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William Cohan claims that “Banking has always been an elaborate confidence game. . . .” And the history of central banking provides ample evidence that his claim is true. Six decades ago, the U.S. Treasury wanted to shut down the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), saying it helped finance the Nazis during World War II. It handled gold looted by the Nazis and transferred Czechoslovakian gold to Germany after the Nazi invasion in 1939 during which Czech officials were held at gunpoint as they placed the order. U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau tried to shut down the bank at the 1944 Bretton Woods conference. Today, Jean-Claude Trichet and Ben S. Bernanke are transforming the organization into one of the world’s most powerful networking clubs.

Central banking developed into a far-reaching plan which has been described by Georgetown Professor Carroll Quigley like this: “to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent meetings and conferences. The apex of the system was to be the Bank for International Settlements in Basel, Switzerland, a private bank owned and controlled by the world’s central banks which were themselves private corporations. Each central bank . . . sought to dominate its government by its ability to control Treasury loans, to manipulate foreign exchanges, to influence the levels of economic activity in the country, and to influence cooperative politicians by subsequent economic rewards in the business world.”

Several short-lived attempts to impose the central banking scheme on the United States were defeated by the patriotic efforts of Presidents Madison, Jefferson, Jackson, Van Buren and Lincoln. But with the passage of the Federal Reserve Act of 1913, America yielded.

Few Americans know that the FED is a privately-held institution owned, operated, and managed by the nation’s banks. Its major concern, as is true of all private institutions, is the welfare of its owners. FED publications rarely inform readers of the FED’s ownership. To do so would expose its “elaborate confidence game.” This confidence game is inherent in remarks made by Richard W. Fisher, President and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas in an interview published in the Dallas Morning News.

Mr. Fisher’s biography is revealing. He attended the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, but apparently didn’t graduate, before transferring to Harvard University where he earned a bachelor’s degree in economics. He then engaged in Latin American studies at Oxford University, again apparently without acquiring a degree, and then earned an M.B.A. at Stanford University. He joined Brown Brothers, Harriman and Company, a private banking firm, where he was assistant to former Undersecretary of the Treasury Robert V Roosa. He then served as Special Assistant to Secretary W. Michael Blumenthal at the United States Department of the Treasury before returning to Brown Brothers and established and managed the bank’s Dallas-based Texas operations. In 1987, Fisher created Fisher Capital Management, and a separate funds-management firm, Fisher Ewing Partners, managing both firms until 1997. In 1993, he was a candidate for the U.S. Senate but took fifth place. The following year, he was a candidate for the same U.S. Senate seat but again lost. From 1997 to 2001, he served as Deputy U.S. Trade Representative, serving under U.S. Trade Representative Charlene Barshefsky, where he was responsible for the implementation of NAFTA, and negotiating a variety of trade agreements, including the bilateral accords admitting both the People’s Republic of China and Taiwan to the World Trade Organization. From 2001 to 2005, he served as Vice Chairman of Kissinger McLarty Associates, a strategic advisory firm headed by former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and former White House Chief of Staff Mack McLarty. He left the firm in April, 2005, when he was appointed President of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas.

Although his political connections are obviously very extensive, he could not get elected and now has the non-responsible power to cast his vote on issues of crucial importance concerning the American economy. Since the FED never has to take responsibility for its actions, being a member of the FED’s Board of Directors is a cushy, high-paid job in which he can be an advocate for his favorite special interests—banking, global finance, and “free trade.” As such, he fits in perfectly with Professor Quigley’s description cited above.

In his interview, Mr. Fisher reveals his lack of critical reasoning ability, inhumanistic biases, and spotty education. He say, for instance, that “Capitalism wasn’t designed to be stable, and we forget that too often. . . . That’s just the price we pay for a system that works better than anyone else’s.”

