This Road to Hell Is Paved With Bush's Bad Choices
With the Cold War's end, many Americans thought we could close our air raid shelters and take the trillions of dollars that had gone into the military and put them into making our lives better by turning toward the pursuit of happiness rather than the defense of our liberty.
And some of that did happen in the last half of the 1990s, during the Clinton-era boom. But only three years into a new century, the United States finds itself plagued by rising unemployment, soaring budget deficits, constricted civil liberties, the threat of terrorist attack and the prospect of a war with, and occupation of, Iraq. We've gone from the best of times to the worst of times.
The Bush administration tells us that it is entirely because of Al Qaeda and now Saddam Hussein that we face these difficulties, but the dark clouds that hang over our country are largely the result of Bush administration policies.
Take the economy. Sure, an economic downturn was inevitable after the speculative excesses of the '90s, and 9/11 certainly hurt airlines and hotels. But the Bush policies of enormous tax cuts directed at the most wealthy, and equally large increases in military spending, will prolong the current slump well through the decade, leaving large deficits just as baby boomers begin to retire.
The nation won't necessarily be in recession, but it will suffer, as it did during the high-deficit Reagan years, from above-average unemployment and below-average growth. And our vaunted advantage over our industrial competitors will narrow.
That won't be because of Osama bin Laden; that will be because of George W. Bush.
Or take the current prospects of war with Iraq. Bad foreign policy creates bad choices, as in Vietnam in the 1960s. By the time the Iraq issue landed back in the United Nations Security Council this month, Americans had no good options about whether to go to war with Iraq. Doing so could create heavy costs down the road, increase the incidence of terrorism and split our longtime alliances; not doing so could also inspire terrorists and split other longtime alliances.
But the question is how we got to this dilemma. We got here because of bad choices.
Al Qaeda was an offshoot of the Soviet war in Afghanistan and of the first Gulf War, after which, through an act of folly, we decided to maintain a major military presence in Saudi Arabia -- creating a rallying point for Al Qaeda without improving Saudi security.
