices did not overreach themselves in ruling on the 2000 presidential elections, something that sits strangely with his denunciations of "judicial activism" elsewhere. However, even if Decision Points adds little to previous accounts of Bush's time in office, its vagueness and approximations being not entirely unexpected, for international readers the book's American flavour is worth savouring, especially with the advent, post Bush, of another crop of down- home US politicians. There is the familiar mix in Bush's book of born-again redemption story, the volume starting with the author's decision to give up alcohol at the age of 40, and Bible-belt religiosity, the Bush family, patricians from the east coast, settling in Texas and becoming friends and dining partners of revivalist preacher Billy Graham, still one of the best-known American tele-evangelists. Bush himself emerges from the book with his easy manner, fixed expressions and approximations to the vocabulary and sentiments of the common man all more or less intact. How is it done? Decision Points has much to say between the lines on what has apparently become an almost irresistible winning formula. THE BOOK IS DIVIDED into 14 chapters, each of which deals with significant decisions, usually ones made during Bush's time as president. After introductory material on Bush's time as governor of Texas, chapter three of Decision Points describes the author's first campaign for the presidency. "As a small business owner, baseball executive, governor, and front-row observer of Dad's White House" -- the administration of Bush senior -- "I learned the importance of properly structuring and staffing an organisation," Bush writes, explaining his choice of key figures in his administration. These included individuals who were later to become internationally familiar, especially in the Middle East, such as vice-president Dick Cheney -- "he had run a global business and understood the private sector" -- and secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld. One motif emerging from these early chapters is the link between big business and politics in the Bush administration. While Bush is careful to position himself as a "small business owner," this being close to the rhetoric of the Republican Party, in fact Bush family oil interests, developed by Bush senior, may not chime with everyone's ideas of "small business". Another motif is the small pool of candidates considered for posts in the new administration. While the power of a handful of families in high-level American politics has long been commented on, giving certain families -- the Kennedys or the Bushes -- the dynastic quality one associates with the Vanderbilts, the Astors, the Roosevelts and the other families that emerged out of the gilded age, such networks also seem to extend to family retainers. Rumsfeld, for example, had employed Cheney when he was chief of staff in the Ford White House after the resignation of president Nixon, and his appointment to the Bush White House 25 years later gives Bush pause because "some believed that Don had used his influence to persuade President Ford to appoint Dad to run the CIA in 1975." When Rumsfeld finally had to go in 2006 as a result of disasters in Iraq, Bush's thoughts turn to Robert Gates. "Why hadn't I thought of Bob? He had been CIA director in Dad's administration and deputy national security adviser to President Reagan." American politics, as recounted by Bush, can easily seem like a game of musical chairs, or perhaps family fortunes, with the same names recurring from decade to decade. Even Bush's grandfather, Wall Street financier Prescott Bush, whose photograph in Decision Points makes him look like something out of F Scott Fitzgerald's novel The Great Gatsby, had been a senator. On the other hand, there are also those who for one reason or other don't quite make it into the charmed circle, or, having made it in, don't have what it takes to stay there. Such people seem to have included Colin Powell, secretary of state in Bush's first administration, "a sensitive man who had been wounded by the infighting [with Rumsfeld] and discouraged by the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq." Fortunately, Powell's decision to resign removed the necessity of firing him. "I admired Colin, but it sometimes seemed like the State Department he led wasn't fully on board with my philosophy and policies." Exit Colin. Enter Condoleezza Rice. The account Bush gives of US domestic policies is masterfully bland, but it speaks volumes about high-level political appointments and decisions in the United States. However, international readers will perhaps be more interested in what the author has to say about the US decision to invade Afghanistan in late 2001 and then to invade and occupy Iraq in 2003. These are discussed in chapters five to eight and 12 to 14 of the book. In chapter five of his memoir, Bush describes the events of September 11 2001 and his determination "to find out who did this and kick their ass". The events, he says, had given a sense of purpose to his presidency: "to protect our people and defend our freedom that had come under attack... The focus of my presidency, which I had expected to be domestic policy, was now war." "The United States," Bush writes, "would consider any nation that harbored terrorists to be responsible for the acts of those terrorists," and after Osama bin Laden had been confirmed as responsible for the attacks -- "[CIA director] George Tenet confirmed that bin Laden was responsible... intelligence intercepts had revealed Al-Qaeda members congratulating one another in eastern Afghanistan", -- Bush introduced heightened security measures at home and gave the order to attack Afghanistan. In the account given here, there were three options, the first to carry out missile strikes on Al-Qaeda camps in Afghanistan, an option that had been used by the Clinton administration, the second to use missiles and American air force bombers, and the third to use missiles, air force bombers and deploy US combat troops to Afghanistan. Bush chose the third option. "Cruise missile and manned bomber attacks would be part of our response, but they were not enough... This time we would put boots on the ground, and keep them there until the Taliban and Al-Qaeda were driven out and a free society could emerge." A decade later, and with few signs of the situation in Afghanistan stabilising, it might be asked whether this was in fact the right decision. Even Bush wonders whether there might have been other options, since "the task turned out to be even more daunting than I anticipated." However, on the whole he is upbeat. "One of the most effective forms of diplomacy is to show the good heart of America to the world... A country dominated by one of history's cruelest regimes was now governed by freely elected leaders. Women who had been prisoners in their homes were serving in parliament. While still a danger, Al-Qaeda had lost the camps it used to train ten thousand terrorists and plan 9/11." He argues against "America abandon[ing] the country," since this would "betray all the gains of the past nine years." He does not consider the possibility that America, and not only America, might have been led into a trap in