George W. Bush's first term as President of the United States

George W. Bush's first term as president of the United States began January 20 2001 and ended January 20 2005, with the beginning of his second term as president.

First eight months in office

During the Election of 2000, both houses of Congress were divided almost evenly between the Republican and Democratic parties. In the first few months President Bush enacted a small number of policies and his approval ratings were decent (often fluctuating between 50% and 60%). In April of 2001, a U.S. military spy plane was forced to land at a Chinese military airport. The incident was one of the first major international challenges that the new administration faced. See: U.S.-China spy plane incident

During this period The Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2001 was enacted under his direction, which changed the way Federal taxes were paid and introduced changes to retirement and pension plans of senior citizens. The most public aspect of this act was that most Americans received a check from the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) as "reconciliation" for paying more tax than was necessary.

Handling of the aftermath of 9/11 terrorist attacks

On September 11 2001, eight months after Bush had taken office, terrorists hijacked airplanes and flew them into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York City and The Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia. On the evening of the day of the attacks, the President declared a war on terror. Soon afterwards, President Bush's approval rating rose to 90%, the highest approval rating recorded for any president by the Gallup Organization, which began the poll during the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Bush's first policy-related response to 9/11 came on October 8 2001 when, during a speech to Congress, he announced the creation of the Office of Homeland Security and appointed Tom Ridge, former governor of Pennsylvania, as its director. This was the first executive-level office to be created since 1988, when President Ronald Reagan appointed a head to the Department of Veterans Affairs. The stated goal of the Homeland Security office was "to develop and coordinate the implementation of a comprehensive national strategy" and "to secure the United States from terrorist threats or attacks." The department's most public accomplishment came on March 12 2002 with the unveiling of the Homeland Security Advisory System, a system of color-coded alerts designed to warn the populace of the assessed level of threat, based on the evaluation of credible intelligence reports, currently posed by terrorists. The "terror alert" level was and continues to be posted on a daily basis.

Bush's military response to the terrorist attacks began in October of 2001, with the deployment of 11,000 troops to invade Afghanistan. The invasion was supported by many countries, but especially by troops from The United Kingdom, Australia, Germany and also by The Afghan Northern Alliance, a large group of allied Afghan tribes that had been waging a civil war against the Taliban for many years. The mission was supported by the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) as well. The stated goal of the invasion was to overthrow the Taliban government, an Islamic fundamentalist regime thought to be harboring Osama Bin Laden, the leader of Al-Qaeda, the terrorist organization that was blamed (and which later claimed responsibility) for the 9/11 attacks.

The Taliban described Bin Laden as their guest and refused to place him in United States custody. Some contemplators of the issue currently believe, however, that Bin Laden was hiding out of the reach of the Taliban in the mountains of Afghanistan. The Taliban was overthrown in Afghanistan and a US-approved government was installed, but the majority of Al-Qaeda members, including Osama Bin Laden, escaped and some are still active to this day. Bush has been criticized for sending an insufficient number of troops into Afghanistan to successfully achieve all of the mission's objectives, although during this time the Bush administration was successful in freezing Al-Qaeda funds and shutting down many training camps for new members. The US has also captured many Al-Qaeda leaders and members in the ensuing months, but Osama Bin Laden remains at large.

The Mid-Term Elections

In 2002, Bush began a cross-country barnstorming effort on behalf of the hand-picked Republican Senatorial candidates from states considered potential toss-ups, such as New Hampshire, Missouri, Georgia, Minnesota and South Dakota. Defying the conventional wisdom that the party in power loses seats in off-year elections, Bush (according to conservative pundit John Podhoretz) helped to revert Senate control back to the Republicans, albeit only by a two seat majority, which would grow by more two years later. Of the states mentioned above, only South Dakota retained its incumbent Democrat Senator Tim Johnson, but only by some five-hundred or so hotly contested votes in an election that Republicans claimed was rigged. Bush helped install such reliable conservative stalwarts as Norm Coleman, Saxby Chambliss, John E. Sununu and Jim Talent, defeating, respectively, Walter Mondale, incumbent Vietnam veteran Max Cleland, Governor Jeanne Shaheen and incumbent Jean Carnahan.

