I don’t know if his reputation would be worse today, because I don’t think he would have been able to raise the political capital to invade Iraq. Without that, (and certainly without an invasion of Afghanistan), his first term wouldn’t really be perceived as good or bad. If Gore made another run in 2004 (which he very may well have without Bush being a wartime President), he would probably have a 50/50 chance of winning, with the election being focused probably on the environment, government debt (would Bush have still gone into a defecit without 9/11? probably) or some other (when compared to a war) small issue. Katrina would still have been a clusterfuck, although I bet that without a war he would have devoted more attention to it. If he only did one term, he would probably be perceived as a mediocre, passive president. With a second term, with Katrina and the housing bubble, his reputation would probably only slightly better than it is today.
I don’t remember the exact name of the legal manuevering he did, but I remember reading about this too. It was one reason why people thought Obama increased the deficit when in fact all he did was uncloak the hidden spending Bush used for the wars and put them into the official budget. Because Bush hid it, it wasn’t part of the official budget and thus, we got a couple of wars we thought we didn’t have to pay for
Indeed, it would have been a lot harder without a 9/11 to justify an invasion. I do not claim that he would have definitely been able to have his war, but it’s fairly clear that he wanted to try. His own treasury secretary has said that an invasion of Iraq was on the agenda practically from day 1 of the Bush administration.
As for how he’d go about it, I already suggested his father’s first adventure as an example. Use the bully pulpit to whip up anger against the chosen target, and hope that it resonates with at least some influential reporters. If the media goes along, so will many members of congress. There are many precedents for this sort of thing in history, from 1812 to the Mexican war, to the Spanish-American war, to Vietnam, to various minor adventures in Central America and the Caribbean, to Panama, to Iraq. The British have a similar history. It’s never been that hard historically to convince the legislature that a war is a good idea, if the enemy is presented as sufficiently evil, the costs as sufficiently small, and the political benefits as sufficiently large. Members of congress will tend go along with whichever course of action they think will benefit them in the next election.
Why would you ask how they’d claim to pay for the war? Is your memory that short? The Iraq war would pay for itself, remember? It would be quick and cheap. The Iraqi civilians would welcome a US invasion. Oil revenues would cover the rebuilding costs. Etc, etc.
Anyway, my point isn’t that he would have forced the country into a war. It’s that he’d have tried to whip up support for one. If that had worked, Bush would have gone for it. If not, then not. However, I think the odds are good that it would have worked.
Do you think that the Saudis or Kuwaitis couldn’t have been pressured to go along? I really do not know enough about the relations between the US and those two nations to speculate. However, it’s irrelevant to my point - that he would have tried to have an Iraq war, and taken the opportunity if it could have been arranged.
I do not have evidence that the UK would have gone along. I said that there’s a good chance it would have. Many senior officials thought that the entire project was dodgy at best, and they went along anyhow. Please bear in mind that in the British system (and here in Canada too) it’s much harder for an individual MP to defy the wishes of the party leadership than it is in the US. To a much greater extent, policy is driven by the wishes of the PM and the cabinet.
Nothing much would have changed if he’d waited until 2006, except that Canada might well have gone along with it. Stephen Harper, while in opposition, was in favour. In the event, Canada was probably the most heavily involved nation in Iraq that wasn’t officially involved. Sure, it wouldn’t have affected the outcome at all. I merely mentioned it because…well, I’m Canadian.
I am sorry if this post didn’t make as much sense as either of us might have liked. I should be in bed, but didn’t want to be accused of posting something inflamatory and then declining to respond to criticism. As I’ll probably be working quite late the next few days, it seemed only fair to respond as well as possible within the time constraints.
Pleased to meet you, xtisme.
I may be using the wrong term here, but I believe the wars were funded every year by special appropriations bills. They weren’t included in the annual federal budget.
Why wouldn’t it? Weather patterns are not determined years in advance.
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There was some discussion of financial reform by the Republican Congress in 2003, without the wars that issue might more have been in mind.
