Genevieve Simms

For hurling his shoes at U.S. President George W. Bush last month, Iraqi journalist Muntadhar al-Zaidi faces a possible jail sentence of seven to 15 years, depending on the precise charge pressed against him. For initiating a war that to date has cost the lives of 4,000 U.S. soldiers and anywhere from 100,000 to a million Iraqi civilians, Bush faces a retirement package that includes a generous pension, staff, office and enough secret service protection to ward off any future footwear attacks.

This discrepancy — no, make that chasm — between action and consequence, between the personal and impersonal when it comes to violence, may well be Bush’s lasting legacy as his disastrous presidency nears its end. After all, more than five years after he swaggered on board an aircraft carrier beneath the infamous “Mission Accomplished” sign, what else can Bush or his supporters point to? Two unfinished (and possibly unending) wars, in which neither an objective nor strategy was ever clearly articulated? Two puppet regimes that lack popular support and the ability to stabilize their countries, which remain devastated by war and internal chaos? A shadowy network of U.S. secret prisons around the world in which thousands of al-Qaida suspects are held and routinely tortured as part of the ongoing “war on terror”? The failed dead-or-alive search for Osama bin Laden, apparently the only human being in the age of Google Earth who’s able to avoid detection? Or a national debt that jumped from $6 trillion to $10 trillion since Bush took office in January 2001?

And yet there are still those who find much to praise in Bush’s eight years of misrule. John O’Sullivan, senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, recently argued that Bush was not motivated by any form of ideology, but instead was “simply the ordinary American writ powerful.” However, even O’Sullivan concedes that “the Bush personality seems to lack an impulse control mechanism,” and that while his impulses may be right or wrong, “almost always, they prevail.”

Looking back, it’s clear that this character flaw — an insistence that his will should prevail at all costs — was the defining feature of Bush’s presidency. It’s there in his monomaniacal insistence that Saddam Hussein was behind the attacks of 9/11, despite all evidence to the contrary. It’s there in his centralization of power in the office of the president, ripping out pages of the constitution in the process, in order to avoid having to secure the support of the U.S. Congress. It’s there in his boldface lies to Congress when he did require its support, as in the decision to invade Iraq. And it’s there in his decision to define prisoners of war as enemy non-combatants in order to circumvent the niceties of the Geneva Convention.

However, Bush was no Nietzschean “superman,” forcing his will to power on the nation in the manner of a Napoleon or Hitler. Rather, he took advantage of a collective lack of will to pursue alternative options.

For example, Congress had the means and opportunity to impeach the president for taking his nation into war on false pretences, but declined to do so. Intelligent critics such as Michael Moore, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert had the chance to portray Bush as other than a “stupid white guy,” an amusing and bumbling facsimile of a real president, but all too often they went for the easy, cheap shots. And Americans at large might have, even if belatedly, read more carefully and given greater thought to the arguments contained in books such as Graydon Carter’s What We’ve Lost: Bush’s War on Democracy and Freedom and Naomi Wolf’s The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot.

Still, it’s all too late now. What’s done is done, and Bush is set to exit, stage left, on January 20. In fact, he’s been more or less MIA for the past year or so, featuring not at all in the Republican campaign to elect John McCain, and already overshadowed by incoming Barack Obama’s plans to deal with the economic fallout of Bush’s pathological aversion to government regulation.

Yet should we allow George W. Bush to “go gentle into that good night,” as it were, or should we “rage, rage against the dying of the light”? In other words, must we now accept George W. Bush only as part of history, firmly in the past tense, a figure for academics to debate over? Or is there still some unfinished business?

. In last year’s The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder, former U.S. prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi outlined the legal case for holding the president to account for the deaths of U.S. soldiers in Iraq, arguing that since Bush had lied to Congress about Saddam’s alleged possession of WMDs, the subsequent war and occupation were illegal. Consequently, Bugliosi argues, Bush is guilty of second degree murder at the very least.

It’s unlikely, of course, that President Obama will make the prosecution of his predecessor the first order of business when he assumes office on January 20. However, as memories of Bush begin to fade, as we try to erase as much of the horror, wasted lives and lost opportunity of the 21st century’s first decade as we can, it’s important that we not submit to collective amnesia.

George W. Bush was far more than simply the worst or least popular president of modern times. He was a man who, with great success, weakened the connection between action and consequence. He might escape the threat of imprisonment, much as he dodged those shoes last month, but in the pages of history he must nevertheless be held to full account for the damage he has done.

David Bright has published widely on Canadian social, labour and criminal justice history. He teaches history and politics at Niagara College, Ontario.