Well, I don’t know who he thinks “designed” Capitalism, but if is was Adam Smith, I’d like Mr. Fisher to cite any passage in the Wealth of Nations that states or even implies that view. Given that Mr. Fisher’s education in economics was acquired as an undergraduate, I doubt that the Wealth of Nations was even on his reading list. And yes, American Capitalism is “a system that works better than anyone else’s” but better at what? It is not better at providing health-care, it is not better at providing security to the elderly, it is not better at providing a modern, efficient infrastructure, it is not better at providing internet service even though the internet was invented in America. It is not better at providing an efficient transportation system; it is not better at eliminating poverty nor even of providing a culture of law-abiding citizens. It is not better at providing a just legal system or an effective educational system. So just what is it better at? Two things: a plethora of products and services most of which do not work as advertised and many of which don’t work at all, and a means for a small group of people to amass huge amounts of money, especially bankers.

Mr. Fisher’s comments about the Texas economy are curious at best. He says, “We’re the one shining star in the United States.” And “the benefit of being in Texas is we will have positive employment growth, somewhere between 1 1/2 and 2 percent. We didn’t have an over-priced housing stock. We benefit from significant immigration, not just from across the border, but from foreign countries [sic] (perhaps a typesetter’s error) like California and Florida.”

But Mr. Fisher has his head in the sand. The Texas economy has never been prosperous. In fact, the advantages Mr. Fisher cites are the result of its lack of prosperity. The reason “we didn’t have an over-priced housing stock” is that Texans didn’t have the money to support a run-up in housing prices. And if Mr. Fisher passed his statistics courses, he surely knows that employment numbers are absolutely meaningless by themselves. The very week Mr. Fisher’s interview was published, the Dallas Morning News published two stories about employment that were contradictory. One cited employment growth, the other unemployment growth. The only sane conclusion that can be draws from those pieces is that the numbers used are bogus. Of course, it is well-known that all economic numbers are bogus. The CPI is a cruel joke; so many versions of it exist that it can be cited to support almost any viewpoint. The GNP includes what a Harvard economist has called “phantom” numbers, and the employment numbers have never made any logical sense, since they render a large group of employable aged people neither employed nor unemployed. That employment growth is a meaningless number when cited by itself, consider this simple example. Suppose 12 jobs were gained and 10 lost. That gives an employment growth of two jobs. But now suppose two of the t
en jobs lost paid $80,000, three paid $60,000, four paid $50,000, and one paid $40,000. The income lost comes to $580,000. Now consider the twelve jobs gained. Suppose eight paid $40,000 and two paid $50,000. The income gained comes to $420,000. So income would have declined by $160,000. That does not look like an improvement to me; people pay for things with income, not jobs.

But because Mr. Fisher is a one-consequence thinker, he misses the connection between what he praises about the Texas economy and what he laments about it. The Texas political climate fosters anti-labor and low-wage policies. But the state gets its revenue from a consumption tax, which means that since wages are low, consumption is minimal. This results in under-funded state services, one of which is public education. So when he writes that, “It worries me terribly that there’s only one Texas educational institution in the top 25 in America, and that’s Rice in Houston. . . . The economy is brain-driven in America. And the way brains develop is through education.” Rice University, of course, is a privately funded university; its activities do not depend upon state funding. Secondly, it is not required to enroll a fixed percentage of graduates from the state’s public schools. The other best known Texas universities are public institutions, and Mr. Fisher fails to see that a great university cannot be built on the backs of poorly prepared students. Undergraduate and graduate studies cannot be disassociated. It is difficult to lure the most talented graduate students to a university whose student body is poorly prepared, because graduate students shoulder the burden of undergraduate teaching so that their professors can devote their time to research and graduate-level teaching. Highly prestigious professors can’t be lured to institutions lacking highly talented graduate students, so what Mr. Fisher laments about Texas is the result of those so-called business friendly policies put in place by the legislature that I suspect Mr. Fisher supports. There problem with single consequence thinkers is that they cannot connect causal chains; they don’t understand the distinction between proximate and ultimate causes. The low quality of Texas universities may be a proximate cause of poor economic activity, but the ultimate cause is the practice of fostering ineffective, business-friendly employment policies.

