George W Bush war presidency

The legacy of George W. Bush will probably be associated with the President’s infallibly certain style of visionary leadership and his specific vision of a ‘Freedom Agenda’.  According to this vision, the United States must spread democracy to all people who desire liberty and vanquish those tyrants and terrorists who despise it.  Freedom is universally valued, and the United States is everywhere perceived as freedom’s protector and purveyor.  So, the mission of the Freedom Agenda is to guard existing freedoms as well as spread the democratic political system to those countries lacking comparable freedoms. Recent analyses of the Bush Freedom Agenda examine its roots in realist foreign policy and neoconservative political thought.  In this paper, I take a different approach, connecting the Freedom Agenda to the ideas of two philosophers: (i) Isaiah Berlin’s notion of positive-negative liberty and (ii) John Dewey’s concept of freedom as a function of culture. 
My central claim is that when compared with the ideas of Berlin and Dewey, the Freedom Agenda is a faulty construct, both conceptually and practically, for understanding America’s role in global affairs. The Freedom Agenda proves to be neither conservative nor universal.  Nevertheless, it constitutes an essential element of George W. Bush’s legacy, a vision of American purpose in a threatening and divisive world.

The aim of this article is to test the hypothesis that Halford Mackinder and Nicholas Spykman's geopolitical theories, which sustained the grand strategy of the United States with the implementation of 1946 Truman Doctrine, are still relevant today after their termination. The results indicate that the intellectual matrixes were found in documents of the grand strategy of the United States in two moments. First, in 1992, in the George Herbert Walker Bush's government's Defense Planning Guidance document, formulated by the Pentagon, in February 1992. Second, they were found replicated 10 years after in the first term of President George Walker Bush, inaugurated in 2001. In the latter, the theoretical formulations repercussions were depicted in the official documents Quadrennial Defense Review (2001) and the National Security Strategy (2002). The article concluded that the authors' ideas remain valid to explain and interpret the actions of the United States' grand strategy in the international scenario.

What does it take to convince a country that war is justified or even warranted in times of moral dilemma? In the case of the war on terror in Iraq, it required the perfect framing of an American enemy and mythical claims about weapons to fear-monger a population into war, which in hindsight has proved to be detrimental to both the Middle-Eastern region and American economy. When former President George W. Bush sought out to fight the war on terror in Iraq after claiming they were harboring weapons of mass destruction, nobody could have predicted the lingering effects the decision to spread democracy and fight terrorism would entail. However, the world now sees how destabilizing a regime can be detrimental, and furthermore how the decision to go to war with justification based on faulty pretenses was devastatingly harmful.    Considering the more harmful than helpful long-term effects this war has had, it is pertinent to understand and analyze how leaders set out to construct the perfect enemy in order to justify and harvest support for war – by doing so, the public may be more critical should the situation ever arise again. More specifically, some of the primary indicators that a leader might be trying to persuade a population into war can be found through the techniques of moral justification, moral disengagement, dehumanizing the enemy, creating rhetorical myths and utilizing fear arousing appeals, which is seen evidently when observing the statements Bush delivered which pushed our nation towards war.