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President George H.W. Bush addresses the nation from the Oval Office on Jan. 16, 1991, after U.S. forces began military action against Iraq, code-named Operation Desert Storm.\u00a0 Photo: Charles Tasnadi\/AP<\/h5>\n<\/div>\n
THE TRIBUTES TO<\/u>\u00a0former President George H.W. Bush, who died on Friday aged 94, have been pouring in from all sides of the political spectrum. He was a man \u201cof the highest character,\u201d\u00a0said<\/a>\u00a0his eldest son and fellow former president, George W. Bush. \u201cHe loved America and served with character, class, and integrity,\u201d tweeted former U.S. Attorney and #Resistance icon Preet Bharara. According to another former president,\u00a0Barack Obama<\/a>, Bush\u2019s life was \u201ca testament to the notion that public service is a noble, joyous calling. And he did tremendous good along the journey.\u201d Apple boss Tim Cook\u00a0said<\/a>: \u201cWe have lost a great American.\u201d<\/p>\n In the age of Donald Trump, it isn\u2019t difficult for hagiographers of the late Bush Sr. to paint a picture of\u00a0him as a great patriot and pragmatist; a president who governed with \u201cclass\u201d and \u201cintegrity.\u201d It is true that the former president refused to vote for Trump in 2016, calling him a \u201cblowhard<\/a>,\u201d and that he eschewed the white nationalist, \u201calt-right,\u201d conspiratorial politics that has come to define the modern Republican Party. He helped end the Cold War without, as Obama\u00a0said<\/a>, \u201cfiring a shot.\u201d He spent his life serving his country \u2014 from the military to Congress to the United Nations to the CIA to the White House. And, by all accounts, he was also a beloved grandfather and great-grandfather to his\u00a017 grandkids and eight great-grandkids<\/a>.<\/p>\n Nevertheless, he was a\u00a0public, not a private, figure<\/a>\u00a0\u2014\u00a0one of only 44 men to have ever served as president of the United States. We cannot, therefore, allow his actual record in office to be\u00a0beautified in such a brazen way. \u201cWhen a political leader dies, it is irresponsible in the extreme to demand that only praise be permitted but not criticisms,\u201d as my colleague Glenn Greenwald has\u00a0argued<\/a>, because it leads to \u201cfalse history and a propagandistic whitewashing of bad acts.\u201d The inconvenient truth is that the presidency of George Herbert Walker Bush had far more in common with the recognizably belligerent, corrupt, and right-wing Republican figures who came after him \u2014 his son George W. and the current orange-faced incumbent \u2014 than much of the political and media classes might have you believe.<\/p>\n Consider:<\/p>\n He ran a racist election campaign.<\/em>\u00a0The name of\u00a0Willie Horton<\/a>\u00a0should forever be associated with Bush\u2019s 1988 presidential bid. Horton, who was serving a life sentence for murder in Massachusetts \u2014 where Bush\u2019s Democratic opponent, Michael Dukakis, was governor \u2014\u00a0 had fled a weekend furlough program and raped a Maryland woman. A notorious television ad called \u201cWeekend Passes,<\/a>\u201d released by a political action committee with ties to the Bush campaign, made clear to viewers that Horton was black and his victim was white.<\/p>\n As Bush campaign director Lee Atwater\u00a0bragged<\/a>, \u201cBy the time we\u2019re finished, they\u2019re going to wonder whether Willie Horton is Dukakis\u2019s running mate.\u201d Bush himself was quick to\u00a0dismiss<\/a>\u00a0accusations of racism as \u201cabsolutely ridiculous,\u201d yet it was clear at the time \u2014 even to right-wing Republican operatives such as Roger Stone, now a close ally of Trump \u2014 that the ad had crossed a line. \u201cYou and George Bush will wear that to your grave,\u201d Stone\u00a0complained<\/a>\u00a0to Atwater. \u201cIt\u2019s a racist ad. \u2026 You\u2019re going to regret it.\u201d<\/p>\n Stone was right about Atwater, who on his deathbed\u00a0apologized<\/a>\u00a0for using Horton against Dukakis. But Bush never did.<\/p>\n He made a dishonest case for war<\/em>. Thirteen years before George W. Bush\u00a0lied<\/a>about weapons of mass destruction to justify his invasion and occupation of Iraq, his father made his own set of false claims to justify the aerial bombardment of that same country. The first Gulf War, as an investigation by journalist Joshua Holland\u00a0concluded<\/a>, \u201cwas sold on a mountain of war propaganda.