DF: Scandals always hurt. Communications are an essential part of modern war, and Abu Ghraib may well be regarded as more strategically costly than a lost battle.
More broadly: Obviously the administration made many mistakes as well. These have not exactly gone undocumented, and they were not my topic. That said, I do think that the failure to work with Congress in 2002 to pass a statute governing the treatment of terrorist detainees was a serious mistake. I thought so at the time and wrote so soon after I left government.
U.S. courts typically allow the U.S. government a certain limited period of time to win its wars without second-guessing. Thus the Supreme Court handed down its important decision overturning some of President Abraham Lincoln’s Civil War actions … in 1866, the year after the war ended!
The courts were not going to allow the U.S. government to operate an executive-branch legal and prison system forever. They began signaling discontent in 2005, before finally overturning the whole system this year. This was predictable and should therefore have been predicted.
Q: The Bush administration failed to anticipate the costs of the Iraq war in its initial combat estimates, which were hundreds of billions of dollars less than the current price tag. Was this justified in light of the current economic crisis? What effect did it have on the progress and stability of the American economy?
DF: The war was and is expensive. Still, Afghanistan and Iraq together will cost much less than either the Bush administration’s prescription drug benefit or the mortgage bailout resulting from federal acquiescence on too-easy lending standards. The cost of Iraq alone may add as much as $1 trillion to the federal debt. The federal assumption of responsibility for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac: $6 trillion. If you are looking for culprits for the United States’ current financial troubles, those domestic decisions should head the list.
Q: With both presidential candidates distancing themselves from the Bush administration, why are you confident that many of Bush’s foreign policies will go unchanged under the next president?
DF: Barack Obama and John McCain are both committed to intensifying the U.S. role in Afghanistan. Obama is visibly retreating from his previous positions on Iraq: He now describes the surge as a “success”—and I doubt very much that he will wish to incur the blame for turning success into failure. The India relationship will surely continue to be nurtured under the next president as it was under both Bill Clinton and Bush, ditto the policy of refusing to be drawn into a confrontation with Venezuela. True, Barack Obama has surrounded himself with many who dislike the Bush administration’s rhetorical emphasis on democracy. But on this most controversial issue, it is George W. Bush who is in line with the U.S. foreign-policy tradition—and traditions are very hard to escape.
David Frum, a former speechwriter and special assistant to President George W. Bush, is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and author of Comeback: Conservatism That Can Win Again (New York: Doubleday, 2007).
