Madam, - Is George W Bush the worst president in American history? In my view, you have to go back to James Buchanan (president, 1856-1860) to find an administration as derelict in its constitutional duty and as incompetent in its execution of policy.
Buchanan presided over the slide into secession and civil war; Bush has presided over the end of the US as a benign moral force in world affairs. Buchanan left - and Bush will leave - a dangerous and almost intractable political mess for his successors.
To be more accurate, we should call it the "Bush-Cheney administration" as Dick Cheney has been described as "the most powerful vice-president in American history", as "prime minister" and even as "co-president". The presence of a powerful number two is the most likely reason for the failure of George W Bush to grow and mature in office. Cheney was probably behind the persistence with a failed secretary of defence, Donald Rumsfeld, an old crony of his. Even the secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, widely touted as the star of the Bush second term and bearer of his legacy, has become a sort of stunned and impotent onlooker, her career blighted by a failed presidency.
The ineptitude of this administration is already legendary. Trenchant accounts of its behaviour in Iraq can be found in books with names such as Fiasco and The End of Iraq. To that can be added the response to Hurricane Katrina and the growing instability in Afghanistan, a country pacified by overwhelming force in 2002. The Bush administration failed to learn, failed to anticipate and failed to adapt. Its intellectual poverty is frightening. It is now known that, even as the war in Iraq was being planned, the president and senior figures in the administration did not learn a basic fact that was vital to the success of the whole venture. They did not know that Islam was divided into Sunni and Shia Muslims, and that Iraq had a Shia majority. This was the equivalent in Christian terms of believing Spain to be a Protestant country.
With the best scientists in the world at his command, George W Bush still thinks that a religious dogma ("Intelligent Design") should be taught in high-school science classes. His administration has been accused by scientists of falsifying data on climate change in order to help rich donors in the oil industry. Even its African Aids programme is turning into a counter-productive waste of money and effort by emphasising single-solution, "faith-based" initiatives such as sexual abstinence, rather than a range of alternatives that include wider condom use.
Just as malignant has been the administration's influence in constitutional and international matters. George W Bush is famous for the "Bush Doctrine" that the US is free to wage "preventive war" against any state that may pose a terrorist threat to it in the future. In one of the most fatuous remarks ever made by an American executive, Dick Cheney restated this rule to say that such an attack would be justified even if there were a "1 per cent chance of the unimaginable coming", a condition that probably excludes only the Vatican as a potential aggressor.
To that one can add the torture scandal of Abu Ghraib, the "extraordinary renditions", Guantánamo, and the abridgement of civil rights in the US itself. Most worrying are Bush's "signing statements" on new legislation. These seem to be an effort to raise the executive branch higher than the others in the American system by declaring the president's right to nullify legislation with which he disagrees. This is a new and sinister development, given that President Bush has now issued more signing statements than all previous presidents put together.
What links Bush to Buchanan is the determination above all else to remain close to an important, but extreme, constituency. With Buchanan it was the Southern slave-owners who dominated his party. For Bush it is the religious right, to which he panders shamelessly. There have been religious presidents before - Lincoln came to believe in divine providence, and Jimmy Carter was also "born again". But Bush believes himself to be elected by God, not the people of the United States. And if there is one thing he knows, it is that his God does not compromise with anyone. One fears that the destructive effects of this administration are not over.
Here is an administration that could have made decisive moves towards ending Aids in Africa, could have halted the Darfur genocide, could have moved the Middle East closer to peace, could have led the way in the vital decisions that need to be made about climate change, could have rallied the world around a new vision for human rights and collective action.
Instead, the years of Bush and Cheney are, as Winston Churchill described the 1930s, "the years the locusts have eaten". - Yours, etc,
TOBY JOYCE,
Balreask Manor,
Navan,
Co Meath.