\u201d<\/p>\n For a start, Bush told the American public that Iraq had invaded Kuwait \u201cwithout provocation or warning<\/a>.\u201d What he omitted to mention was that the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, April Glaspie, had given an\u00a0effective green light<\/a>\u00a0to Saddam Hussein,\u00a0telling<\/a>\u00a0him in July 1990, a week before his invasion, \u201c[W]e have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait.\u201d<\/p>\n Then there is the fabrication of intelligence. Bush deployed U.S. troops to the Gulf in August 1990 and\u00a0claimed<\/a>\u00a0that he was doing so in order \u201cto assist the Saudi Arabian Government in the defense of its homeland.\u201d As Scott Peterson\u00a0wrote<\/a>\u00a0in the Christian Science Monitor in 2002, \u201cCiting top-secret satellite images, Pentagon officials estimated \u2026 that up to 250,000 Iraqi troops and 1,500 tanks stood on the border, threatening the key U.S. oil supplier.\u201d<\/p>\n Yet when reporter Jean Heller of the St. Petersburg Times acquired her own commercial satellite images of the Saudi border, she found no signs of Iraqi forces; only an empty desert. \u201cIt was a pretty serious fib,\u201d Heller\u00a0told<\/a>\u00a0Peterson, adding: \u201cThat [Iraqi buildup] was the whole justification for Bush sending troops in there, and it just didn\u2019t exist.\u201d<\/p>\n President George H. W. Bush talks with Secretary of State James Baker III and Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney during a meeting of the cabinet in the White House on Jan. 17, 1991 to discuss the Persian Gulf War.<\/p>\n Photo: Ron Edmonds\/AP<\/p>\n<\/div>\n He committed war crimes.<\/em>\u00a0Under Bush\u00a0Sr., the U.S. dropped a whopping\u00a088,500 tons of bombs<\/a>\u00a0on Iraq and Iraqi-occupied Kuwait, many of which resulted in horrific civilian casualties. In February 1991, for example, a U.S. airstrike on an air-raid shelter in the Amiriyah neighborhood of Baghdad killed at least\u00a0408 Iraqi civilians<\/a>. According to\u00a0Human Rights Watch<\/a>, the Pentagon knew the Amiriyah facility had been used as a civil defense shelter during the Iran-Iraq war and yet had attacked without warning. It was, concluded HRW, \u201ca serious violation of the laws of war.\u201d<\/p>\n U.S. bombs also\u00a0destroyed<\/a>\u00a0essential Iraqi civilian infrastructure \u2014 from electricity-generating and water-treatment facilities to food-processing plants and flour mills. This was no accident. As Barton Gellman of the Washington Post\u00a0reported<\/a>\u00a0in June 1991: \u201cSome targets, especially late in the war, were bombed primarily to create postwar leverage over Iraq, not to influence the course of the conflict itself. Planners now say their intent was to destroy or damage valuable facilities that Baghdad could not repair without foreign assistance. \u2026 Because of these goals, damage to civilian structures and interests, invariably described by briefers during the war as \u2018collateral\u2019 and unintended, was sometimes neither.\u201d<\/p>\n Got that? The Bush administration deliberately targeted civilian infrastructure for \u201cleverage\u201d over Saddam Hussein. How is this not terrorism? As a Harvard public health team\u00a0concluded<\/a>\u00a0in June 1991, less than four months after the end of the war, the destruction of Iraqi infrastructure had resulted in acute malnutrition and \u201cepidemic\u201d levels of cholera and typhoid.<\/p>\n By January 1992, Beth Osborne Daponte, a demographer with the U.S. Census Bureau,\u00a0was estimating<\/a>\u00a0that Bush\u2019s Gulf War had caused the deaths of 158,000 Iraqis, including 13,000 immediate civilian deaths and 70,000 deaths from the damage done to electricity and sewage treatment plants. Daponte\u2019s numbers contradicted the Bush administration\u2019s, and she was threatened by her superiors with dismissal for releasing \u201cfalse information.<\/a>\u201d (Sound familiar?)<\/p>\n He refused to cooperate with a special counsel<\/em>. The\u00a0Iran-Contra affair<\/a>, in which the United States traded missiles for Americans hostages in Iran, and used the proceeds of those arms sales to fund Contra rebels in Nicaragua, did much to undermine the presidency of Ronald Reagan. Yet his vice president\u2019s involvement in that controversial affair has garnered far less attention. \u201cThe criminal investigation of Bush was regrettably incomplete,\u201d wrote Special Counsel Lawrence Walsh, a former deputy attorney general in the Eisenhower administration, in his\u00a0final report on the Iran-Contra affair<\/a>\u00a0in August 1993.