Which is why it makes no sense to suppose that no September 11th means no Katrina. There’s no connection between them. It’s at least possible to imagine a world where the September 11th attacks failed, or were foiled by luck, timing, or different decision making by any number of people. Hurricanes don’t work like that, and your idea takes the discussion into the realm of deliberate fantasy: you’re skewing the results to make Bush look good. You might as well assume the economy would have broken out of its slowdown and started growing at twice the rate it grew during its peak under Clinton.
In 2003, the Republicans were at the peak of their power and controlled both houses of Congress and the Presidency. I take it “some discussion” means there was probably not even a bill, or none that got out of committee at any rate. The fact that there was only “some discussion” when the Republicans had that kind of control tells you that it was not a priority at all. And Bush was in office for another six years after that. There was no momentum on the financial issues from either party before the crisis went out of control.
Yes, but 9/11 had no effect on weather patterns either. Not the point of the discussion anyway.
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Indeed, it would have been a lot harder without a 9/11 to justify an invasion. I do not claim that he would have definitely been able to have his war, but it’s fairly clear that he wanted to try. His own treasury secretary has said that an invasion of Iraq was on the agenda practically from day 1 of the Bush administration.
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I think the evidence that Bush wanted an invasion is unclear, but even if it was in fact clear as crystal that doesn’t really mean much…Bush could have wanted a new pony and a blowjob from Condi for all I know, but wanting and getting are two different things. The guy barely squeaked by getting elected and had as close to absolutely zero political capital as one could get for a newly elected president. It goes beyond credulity that such a guy could have gotten a full scale invasion of another country given the political realities he was facing in his term. Heck, unless the economy really jumped in 2002-2003 I’m not sure he could have even gotten re-elected.
The situation with Bush’s father was, again, completely different. Bush Sr. was able to rally international support and alliance because Saddam had invaded Kuwait. He was able to rally congressional support because of the threat this was to our strategic interests in the region, and the fact that a vital strategic resource for the US (namely oil) was threatened by what Saddam and the Iraqis had done. He was able to rally the same support from the American people for much the same reason…a nasty dictator had gone in and crushed a small country that also happened to have a large percentage of the worlds strategic oil reserves in it…and by taking Kuwait he was also threatening Saudi, which was even more vital.
Bush Jr. wouldn’t have had any of those things going for him, unless you want to posit that Saddam et al would have tried again for Kuwait or Saudi. As for the other, the political climate was so far from what it was during the War of 1812 or the Mexican American war that there is no comparison.
That was the cheese to get people to go along with what they were ALREADY going along with. People WANTED to invade Iraq. Americans wanted to lash out, and Iraq was a much easier target for people to focus on than Afghanistan. Saddam was already considered a bad guy, everyone ‘knew’ that Iraq had WMD and that they hated the US. In the post-9/11 climate it was a no brainer. But without 9/11?? No way. We had gone through the entire Clinton presidency without doing anything more substantial to Iraq than blowing the crap out of some radar installations or command bunkers. We had Iraq down. We were enforcing the No-Fly-Zones. There was no compelling reason to invade Iraq, and no way could they have sold the American people on ‘well, the oil will pay for it all!’. :dubious:
And my point is that he couldn’t. There is no way he could whip up support for a foreign adventure, and I seriously doubt he would have even tried. He seems to have been a mostly domestic policy guy, and it was only 9/11 that caused such a sea change. He might have had some sort of adventure in Iraq in the back of his mind before 9/11, but it was the events that crystallized things for him and for the administration.
The odds of Bush pushing through some sort of war with Iraq without the events of 9/11 or something similar are absolutely zero, IMHO. Even trying to do that would have been worst than what he tried (at the height of his popularity) to do with Social Security. The man had no political capital without the emotion and anger/fear generated by 9/11. I seriously doubt he could have even gotten his own party on board for some sort of out of left field invasion, let alone the democrats…let alone the rest of us. I think people are viewing all of this stuff through the filter of what actually happened, and think that the same emotions would have been in play as happened after 9/11, but things would have been completely different without those events.
I absolutely think that the Saudis wouldn’t have gone along with an invasion of Iraq without any pretext or threat. Oh, I’m sure the royal family wouldn’t have been heart broken if the US rolled into Baghdad, but to actually let us stage troops out of Saudi without some compelling reason? They would have had their own people going ape shit over something like that…absolutely. Even with 9/11 there was resentment over the US using Saudi as a staging base. Kuwait? I’m not sure…we still had some political goodwill from the Kuwaitis from the First Gulf War, but even there I’d say that arbitrarily ordering them to let us stage an army to invade Iraq? They would have resented the hell out of it.
