[captionpix imgsrc=”https://thecostaricanews.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/Meditation.jpg” align=”left” captiontext=””]The one and only thing that George W. Bush did right during his miserable eight years in power as the president of the most powerful nation on earth, was to implement a more effective AIDS, malaria, and TB policy on the African continent. Now he’s back.
The video of Bush’s visit to Arusha in 2008 is the only time I’ve seen him look happy during his eight years in office. But let’s not lose sight of the fact, and the truth.
George W. Bush’s current trip to East Africa serves two smarmy little purposes for our disgraced former president. First, it applies a thick layer of African love to balm the troubled conscience of the man who caused a million deaths in Iraq, and sent the United States, through his almost equally stupid economic policies, into precipitous decline.
Second, Bush’s trip pokes a finger in the eye of the man that defeated him, President Barack Obama, whose father was from Kenya.
The connection between the Bushes and the heart of darkness has always been a close one. And I’m not referring to Joseph Conrad’s novella by the same name that is set in Africa.
I think that history will record that Bush Senior’s mission from hell was to provide the last straw to break the back of the American spirit, through Gulf War I.
It’s taken 20 years, another unnecessary war in Iraq, and an economic meltdown to bring home the truth that America has crumbled as certainly as the Soviet Union. America’s demise has been primarily a collapse in character, unlike the USSR at the time of Bush Senior, which collapsed economically and politically.
America dithered with pride as “the sole remaining superpower” and “the indispensable nation” during the Clinton years. And therefore we, and the world, got George Bush Junior.
[captionpix imgsrc=”https://thecostaricanews.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/Meditation2.jpg” align=”right” captiontext=””]’W’s’ dark mission was to provide the bale to break the back of the human spirit, through his idiotic invasion of Iraq after 9.11, and his ‘Global War on Terror’ (which now terrorizes East Africa). In addition, Bush’s profligate economic policies now threaten to bring down Europe, three years after Wall Street’s financial breakdown.
President Obama, sadly, has turned out to be a placeholder as America’s place in the world weakens. History spins out of control as the forces of negativity take over.
The loss of hope, and the open or secret despair so many, especially in the West, now feel, was ushered in by the Bush Administration. It is ironic indeed that this man, still so reviled in the United States that he cannot show his face three years after leaving office, should be so welcome in places like Arusha, Tanzania.
In a just, sane, and humane world, Bush Junior would be tried for crimes against humanity, instead of being free to travel with impunity, in a vain attempt to resurrect his image.
Just as African leaders like Gaddafi, Mubarak, and Charles Taylor cannot escape justice (even if death will be the only end for wily old Mugabe), so too George W. Bush cannot skate off into retirement without some kind of recompense. Of course, there won’t be any mob revenge, no victor’s justice, and no ICC trial for Bush. But his name is mud forever.
The larger and much more important question is whether George W. Bush has succeeded in his dark mission to break the human spirit by providing the last straws of Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Global War on Terror.
I feel that as long as there are even a few human beings that haven’t given up on humanity and themselves (which are really the same thing), humankind will spiritually survive, and one day even thrive.
Bush Senior and Junior, though they were world-class conduits of darkness during their presidencies, aren’t the source of malignancy and malevolence in human consciousness. They merely channeled it in recent times.
But the world is what it is, and we must meet darkness and evil first within ourselves. For us, as living people and peoples, not to drown in the river of man’s darkening consciousness, each of us has to face and empty our portion, for darkness runs through all of us to one degree or another.
Martin LeFevre for TheCostaRicaNews.com