Cleaning Up After Bush
Posted on Aug 28, 2008
By William Pfaff
The Bush administration has lived by a strategy of tension, and will go out of office bequeathing the wars it has started and the ill will it has created to its successors, to compromise those who come after.
The Bush people have set a lot of precedents for America: Guantanamo and the “black sites” abroad will be left, and the probably more than 1,000 U.S. military bases abroad, presumably including the 50 bases (currently) that Washington still wants to keep in Iraq after the troops go home, if they go home. And of course the administration’s outsourcing arrangements for torture and kidnapping abroad will be left to a new administration.
Whether it is Barack Obama or John McCain who enters the Oval Office in January, he will confront an inheritance of eight years of foreign policy abuses, failures and unresolved dilemmas, and a climate of international crisis in the Caucasus, expected by Richard Cheney and others in the Bush administration to promote McCain’s election.
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