I think it IS relevant to the central point. Even if you think there was some way in hell that in our political system and in the political environment that existed at that time (remember when the Republicans tried to impeach Clinton? Remember all the rancor and friction that was going on? Remember the 2000 election??), we wouldn’t have gotten the support from any foreign countries for such an adventure either, not without some really compelling reason.
They went along because the US had been attacked. Granted, we hadn’t been attacked by Iraq, but in the aftermath of 9/11 ANY dictator even marginally associated with anything to do with terrorism or even antipathy towards the US was going to be a target. Think about how it would have looked if the UK had not stood by us after 9/11…we couldn’t have had a more hurtful blow. But why would the UK have stood by us if Bush had just decided arbitrarily to invade Iraq without any pretext? We had contained Iraq for over a decade after all…what was the compelling reason to invade them? What was the compelling reason for the UK to get involved in such an adventure without the 9/11 attacks??
No worries. I’m fairly abrasive, but didn’t mean to imply you had posted something inflammatory. You didn’t. It’s a position I’ve seen put forth on this board for years, that even without 9/11 we’d have still gone to war. I just don’t see how it was a political reality given the state of things not only in the US but world wide. Politically, there is no way in hell (IMHO) that Bush could have gotten enough political support to invade another country.
Nice to meet you too. 
If you are new to the board, I hope you enjoy posting here and will stay as a member. It’s a good board, IMHO, and the discussions are usually lively but interesting.
-XT
If Katrina is “butterflied out,” then I’m “butterflying in” the eruption of the Yellowstone super volcano. There: Bush is now responsible for destroying all civilization in North America. Good job, Republicans.
What did Canada ever do to you? 
If 9/11 never happened then without US retaliation for 9/11 Al-Qaeda wouldn’t have been running and hiding and some other major terrorist attack would have been planned at some point. Since there seems to be a consensus that a terrorist attack was Bush’s justification for teaching Saddam a lesson, the war in Iraq would have still be on the agenda, probably with even less international support than it had. End result: pretty much the same legacy of idiocy.
Joe Blow? The public didn’t catch the idea until Bush and pals started talking about it.
That’s exactly what happened though.
This would go back to fundamental questions of power and propaganda, or the nature of the United States or similar states, but the ‘people’ don’t seem to have much to do with anything. Factions inside the USG/private sphere plan this stuff and then make commercials for us little people, not the other way around. The references to the ‘fear from 9/11’ being necessary just doesn’t strike me as being that important. Even if public perceptions must be molded then wars create their own frenzy. Wall to wall propaganda on all the major networks and newspapers helps too. Historically it doesn’t appear that starting wars is all that difficult.
The only question in my mind is whether an alternate universe President Gore and the media would have to insinuate that wayward Republican opponents of the Iraq war proposal are anti-American turncoats who love Saddam or whether the Pubs would just all go along for the same reasons they did in our world. On one hand it seemed like a lot of powerful interests really wanted to go into Iraq in the late '90s/early '00s, but on the other it could’ve been a natural transition from the '90s Kosovo and nation building talking points from both sides. e.g. this Santorum quote:
Don’t blame me, I voted for Al Gore.
And who do you propose would manipulate a Gore presidency to invade Iraq? The Illuminati? Karl Rove?
I can easily imagine a domestic policy and culture war focused first term - think Medicare Part D and the stem cell / gay marriage bullshit, only more so. I doubt he’d have tried the Social Security stuff any earlier, though.
There were enough PNAC-types in high places, though, that I can also readily imagine a slowly but steadily increasing tension with Iraq. Further sanctions, more stringent weapons inspections, increasing the no-fly zones, all in a deliberate attempt to turn up the heat until Iraq gave the neocons a pretext to push for an invasion.