Mr. Fisher also laments the nation’s commitment to Medicare. Would he then advocate that we merely allow people to suffer and die prematurely? If the nation merely kills-off the sick among us, Medicare would cost nothing at all. But Mr. Fisher’s worry about the nation’s long-term Medicare liability is misplaced anyhow. He says, “We have committed ourselves to do something for which there is a lack of $85.6 trillion in funds, which we’ll have to find somewhere. To me, that is the greatest threat facing America and our overall stability.” But this cited number is based on some projection, and every projection is derived from a set of assumptions. Anyone with even a modicum of mathematical knowledge can show how the number can be changed by changing some or all of them. Mr. Fisher’s chicken-little fears are the result of pure speculation. There are numerous ways of making the costs of Medicare manageable; every other developed nation has done it. The only reason it can’t be done in America is the hide-bound thinking of people like Mr. Fisher.

But in the end, the problem is really banker-think, which Mr. Fisher describes very nicely but inaccurately: “When the return on money gets low, people take higher risk. We had a period . . . where interest rates were low worldwide. And the yield curve, which is the difference between long-term lending rates and short-term lending rates, was almost nil. So what did humans do? They did what they always do. . . . They went out further and took higher risk. Now they’re paying for that.” The trouble with this description is that is uses slippery language. “When the return on money gets low, people take higher risk.” Well, no. Financiers (bankers) take higher risk. Most people are not in the business of money-lending. Then again, “So what did humans do?” Well, no, not humans, bankers. Then again, “Now they’re paying for that.” Well, a few bankers may be paying for it, but, unfortunately, so are the rest of us who never intended to take on any risk.

Banker-think is very insidious. Bankers take the risk and then dump the consequences of the public, and Mr. Fisher says, “I don’t see anything abnormal about it.” Only a person who also engages in banker-think could make that statement.

And then Mr. Fisher fixes the blame: “We go through periods of excess, we overbuild, we correct, we reroute. . . . But you don’t correct for the “excess excess” that we have experienced very quickly. We got carried away. I blame the regulators, including the Federal Reserve, for letting things get too far. Given that it went so far, given the natural pattern of the way creditors work, they sort of feel something is wrong, but they let it happen anyway. . . .” Mr. Fisher again confounds proximate and ultimate causes. If one asks why regulators and the FED let things get too far, the answer is banker-think. If one asks why creditors felt something was wrong, but let it happen anyway, the answer is banker-think. If the bankers didn’t engage in banker-think, the excess would have been avoided, and the regulators would have had no need to regulate. But because both the bankers and the regulators (more bankers) were of one mind, banker-think drove the bankers to more and more excess, and because the regulators were of one mind with the bankers, the regulators did nothing.

So there you have it, a bankers’ constitution for the world which reads, “We the bankers of the world, in order to form a more perfect association, to secure wealth to ourselves and our posterity, caring nothing for the nation nor the welfare, suffering, or even deaths of ordinary people, do ordain and establish the BIS and a world-wide bankers’ economy.” Confidence game? Confidence game indeed!

Putting bankers in control of the economy is just like putting a wolf-pack in the pantry.

Marketing is misunderstood and much maligned. The industry is dogged by pejorative associations with concepts such as ‘spin’, ‘hype’, ‘gimmick’ and ‘ploy’, and it is not uncommon for fellow board members to refer to the marketing director as ‘the chief flower arranger’.

 

So it’s perhaps not surprising that when times get tough, marketing gets it in the neck from governments too. Marketing is seen as an agent of consumerism, and is, therefore, an obvious scapegoat for major societal problems such as obesity, binge drinking, global warming and debt. It is much easier for governments to publicly ‘punish’ marketers with legislation that restricts their licence to operate, than it is for those governments to tackle some of the issues themselves. Marketing and democracy provide similar benefits, as I and my fellow author Katherine Jocz outline in Greater Good – How good marketing makes for better democracy (Harvard Business School Press, February 2008). For example, marketers give consumers information and choice, they seek to engage them to earn their loyalty, they try to bring quality and innovation to the masses. Marketing also provides ‘social glue’ via successful exchanges, and improves living standards and consumer wellbeing. Similarly, democracies depend on informed citizens participating in the political process and making choices among political alternatives.

 

They also promote the welfare of all citizens, which leads to improved prosperity. But marketing is better than democracies at providing these benefits. For example, while consumers in the commercial world ‘vote’ every day at the cash tills, citizens have to subsume their individual preference to a collective will, and consume the policies of the party that has been elected. Marketing is also quicker than democracy to spot and embrace new trends, while strong brands can forge the kind of long-term loyal relationships with their consumers that politics, with its mass market approach and lack of any real competition, can only dream of.

 

Marketing is also being used as a force for social good – witness the rising popularity of Fairtrade goods and the commitment to tackling climate change by brands such as Marks & Spencer. Indeed, you could argue that the practice we get as consumers every day in the commercial marketplace makes us better, smarter citizens – which may be why our politicians are frequently such a disappointment to us. The difference in the way politicians and brands ‘advertise’ themselves is further evidence of marketing’s more highly evolved status.

 

Brand advertisements knocking the competition are frowned upon in the commercial world – marketers know that a tit-for-tat war of words turns consumers off the category as a whole – but they are par for the course in politics. The penalties of this approach were obvious in the US Democratic race, where Hillary Clinton and Barrack Obama took every opportunity to undermine each other’s credibility. Their subsequent efforts to present a united front against Republican John McCain in the Presidential campaign were met with understandable cynicism.

 

It is time governments, NGOs and the general public sat up and recognised the positive social and economic impacts marketing has on society as a whole. It contributes significantly to economic development, for example. In the US alone 17 million people hold marketing, sales and customer-service jobs. Marketing also supports the pillars of democratic society. It funds our diverse media, including the internet, giving citizens access to information about political figures, policies and programmes. And marketing knowhow helps public policy makers change citizens’ behaviours by, for example, encouraging seat-belt use, good nutrition and responsible drinking. So instead of treating them merely as taxpayers, donors and voters, politicians should treat citizens as well as marketers treat their customers. They could improve the democratic process as a result.

 

Previously published in the Business Review, Impact Executives

 

Interim Management

Accomplished? On May 1, President Bush triumphantly proclaimed the end of combat operations, and he did it with a theatrical flourish.  Attired in a Navy flight suit, the former Air National Guard trainee (Bush had actually cut short his flight training to participate in a political campaign) landed ceremoniously on the deck of the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln off San Diego.  Bush emerged from the plane under a banner stretched across the carrier’s super structure. “Mission Accomplished” the banner exulted. “We have difficult work to do in Iraq,” the president said. “Parts of that country remain dangerous…The War on Terror continues.” But, he went on, “In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed.”

But a growing opposition thought otherwise.  Rumsfeld had assured Bush that the war could be fought on the cheap.  Once the productive Iraqi oil fields were up and running, they would more defray the costs of the war and the occupation.  (As of spring 2008, Iraqi oil production was still below prewar output.)  A streamlined military force brandishing high-tech equipment would be all that was needed.  American forces could be reduced and hand off the job to Iraqis.

When Lieutenant General Eric Shinseki, the Army chief of staff, told Congress that “something in the order of several hundred thousand” military personnel would be needed, Rumsfeld was outraged.  The Army’s top officer was hounded into retirement.  The Pentagon leadership pointedly refused to attend the customary retirement ceremony.

And Americans were dying.  Bremer and the CPA, mostly made up of young and inexperienced recent college graduates but with impeccable political credentials, holed up in the heavily fortified and protected area of Baghdad, the Green Zone.

Beyond, chaos and danger reigned.  Snipers picked off individual soldiers.  Roads were sown with mines and improvised explosive devices (IEDs), which were designed to blow up and destroy the unprotected undercarriage of military vehicles when they passed over.  Personnel carriers were only lightly armored, another money-saving policy.  Besides, heavy armor was unnecessary, it was thought, with Iraq conquered and the population friendly.  Troops took to fashioning their own armor from scrap metal or persuaded families back home to provide it to them.

The Bombing of a Shrine. When Baghdad fell, Saddam Hussein was nowhere to be found.  As the coalition rounded up other former government leaders on their “Most Wanted” list, the supreme leader’s whereabouts remained a mystery.  Then, seven months after his statue fell in December 2003, a disheveled and filthy Hussein was discovered cowering in a tiny subterranean dugout — a “spider hole,” his captors called it — near his birthplace of Tikrit.  The all-powerful dictator who once had thirty-seven palaces was living in a few cubic feet underneath a mud hut.  Bush immediately went on television to trumpet his capture, “I say to the Iraqi people, ‘You will not have to live in fear of Saddam ever again.’”  But elsewhere, there was little to crow about.

Even the commander of U.S. ground forces acknowledged that a “low-key, guerrilla-type war” was underway.  Suicide bombers blew themselves up in marketplaces, city squares, offices, buses, and crowded streets, often taking as many as 100 fellow Iraqis with them.  In one horrifying instance, 140 Shiites enjoying a Shia festival were blown up.  Terrorist explosives reduced to rubble one of the most treasured shrines of Shia Islam, the Golden Mosque of Samarra with its gleaming dome, setting off a countrywide wave of violence between Sunnis and Shiites.  Trying to quell the rising insurgency that was morphing into a civil war.  U.S. troops fought pitched battles with Shiite militia in the teeming Sadr City district of Baghdad.  A month later, they were fighting Sunni insurgents for the city of Falluja.

Misled by the Iraq National Congress’s belief that Iraqis were united by their hatred of Hussein, American leaders had vastly underestimated the long standing enmity between the rival Muslim factions.  Meanwhile Bremer had undertaken to exterminate root and branch all vestiges of Hussein rule.  He outlawed Hussein’s Baath party and barred all members from the government payroll, even low-level clerks and drivers who had joined the party simply to protect their jobs.  “DeBaathification” eliminated much of the trained bureaucracy and brought normal government function to a standstill so that even mailing a letter became difficult.

Another Bremer edict disbanded the Iraqi army.  Four hundred thousand angry trained soldiers were suddenly turned onto the streets with no jobs or income, to demonstrate or bitterly join the insurgency-where, at least, they would be fed. 

The army was the only organization that could bring any kind of order to the country and perhaps stop the widespread looting, Bremer’s predecessor, an appalled General Garner noted.  ”You can get rid of an army in a day, Jerry,” he told Bremer.  ”It takes years to build one.”  (Bremer was to claim afterward that he didn’t disband the army; it had simply “dissolved.” And he said he took his action only after consulting the Pentagon.)

Despite these setbacks and growing antiwar sentiment, Bush was elected for a second term in 2004 and promised to prosecute the war until “victory.”  After the election, Powell went to the White House and submitted his resignation.  He had, he insisted, always intended to serve only one term.  Bush made no effort to keep him.

“We had a good and fulsome discussion,” Powell said in a press briefing afterward.  ”We came to the mutual agreement that it would be appropriate for me to leave at this time.”  Washington interpreted that as diplomatic double speak for “We aired our disagreements in loud and angry voices.”

Where are those WMDs? The bits of broken crockery that the “Pottery Barn Rule” had predicted continued to accumulate.  David Kay, named to head a diligent search to find those hidden weapons of mass destruction, failed to turn up a single specimen after two years of looking.  Nor could he uncover any evidence of any advanced plans to develop them.  The best he could document were a few vials of anthrax powder kept in scientists’ home refrigerators as souvenirs after the first Gulf War.

The aluminum tubes said to be designed for enriching and weaponizing uranium were actually for use in unforbidden short-range missiles.  The deal to buy yellow-cake uranium from the African nation of Niger, mentioned by Bush in his State of the Union address, was a hoax.  No evidence could be found of supposed meetings in Prague between Al Qaeda operatives and Iraqi diplomats.

Then came the revelation — with graphic, almost stomach-turning photos — that American soldiers had mistreated and tortured prisoners in the notorious Abu Ghraib prison.  The Congressional cry to take the troops out grew to a roar.  Democratic candidates swept the House and Senate in the 2006 elections.  With Bush’s popularity sinking to the low 20s in the polls, other Republicans stumbled over each other in haste to distance themselves from the president.  Rumsfeld was finally fired, and the Iraq Study Group, an elite panel of Washington wisemen co-chaired by former Secretary of State James Baker, normally a Bush acolyte, deemed the Iraq situation “grave and deteriorating.”

Instead of withdrawing troops, however, a defiant Bush increased them.  The “surge” of 30,000 reinforcements announced in 2007 was supposedly to allow the shaky, Shiite-controlled Iraqi government time and cover to solve contentious issues–such as sharing oil revenue and regional autonomy–and to train a viable army.

“As they stand up, we will stand down,” Bush repeated, almost like a mantra.  In the new army’s first test of standing up, Prime Minister Nouri Kamal al-Maliki ordered an attack on Shiite militias in the port city of Basra.  More than 1,0
00 recruits deserted or fled the battlefield and had to be rescued by U.S. troops and airpower, with a ceasefire brokered by Iran.

Meanwhile, the country that Bush still insisted was the front fine in the “war on terror” lay in shambles, along with the lives of twenty-five million citizens.  Except for the Kurdish-held north and the “Green Zone” headquarters of the coalition, no part of the embattled nation could be considered secure.  (Later, in the spring of 2008, incessant rocket attacks shattered the supposed safety of the Green Zone.)  Cities cleared of resistance by coalition offensives frequently fen back into chaos when the troops moved on.  Historic Baghdad, the fabled city of flying carpets and Arabian Nights, was a nightmare of suicide bombing, IEDS, and ruins, with one million impoverished residents in ‘Sadr City,’ a Shiite enclave and a law unto itself.

More than one and a half million Iraqis, by official estimate, had fled, most of them huddled in squalid quarters in the unwelcoming cities of neighboring Jordan and Syria.  Another estimated two million were displaced within the country, fleeing wrecked homes to crowd in with relatives or live in makeshift tent villages.  Much of the educated population of what had once been the most developed country in the Middle East had decamped, including 12,000 of the country’s 34,000 physicians.  Living conditions for those remaining were abysmal. Whole neighborhoods were without adequate sewage or water.

In July 2007, U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker told Congress that most Iraqi cities had electricity only one to two hours a day.  On the fifth anniversary of the war, the nation’s electric grid was still producing less than 5,000 daily megawatts of power, less than when the war started.  Iraqis faced a scorching summer when  11,000 megawatts would be the daily minimum.  In oil-rich Iraq, oil to power generating plants was in short supply.  The bulk of it was being shipped abroad, the Iraqi government’s only source of revenue.  And an estimated 35 percent of the population was unemployed.  

The repeatedly fought-over city of Falluja, west of Baghdad, was a classic example of the war’s devastation.  Once a thriving city of 450,000, its surviving population was estimated in 2007 at fewer than 50,000.  Eighty percent of the buildings had been damaged in the fighting; half of them were completely destroyed.  Half of the homes were gone.  Those that remained were largely without water, electricity, or sewage.  There were no operating schools.  Buildings had been stripped by looters, including floor tiles and window frames.  Once Falluja had been known as “the city of mosques,” with more than 200 glittering temples of worship.  Only 60 remained intact.

The estimates of “collateral damage”-the Pentagon euphemism for civilian and noncombatant casualties-varied wildly.  In 2007, the Iraqi Ministry of Health gave a low figure of 151,000 Iraqis killed from war-related causes between February 2003 and June 2006.  A survey published in the British medical journal Lancet estimated 600,000 “excess” deaths-those above the normal attrition of population-for the period 2003-2006.  An Opinion Research Bureau report estimated the war had caused 946,000 to 1,033,000 violent deaths.  In one survey, researchers asked individual Iraqis if they had a civilian relative or friend who had been a war casualty.  Eighty percent of those interviewed said yes.

One unlamented casualty was Hussein.  After a tumultuous trial marked by raucous shouting at the judges of the special tribunal, the onetime strong man was unceremoniously hanged for ‘crimes against humanity’ on December 30, 2006.  Reactions predictably ranged from cheering to anger.  And yet the fighting went on.  And on.

In December 2005, Bush at last admitted that some intelligence on which the war had been fought was “wrong.”  But so what?  Bush insisted that the war was worthwhile and the decision to bring down Hussein was “the right thing to do.”  He would have made the same decision even if he had known more.  Powell, the obedient soldier, kept silent while writing his memoirs and giving motivational speeches.  But in 2007, he finally apologized for the United Nations speech.  “The intelligence I was given turned out to be inaccurate,” he told Barbara Walters.  ”That will always remain a blot on my record.”

The Historic Record. In 1971, Henry Kissinger asked Chinese foreign minister Zhou En-lai the historical impact of the French Revolution of 1789.  “Too soon to tell,” En-lai responded.

In the lame duck months of Bush’s presidency, in the midst of an election campaign, and with his popularity ratings cratering, by En-lai’s reckoning, it is at least 200 years too soon to assess Bush’s impact on history, and especially the Iraq invasion.

But writers, historians, politicians, office-seekers, and the world are trying already to size up the eight Bush years.  Some contend that Bush is simply “an amiable dunce” (as Clark Clifford dubbed Ronald Reagan), readily manipulated by Vice President Cheney, former Secretary Rumsfeld, and his political Svengali Karl Rove.  They say Bush is a president out of the loop, whose priorities were cutting brush on his ranch in Crawford, Texas, and getting a good night’s sleep.  Many Europeans share that view and believe Bush has destroyed the world’s trust in the United States–trust that will take decades to rebuild.  Others regard the Bush administration as visionary-the first to recognize an impending “clash of civilizations,” and begin to prepare America for it.  And meanwhile, to fight a preemptive war before the terrorist enemy got stronger.

How will the decision to invade Iraq be judged 50, 100, 200 years from now?  How will Bush’s record be written in the twenty-third century?  Where is Zhou En-lai when we need him?

The above is an excerpt from the book Failures Of The Presidents: From The Whiskey Rebellion And War Of 1812 To The Bay Of Pigs And War In Iraq

by Thomas J. Craughwell with M. William Phelps

Published by Publisher;  September 2008;$19.95US/$21.95CAN; 978-1-59233-299-1

Copyright © 2008 Author

Author Bio

Thomas J. Craughwell is the author of several books, most recently How the Barbarian Invasions Shaped the Modern World (Fair Winds Press, 2008) and Stealing Lincoln’s Body (Harvard University Press, 2007). He has written articles on history, religion, politics, and popular culture for the Wall Street Journal, American Spectator, and U.S. News & World Report. He lives in Bethel, Connecticut.

Journalist, lecturer, and  historian M. William Phelps is the author of eleven books, including his most recent, Nathan Hale: The Life and Death of America’s First Spy (Thomas Dunne Books, 2008). He lives in Vernon, Connecticut.