Afghanistan, as the former Soviet Union had been some decades earlier, from which it is going to be harder and harder to escape. Bush writes with reference to Iraq that "by early 2001, Saddam Hussein was waging a low-grade war against the United States... He had fired at our aircraft, issued a statement praising 9/11, and made an assassination attempt on a former president, my father." While "before 9/11, Saddam was a problem America might have been able to manage, through the lens of the post-9/11 world my view changed. I had just witnessed the damage inflicted by nineteen fanatics armed with box cutters. I could only imagine the destruction possible if an enemy dictator passed his WMD to terrorists." Removing Saddam would remove this possibility. Though Bush does not go as far as to say that there were links between the Saddam regime and the 9/11 terrorists, because no such links have been established, he manages to suggest that there might have been. Moreover, because the "Middle East was the center of a global ideological struggle," with, on the one side, "decent people who wanted to live in dignity and peace," and, on the other, "extremists who sought to impose their radical views through violence and intimidation," it was important to remove Saddam. "Once liberty took root in one society, it could spread to others." Unlike former British prime minister Tony Blair, who in his recent memoir spent pages discussing the matter, the legality of the decision to invade Iraq does not trouble Bush. "Three years earlier, President Clinton and our NATO allies had removed the dictator Slobodan Milosevic from power in Serbia without an explicit UN resolution. Dick [Cheney] and Don [Rumsfeld] argued we didn't need one for Iraq, either." In fact, all the members of the administration, the way Bush tells it, were opposed to seeking explicit authorisation from the UN Security Council for an attack on Iraq, with the possible exception of Colin Powell. The reason a resolution was sought was in order to placate Blair, who wanted "military and political protection". A possible surprise in this part of the book is the news that "President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt had told [US general] Tommy Franks that Iraq had biological weapons and was certain to use them on our troops. He refused to make the allegation in public for fear of inciting the Arab Street." Writing of the invasion itself, Bush blames the chaos that enveloped Baghdad as the Saddam regime collapsed on Turkey. The Turkish parliament had refused to allow US troops access to Turkish territory in carrying out the invasion -- "on one of the most important requests we had ever made, Turkey, our NATO ally, had let America down" -- and "because of Turkey's decision, many of the American troops who liberated Baghdad had been required to continue north to free the rest of the country," leaving Baghdad to the looters. He says he had been against the idea of turning over power in Iraq to the Iraqi exiles gathered in Washington, installing first Jay Garner and then Paul Bremer as heads of a Provisional Authority instead. After his arrival in Baghdad in May 2003, Bremer blacklisted members of the Baath Party from serving in a new Iraqi administration and disbanded the Iraqi army, with chaotic effect. "In retrospect, I should have insisted on more debate on Jerry's [Bremer's] orders," Bush writes, "particularly on what message disbanding the army would send and how many Sunnis the de-Baathification would affect." This is not the only mistake Bush admits to in Iraq, even as he denies accusations of dishonesty over claims that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMDs). "In retrospect, of course, we all should have pushed harder on the intelligence and revisited our assumptions. But at the time, the evidence and the logic pointed in the other direction. If Saddam doesn't actually have WMD, I asked myself, why on earth would he subject himself to a war he will almost certainly lose?" Of the failure to find WMDs in Iraq after the invasion, Bush writes that "no one was more shocked or angry than I was." However, that failure "did not change the fact that Saddam was a threat" or mean that the decision to invade was the wrong one. "Because the United States liberated Iraq and then refused to abandon it, the people of that country will have a chance to be free." Iraq "can be a valuable ally at the heart of the Middle East, a source of stability in the region, and a beacon of hope to political reformers in its neighborhood and around the world." IT IS THIS POSSIBILITY that Bush returns to in a further chapter on the Middle East entitled "Freedom Agenda". Here, he says that "the great tide of freedom that swept much of the world during the second half of the twentieth century," presumably referring to the break-up of the former Soviet Union, "had largely bypassed one region: the Middle East." All this would change now that "the focus of the freedom agenda would be the Middle East." One aspect was Palestine, where "the fundamental problem was the lack of freedom in the Palestinian Territories." Bush writes that "by the spring of 2002, I had concluded that peace would not be possible with Arafat in power," but following Arafat's death and the election of Mahmoud Abbas things started to move forward. "Then, in June 2007, the militant wing of Hamas intervened... Hamas terrorists backed by Iran and Syria mounted a coup and seized control of Gaza." Another aspect was Lebanon, where, as Bush tells it, Hezbollah provoked conflict with Israel in 2006. America's policy was to "buy time for Israel to weaken Hezbollah's forces" by frustrating international efforts at calling for a ceasefire. Eventually, Bush writes, with the Israelis "mishandling the opportunity," it was decided to support UN Resolution 1701 and install an international security force in southern Lebanon. With his successor now left with the task of mopping up the results of Bush's Freedom Agenda, whether in Iraq, Afghanistan, or elsewhere, Bush turns to the question of his political legacy. Throughout his memoir, he makes a habit of comparing decisions made during his time in office to those taken by predecessors, mostly big-hitters like Lincoln or Roosevelt. Mostly this seems to function as an attempt at legitimacy, legitimating his administration by inserting it into a broader narrative of US history. Sometimes it seems to function as a form of self- defense: commenting on "partisan opponents and commentators," who "mocked my appearance, my accent, and my religious beliefs," Bush says that even Lincoln "was compared to a baboon." Bush hopes that his two terms in office will receive a favourable verdict from posterity, even if part of the worldwide relief felt at the election of Obama two years ago undoubtedly had something to do with being able finally to bid farewell to him. "President Ford's pardon of Richard Nixon, once regarded as one of the worst mistakes in presidential history, is now viewed as a selfless act of leadership. And it was quite something to hear the commentators who once denounced President Reagan as a dunce and a warmonger talk about how the Great Communicator had won the Cold War." George W. Bush, Decision Points , Virgin Books, 2010 pp.497.