I mean, even in the context of 9/11, the invasion of Iraq didn’t make a lick of sense. Nobody with the slightest bit of familiarity with the Middle East believed for a second that an Arab Nationalist dictator had anything to do with funding an Islamist terrorist organization, let alone the Saudis or Kuwaitis. There’s no way in hell the various royals were convinced to go along with the invasion based on the Iraq/al-Qaeda connection, which was ridiculous on it’s face.
That just leaves the WMD justification, which is equally as “valid” with or without Osama in the picture. It might have taken the neocons a couple of years longer to get a slimmer margin of the American public on board with the adventure, but Rumsfeld et al had had it on their agenda for years. No way were they going to give that up.
Bolding mine. That’s the point- enough Americans were pissed off and ignorant enough to just think “Screw the Middle East” and support any invasion of “people over there”. Also, due to the fact that we already had quite an animosity towards Iraq, the surge of patriotism post-9/11 made the US public hate any openly anti-American dictator to the point where we probably could have invaded Venezuela if we wanted to. Without 9/11, enough cooler heads would have prevailed to at least ** seriously** put a damper on Rumsfeld’s plans.
I did say that a better economy was pure conjecture on my part. But isn’t it true that the holy deficit doubled while GW was in office?
By the time he left office, Clinton was running a budget surplus. This is the opposite of a budget deficit. (Surplus/deficit just refers to the year-by-year comparison of income v. expenditures in the federal budget. If they take in more than they put out, it’s a surplus. If they put out more than they take in, it’s a deficit. The federal debt is the debt the government has gone into as a result of the cumulative deficits from prior years adding up.) We’ve been in pretty serious debt since the 50s, but Clinton was able to get a budget surplus by the end of his second term. Bush cranked the deficit back up to $700B by 2004. (Cite.) Whether this was due to defense spending or other factors, I don’t know.
Quite the opposite.
Without 9-11, and without the explosion of government, Bush probably would have been a Conservative president and bush would have went down in history as the greatest President ever.
Without 9-11, there would have been no war in Iraq no war in Afghanistan, no Patriot Act no Homeland Security, no TSA doing genital patdowns and nude photographs. Bush could have balanced the budget and paid off the federal debt. Bush would have had plenty of time to make government smaller, repeal or abolish needless goverment agencies and bad laws, like getting rid of the Department of Education, abolishing the EPA, repealing the GunControl Acts of 1934 and 1968, etc. The bush years could have been all Peace and Prosperity. Also, the price of gold would have went down from $250 in 2000 to maybe around $50 an ounce by 2008. Oil and gasoline would would have went back down to the prices they were in the clinton years- $20 a barrel for oil and gasoline would be less than a dollar a gallon, probably much less.
Unfortunately, as it turned out, the bush years were the greatest tragedy in American history. We waited 50 years for the Republicans to take control of Congress, the Supreme Court, and the Presidency, as well as state governorships, in order to repeal all the bad Democrat laws, and it all was wasted and bush did not do a darn thing to make the country better. What a waste!
::Tears of laughter::
How would he have gotten Congressional Democrats and the public to go along with this?
Economic slowdown? What economic slowdown? Nevermind the housing market crash and the financial crisis. Without September 11th, the previous 20 years wouldn’t have happened.
I’m not sure I’d put it that strongly but we pretty much agree here.
Agreed. Don’t forget that Saddam had authorized a hit on Dubya’s dad, too. 9-11 gave the Bush Administration an additional argument for toppling Saddam, but they had it as a goal pretty early on. Suspected WMDs, Saddam’s resistance to IAEA inspections, suspected ties to terrorism, and the terrible Iraqi human rights situation would’ve probably been enough for Bush to push for an invasion of Iraq in 2003 or so. After the initial relatively quick military victory, the occupation would’ve gone just about as badly as it did IRL. Without 9-11, there’s no reason to invade Afghanistan. Come to think of it, we might have intervened militarily in Sudan to stop genocide there - that was a big issue among the Christian Right at the time.
Bush won just by a hair over Kerry in 2004 IRL, and might easily have lost by the same margin in a 9-11-less timeline. Tax cuts, the stem cell research funding ban and the Iraq invasion would be Bush’s legacy. The deficit wouldn’t be as bad, and fewer people would have died if Bush had been a 9-11-less one-termer.