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Why? Because Bush, who was \u201cfully aware of the Iran arms sale,\u201d according to the special counsel, failed to hand over a diary \u201ccontaining contemporaneous notes relevant to Iran\/contra\u201d and refused to be interviewed in the later stages of the investigation. In the final days of his presidency, Bush even issued\u00a0pardons<\/a>\u00a0to six defendants in the Iran-Contra affair, including former Defense Secretary\u00a0Caspar Weinberger<\/a>\u00a0\u2014 on the eve of Weinberger\u2019s trial for perjury and obstruction of justice. \u201cThe Weinberger pardon,\u201d Walsh pointedly noted, \u201cmarked the first time a president ever pardoned someone in whose trial he might have been called as a witness, because the president was knowledgeable of factual events underlying the case.\u201d An angry Walsh\u00a0accused Bush<\/a>\u00a0of \u201cmisconduct\u201d and helping to complete \u201cthe Iran-contra cover-up.\u201d<\/p>\n Sounds like a Trumpian case of obstruction of justice, doesn\u2019t it?<\/p>\n A U.S. marshal, left, looking for a suspect, shows a mug shot to a man found allegedly using drugs in a crackhouse, according to police, in Washington, D.C., on July 18, 1989. The police raid was part of President George H.W. Bush\u2019s war on drugs.<\/p>\n Photo: J. Scott Applewhite\/AP<\/p>\n<\/div>\n He escalated the racist war on drugs.<\/em>\u00a0In September 1989, in a\u00a0televised address<\/a>to the nation from the Oval Office, Bush held up a bag of crack cocaine, which he said had been \u201cseized a few days ago in a park across the street from the White House .\u00a0\u2026 It could easily have been heroin or PCP.\u201d<\/p>\n Yet a\u00a0Washington Post investigation<\/a>\u00a0later that month revealed that federal agents had \u201clured\u201d the drug dealer to Lafayette Park so that they could make an \u201cundercover crack buy in a park better known for its location across Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House than for illegal drug activity\u201d (the dealer didn\u2019t know where the White House was and even asked the agents for directions). Bush cynically used this prop \u2014 the bag of crack \u2014 to call for a $1.5 billion increase in spending on the drug war, declaiming: \u201cWe need more prisons, more jails, more courts, more prosecutors.\u201d<\/p>\n The\u00a0result<\/a>? \u201cMillions of Americans were incarcerated, hundreds of billions of dollars wasted, and hundreds of thousands of human beings allowed to die of AIDS \u2014 all in the name of a \u2018war on drugs\u2019 that did nothing to reduce drug abuse,\u201d pointed out\u00a0Ethan Nadelmann<\/a>, founder of the Drug Policy Alliance, in 2014. Bush, he argued, \u201cput ideology and politics above science and health.\u201d Today, even leading Republicans, such as\u00a0Chris Christie<\/a>and\u00a0Rand Paul<\/a>, agree that the war on drugs, ramped up by Bush during his four years in the White House, has been a dismal and racist failure.<\/p>\n He groped women<\/em>. Since the start of the #MeToo movement, in late 2017, at least\u00a0eight different women<\/a>\u00a0have come forward with claims that the former president groped them, in most cases while they were posing for photos with him. One of them, Roslyn Corrigan,\u00a0told Time magazine<\/a>\u00a0that Bush had touched her inappropriately in 2003, when she was just 16. \u201cI was a child,\u201d she said. The former president was 79. Bush\u2019s spokesperson offered this\u00a0defense<\/a>\u00a0of his boss in October 2017: \u201cAt age 93, President Bush has been confined to a wheelchair for roughly five years, so his arm falls on the lower waist of people with whom he takes pictures.\u201d Yet, as Time\u00a0noted<\/a>, \u201cBush was standing upright in 2003 when he met Corrigan.\u201d<\/p>\n Facts matter. The 41st president of the United States was not the last Republican moderate or a throwback to an imagined age of conservative decency and civility; he engaged in race baiting, obstruction of justice, and war crimes. He had much more in common with the two Republican presidents who came after him than his current crop of fans would like us to believe.<\/p>\n![\"U.S.](\"https:\/\/theintercept.imgix.net\/wp-uploads\/sites\/1\/2018\/12\/AP_9101170331-1543671810.jpg?auto=compress%2Cformat&q=90&w=1024&h=671\")
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