Invasion of Iraq

In the fall of 2002, during his State of the Union Address, Bush set forth what has come to be known as the Bush Doctrine. Although the doctrine was technically used for justifying the invasion of Afghanistan, it was not clearly stated until the address. Simply put, because of the "new world" Americans were now living in and the reality of massive terrorist attacks orchestrated by organizations that exist in multiple places all over the world, the United States no longer had the luxury of thinking of the world as exclusively made up of sovereign nations. Due to this, the United States would now implement a policy of using a preemptive strike against any nation known to harbor or aid any terrorist organization. President Bush also outlined what he called the Axis of Evil, consisting of three nations that he stated posed a threat to world peace, namely Iraq, North Korea and Iran.

The Bush administration began announcing that officials had supposedly discovered weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) in Iraq. The description of these weapons ranged from chemical to nuclear weapons. The administration supported their claim with intelligence documents as well as aerial photographs. Saddam Hussein, then-President of Iraq, was described as being a threat to the world and his own people as long as he remained in power - especially if his regime had access to WMDs. Changes in the political arena, especially since Saddam had been supplied with some conventional weapons and other assistance during the Iran-Iraq War by the United States in the 1980s, were largely due to an increasingly hardline stance that Saddam had imposed on Iraq and his subjects, and his arbitrary invasion of Kuwait in 1990.

The armed forces of the United States and several other countries, dubbed the Coalition, invaded Iraq in 2003. The operation was known in the United States as Operation Iraqi Freedom. Though the American government, with encouragement from the British Prime Minister Tony Blair, had attempted to gain a United Nations Security Council resolution authorizing the use of force to remove Hussein from power, they were unsuccessful. Proponents of the use of force cited current and previous violations of resolutions and sanctions by the United Nations (UN) and the UN Security Council as substantive enough to justify the military intervention in Iraq by Coalition forces. Bush drew criticism for preemptively attacking a country that had never attacked the United States or threatened to, as well as for disregarding the opinion of the UN and diverting attention away from capturing Osama Bin Laden and others responsible for the 9/11 attacks. When asked during a press conference in March of 2002 about what he was doing to capture Osama Bin Laden, the president remarked, "you know, I just don't spend that much time on him" [1].

On May 2, from the flight deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln, in front of a huge banner that read "Mission Accomplished", Bush declared that "major combat operations in Iraq have ended." This move drew criticism of being premature, as many Coalition forces were still fighting in Iraq. Other counter that the banner, representing a completed military operation, was supposed to be removed before the speech and was not the work of the president.

The group charged with finding the WMDs in post-Hussein was the Iraq Survey Group (ISG) made up of 1,200 members of British and American experts. In October 3 they released their Interim report, which stated that they had found numerous "WMD related materials" but no actual WMDS. It was, however, evident that Iraq had been cheating the United Nations weapons inspectors and had had plans of returning to making WMDs at some later date possibly when the UN sanctions had been lifted.

On November 27 the president made a surprise visit to Iraq to share Thanksgiving dinner with the troops in an effort to raise low morale. He spent two hours eating with troops in Baghdad International Airport before returning to the US. The visit was kept top secret, and even the troops had no idea he was coming. Some saw it as a patriotic moment of history; others saw this as a potentially dangerous political stunt. Accompanied by U.S. National Security adviser Condoleezza Rice, the trip went over without incident.

A few weeks later on December 13, Saddam Hussein, the now deposed President of Iraq, was found and captured by US forces. Pictures of the now bearded former leader, looking severely dazed, being poked and prodded by medical examiners circulated in newspapers and on the Internet around the world. This was a definite boost to the Bush presidency and most Americans were glad that Hussein had been found and captured.

On January 23 2004, the head of the ISG, David Kay, resigned his position, stating that he believed WMDs would not be found in Iraq. "I don't think they existed," commented Dr. Kay. "What everyone was talking about is stockpiles produced after the end of the last Gulf War and I don't think there was a large-scale production programme in the '90s." Kay criticised the intelligence that led to the war in testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee, saying, "we were all wrong and that is most disturbing". Kay's successor, named by CIA director George Tenet, is the former UN weapons inspector Charles Duelfer. In May, