George Bush

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The Continuing War in Iraq

In December 2006 Bush received a long-awaited report from the Iraq Study Group, a bipartisan commission established by Congress to provide an assessment of the ongoing war in Iraq. The report made about 70 recommendations and concluded that the current U.S. strategy in Iraq was failing. Bush said he was studying the report and gathering opinions from other sources, including the U.S. military. In January, Bush replaced his two top military commanders in Iraq, one of them General John Abizaid, who had earlier testified before Congress in opposition to sending more troops to Iraq. In a nationally televised speech on January 10, Bush seemingly rejected the recommendations of the Iraq Study Group and said he was deploying an additional 21,500 troops to Iraq in an attempt to bring order to the capital, Baghdād, and to Anbar province, where foreign fighters linked to al-Qaeda had a presence.

The Bush administration characterized the new troop deployment not as an escalation but as a temporary surge, or “augmentation,” of U.S. forces that would be accompanied by more training of the Iraqi army. Bush also called for more spending on reconstruction projects in Iraq to help alleviate damage to Iraq’s infrastructure and to provide jobs in a country where unemployment was estimated at between 30 and 60 percent. Repudiating a recommendation by the Iraq Study Group to negotiate with Iran and Syria, Bush instead sharply challenged the two neighboring countries of Iraq, accusing them of providing material support to the insurgency in Iraq. Bush said he was adding another aircraft-carrier battle group to the Persian Gulf and that U.S. forces would attempt “to interrupt the flow of support from Iran and Syria.”

The speech met immediately with a negative rejoinder from most Democrats, who called the additional troops an escalation that had no likelihood of succeeding. But a number of leading Republican senators also criticized the speech, including several likely presidential contenders and representatives of the conservative wing of the Republican Party such as Senator Sam Brownback of Kansas. Perhaps the harshest Republican attack came from Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, who voiced concern that the threats against Iran signaled the possibility of an even wider escalation of the war. Hagel said Bush’s speech represented “the most dangerous foreign policy blunder in this country since Vietnam, if it's carried out. I will resist it.” Senator John McCain, a likely Republican presidential candidate, and Democratic senator Joseph Lieberman, however, threw their support to Bush’s plan.

A dramatic confrontation between Bush and Congress rolled forward, with some lawmakers pushing hard for the reduction of troops in Iraq and Bush insisting that he would veto any such attempts. The battle between Bush and Congress became the defining policy issue dominating the Bush administration during the early part of 2007. Analysts also said it was building toward one of the most intense battles inside Washington in many years.

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In March the Democrat-controlled House narrowly voted for legislation that would lead to troops coming home in by the end of August 2008. A week later, the Democrat-controlled Senate also narrowly passed a bill that called for the end of combat operations, this time to be concluded by March 2008. The House approved a binding resolution, meaning that troops would have to depart Iraq, but the Senate resolution was nonbinding, meaning that it was largely symbolic.

Bush continued to strongly reiterate that he had no intention of signing the bills. The votes by Congress, conducted along mostly partisan lines, put Bush in the position of a showdown with lawmakers and with possibly having to invoke his veto power for only the second time in his administration.

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U.S. Attorney Firings and Other Issues

While the debate rolled forward, Bush was confronted with a personnel matter that also dominated headlines and was arguably, along with the Iraq troop withdrawal debate, a crisis moment for the Bush administration in early 2007. Through March, there were increasingly insistent calls by some lawmakers for his beleaguered attorney general, Alberto Gonzales, to step down.

Gonzales, a long-time friend of Bush’s from Texas, was overseeing a Justice Department that was being assailed for its handling of the firings of eight federal prosecutors in 2006. Gonzales denied that he was involved in the firings but the release of e-mails and the testimony of his former chief of staff contradicted these claims.

Bush, who had brought Gonzales to Washington to serve as his White House counsel and then appointed Gonzales as the first Latino to be attorney general, indicated in March that he was still supporting Gonzales despite the growing criticism and the demands for Gonzales’s resignation. Observers said that Bush would be increasingly mired in a politically difficult situation if he continued to support his attorney general.

The growing tempest over the U.S. attorney firings led Congress in March to rescind a Patriot Act provision that allowed new federal attorneys to be put in office, without Senate approval, for an undetermined level of time. The Bush White House did not oppose the changing of the provision, even though it appeared to diminish some of the administration’s power. Political observers said it was a concession on Bush’s part to the welling realities in Washington as battle lines were being drawn between the president and Congress. The firings angered Democrats when it became apparent that some of the fired U.S. attorneys had refused to become involved in electoral contests in which Democrats either won or closely contested the elections. Another of the fired U.S. attorneys had conducted an investigation that led to the prosecution and conviction of a prominent Republican member of Congress.

In early 2007 several polls indicated that Bush’s approval ratings were hovering in the 35 percent range. Political analysts wondered what the fallout for the remaining months of the Bush White House would be from both Bush’s steadfast assurances that he would reject the congressional attempts to set a timeline for troop withdrawals, as well as from the inquiries and questions surrounding his attorney general. Analysts wondered if Bush would have the political muscle to push forward any remaining policy agendas he hoped to accomplish before he left the Oval Office.

Speculation as to the first question appeared to be answered in early May after Bush vetoed a war spending bill approved in Congress that set a timetable for a U.S. troop withdrawal from Iraq. Four days later a Newsweek magazine poll showed that Bush had his lowest approval rating ever at 28 percent, the lowest for any U.S. president since Jimmy Carter in 1979. According to the poll, more than 60 percent of respondents believed that Bush’s actions in regard to the Iraq war showed that he was “stubborn and unwilling to admit mistakes.”

Bush called for allowing more time for his “surge” strategy in Iraq to make headway, promising a possible reevaluation of the strategy in September when General David Petraeus, the U.S. military commander in Iraq, was scheduled to submit a report on the occupation’s progress. But in the meantime Bush continued to lose support among leading Republican senators. In anticipation of an interim report on the surge strategy in mid-July, Senator Richard Lugar of Indiana, the ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said the surge was not working and called for a change in policy. He was backed by Senator John Warner of Virginia. Senator George Voinovich of Ohio endorsed a call for withdrawing troops, and Pete Domenici of New Mexico said he could no longer support the administration’s Iraq strategy. By mid-July Democrats had secured the votes of seven Republican senators behind a proposal to restrict troop deployments. Among the Republicans were Senators Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe of Maine, Norm Coleman of Minnesota, and Chuck Hagel of Nebraska.

Bush was encouraged when the interim report was released on July 12, showing that progress had been made on 8 of 18 benchmarks. He argued that the proper role of Congress was to fund the troops and not to try to conduct a war, a statement that angered both Democrats and Republicans in Congress. As he had done before the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Bush again linked the al-Qaeda terrorist attack of September 11 with Iraq, saying in a speech in Cincinnati, Ohio, that “the same folks that are bombing innocent people in Iraq were the ones who attacked us in America on September 11th.” Critics seized on the statement as a misrepresentation, noting that the group in Iraq calling itself al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia did not exist before September 11, 2001, and that in any event the group is only a minor player in the largely secular and Sunni-dominated insurgency in Iraq. The Democrat’s Senate majority leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, said the key political benchmarks set for the Iraqi government had not been met. On July 12, the U.S. House of Representatives voted 223 to 201, largely along partisan lines, for the United States to withdraw most of its combat troops from Iraq by April 1, 2008.

Bush also met with criticism in July when he commuted the sentence of I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, the former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, who was convicted of perjury and obstruction of justice in the Valerie Plame Wilson affair. However, the move was warmly welcomed by many conservatives in the Republican Party who had advocated a pardon. Bush said he found Libby’s 30-month prison sentence “excessive” and said he would not rule out a pardon. Critics said the sentence was well within judicial guidelines for the offense and argued that the president’s actions could be construed as a further attempt at obstruction of justice. Bush had previously said that if any person in his administration was found responsible for leaking the identity of Plame Wilson, who was a covert agent of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), that person would be “taken care of.” Testimony during Libby’s trial showed that he had leaked Plame’s identity to two reporters, though he was not the first or only administration official to do so.

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Approaching the 2008 Presidential Elections

In August 2007 under increasing calls for his resignation, Attorney General Gonzales informed Bush that he would be stepping down. Some critics suggested that his resignation, which took effect in September, was designed to stem any further political embarrassment for the president, and to ward off any attempts to investigate and impeach Gonzales. Bush accepted Gonzales’s resignation, praised his long-time friend, and said that Gonzales had been besmirched for political reasons.

That same month, Bush named Michael Mukasey as the nominee to fill the attorney general slot. A former federal district judge from New York, Mukasey was subject to intense scrutiny and debate, particularly about his views on torture and the use of the controversial interrogation practice known as waterboarding. Mukasey said that he abhorred the practice but would not flatly state that he considered it illegal and a form of torture. Many senators coalesced in opposition to his nomination, but Mukasey was confirmed by a vote of 53-40 in November. Bush would later veto legislation that specifically outlawed waterboarding.

In fall 2007, Bush’s approval ratings continued to slide. One study, the Reuters-Zogby poll, indicated that the president’s job approval rating had fallen to a new low of 24 percent. Bush told reporters at a news conference that he was “sprinting” toward the end of his presidency and that he had many things he wanted to accomplish. Meanwhile, through the end of the year there were increasing signs that the national economy was weakening and that one of the biggest fiscal challenges of his administration was welling up. For the next several months, the economy and the situation in Iraq were at the forefront of Bush’s concerns.

Bush and administration officials suggested that the U.S.-Iraq War had turned a page and that the additional 30,000 U.S. soldiers sent to Iraq as part of a “troop surge” in 2007 had led to increased stability and a shoring up of the ability of Iraqi forces to defend their own country. Administration critics continued to argue that Bush had no exit strategy for the war and had remained fixed on an ill-advised refusal to set a clear timetable for the return of American troops.

As the future of the war effort became one of the hotly debated issues in the 2008 presidential race, political observers wondered who would seek Bush’s support for their candidacy, and which candidate Bush would endorse. Some political observers wondered if Bush’s low approval ratings would lead any Republican candidates to steer away from the president.

Toward the end of 2007 there were clear signs that the economy was on shaky ground. Housing prices began to slump, foreclosures began to rise, and the financial uncertainty began to reverberate on Wall Street. The unease bled into 2008 as the stock market continued to dip, and economic forecasters began to debate whether or not the U.S. economy was headed into a full-blown recession. Against the backdrop of economic uncertainty and questions from critics about how long the United States intended to keep troops in Iraq, Bush embarked on a January trip to several countries in the Middle East. It marked his first visit as a president to Israel. During his trip, Bush reiterated his belief that more countries needed to work harder to help stabilize the situation in Iraq and throughout the region.

Later in January 2008 Bush touched on the economy and the persisting tensions in Iraq during his final State of the Union address. He said that “our economy is undergoing a period of uncertainty” and that “jobs are now growing at a smaller pace” and that “the housing market has declined.” He said that to help the economy, he would push for tax rebates, combat any tax increases, and cut or eliminate 151 wasteful government programs. He predicted that there would be a federal budget surplus by 2012. Turning to the situation in Iraq, Bush said that the troop surge had proved successful.

Although Bush critics and Democratic presidential candidates continued to call for specific troop withdrawal timetables, Bush did not offer any in his State of the Union address. “Any further drawdown of U.S. troops will be based on conditions in Iraq and the recommendations of our commanders,” said Bush. Rebuffing critics who had suggested that Bush had not done enough to broker internal political settlements in Iraq, Bush also said that there was “progress” in terms of “political reconciliation” among warring factions. Bush repeatedly underscored his belief that the United States should remain committed to its effort in Iraq, in part because U.S. actions there sent a message to the rest of the world.

In February Bush signed a $170-billion economic stimulus package that promised to send tax rebate checks to many Americans and to provide tax breaks for certain businesses. That same month he said “no question, we are in a slowdown” in reference to the economy, and he said that he hoped his tax rebate package—which would, in part, send rebates of $600 or more to individual taxpayers in 2008—could stimulate national economic growth.

That same month, Bush embarked on a multi-country trip to Africa where he was warmly received by some supporters who expressed admiration for U.S. efforts to combat poverty and the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) that causes acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS). In fact, many independent health experts and even critics of President Bush credited Bush with having done more to help treat AIDS than any previous U.S. leader. Under the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, about 1.4 million people suffering from AIDS in Africa received lifesaving drugs paid for by the U.S. fund, an increase from the 50,000 patients who were receiving drugs before the initiative began.

In early March, as the United States approached the fifth anniversary of the Iraq invasion and the U.S. death toll in Iraq neared 4,000, Senator John McCain won primaries that secured his bid for the Republican nomination for the presidency. The day after McCain’s key victories, Bush publicly endorsed the Arizona senator. McCain indicated that he would be glad to have the president campaign with him.

Some political observers suggested McCain needed to treat the president’s endorsement gingerly, because it might steer away moderate or independent voters who were opposed to Bush. Other observers suggested that Bush’s endorsement would help shore up some portion of the Republican Party’s conservative base for McCain’s election and that Bush would be very instrumental in helping to raise money for McCain’s candidacy.

With the clock winding down on the Bush presidency, political observers wondered how engaged Bush would be in any political campaigns, and to what extent he would use his remaining days in office to advance his policy agendas through a so-called “bully pulpit.” As throughout his presidency, the question of whether Bush might have a chance to nominate another justice to the U.S. Supreme Court also lingered in 2008.