How they see us: Goodbye, good riddance to President Bush

George W. Bush single-handedly destroyed America’s image as a beacon of freedom, said Simon Schama in Britain’s Guardian. His administration ordered “mutilations inflicted on internationally agreed standards of humane conduct for prisoners—and on the protection of domestic liberties enshrined in the American Constitution.” Under his stewardship, America interned some of its own Muslims, imprisoned innocent people in Guantánamo Bay for years, and tortured Iraqis in Abu Ghraib. “If the Statue of Liberty were alive, she would be weeping tears of blood.” The world gives thanks that this “reign of misfortune and calamity” is almost over.

It’s hard to fathom the damage Bush has inflicted upon the planet, said Jean-Claude Kiefer in France’s Dernières Nouvelles d’Alsace. He bequeaths the world “the war in Iraq, the stalemate in Afghanistan, oil imperialism, the financial crisis, the U.S. debt weighing on the entire planet, and withdrawal from the Kyoto Protocol—and that list is not exhaustive!” The disgust the world feels for America is all the more astonishing when you consider how much good will existed just after the 9/11 attacks. The turning point came after the invasion of Iraq, when the weapons of mass destruction that were supposedly the casus belli failed to materialize. That is when the world lost trust in America.

In the Middle East, “restoring the balance of trust” will require a new type of “strategic thinking,” said Raghida Dergham in Lebanon’s Dar al-Hayat. The Bush administration’s strategy “was based on undermining stability in the Gulf region.” The result has been tragedy for hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and the rise of Iran as a regional power. And because of his refusal to pressure Israel, Bush failed to move the Israeli-Palestinian peace process forward at all.

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Still, “not everything Bush did was a disaster,” said Canada’s Globe and Mail in an editorial. He handled the rise of China quite well, coaxing the People’s Republic into “a rules-based global economic system” while refraining from antagonizing it with too much needling on human rights. He brought his country much warmer relations with Asia’s other giant, India, a feat that “may turn out to be Mr. Bush’s most important foreign-policy achievement.” And though he has a reputation for being “trigger-happy,” he managed to ignore the many provocations to conflict from the likes of Venezuela and Iran. It may be faint praise, but we’ll give Bush this: He “has not taken his country as far off the track of civilized behavior as his critics claim. That means that getting back on track should be easier for his successor.”