Throughout his presidency, George W Bush has helped a lot in the progress of the U.S. Although often criticized, his presidency has done a lot in making the world a better place for everyone. Yes, not only the United States, but he has also helped the world with some of his actions. His controversial presidency has received both the highest domestic approval along the lowest domestic approval. After the September 11 2001 attack on the World Trade Center by al Qaeda Muslims and his brisk moves to reinforce homeland security, he had an approval rating of around 90 percent. By mid-2007, however, his approval rating went down to 20 percent. His presidency has definitely had its ups and downs with many controversial policies and actions he has made part of the legacy of his presidency for good or ill. The programs and laws that have been passed during the Bush regime can be considered as good or bad depending on one’s point of view. Like his predecessors, Bush has had to deal with both domestic and international problems. Another reason why the Bush presidency is full of controversy is that the majority of the Senate and Congress are Democrats. The difference in beliefs is what drives the conflicts in many decision-making processes along with the passing of laws.
One of the greatest achievements of the Bush administration is the “war against terrorism”. With the 9/11 attacks on the United States, the people were all but ready to nuke the Middle East in retaliation. In response to the attack, Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq prior to the approval of the United Nations. This act of Bush, though considered heroic by people at the time, turns out to have been ill-advised because there was no proper justification for it.
The reason given for the invasion was supposedly the disarming of the weapons of mass destruction (WMD) of Iraq and saving the people of Iraq from a sinister dictator. Years after the invasion was won, no one could find any trace of the claimed WMDs, except perhaps for the poison gas plants which the world had known about when Saddam gassed the Kurdish minority. As the occupation lengthened with no end in sight, Iraqi militias fighting each other and blowing up any civilians they wanted to, and U.S. military deaths reaching 4,000 at last count, the invasion of Iraq was criticized as the son finishing what the father had failed to do in 1990: get rid of Saddam once and for all to dispel the threat he posed to Iran, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and other countries in the Middle East. Perhaps it would have been better if George W. Bush had waited for UN sanction or given Congress and the American people a more truthful rationale for going into Iraq. After all, great leaders often have to rally their people to do what is necessary in times of crisis.
Although highly criticized, the “war on terror” has done some good. Certainly, Bush sent a country that supported terrorists down to its knees, thus setting an example for other countries to close their doors on terrorist gangs.
One of the more infamous of all of Bush’s proposals was the tax cut of 2001. He offered the tax cut that eventually cost the country 1.35 trillion dollars. While such an executive order may have benefited millions of individuals who found themselves with a “windfall,” such a huge amount taken from the U.S. treasury threw the country’s budget into a 434 billion dollar deficit from an 84 billion dollar surplus the year before. In hindsight, it might have been preferable to use some other fiscal tool to stimulate the economy. This could perhaps have taken the form of incentives to U.S. companies to invest, lowering interests so that those companies that financed their expansions might bear lower costs, even imposing tariff barriers on imports from, say, China, so that the continuing hemorrhage of American jobs could be stanched. Instead, the recession lingered on for years and increased the National Debt.
One of the most highly debatable programs of the Bush administration is the No Child Left Behind Act or the NCLB. This program increases the accountability of the State by heightening the educational standards of public schools. This act requires local governments to assess the basic skills of every student. The policy aimed to enforce better teaching standards to solve a problem that had been going on for a long time, the continuing erosion in the academic skills of American students. To enforce compliance, the government used a “stick” instead of a “carrot”: Federal aid would be cut for public schools that failed to bring each cohort of students up to standard.
The flaw in NLCB was that it did not impose a common screening test. If a standardized national test for every year and grade level had been formulated, one would have avoided such misdemeanors as certain districts in Georgia and Arkansas deliberately making their tests easy to pass.
The aforementioned acts and programs are just some of the more prominent ones. This selection is by no means complete but they are enough to show both the benefits and the inadequacies of the Bush administration. He is far from perfect as a President. It may be his lack of attention to the domestic economy of the U.S., it may be his obsession with the war against terror, or it could be just plain ornery dissension in the ranks of Congress and the Senate. Whatever it might be, future historians will debate the positive actions and sins of omissions of President Bush’s administration at this critical juncture in America’s history.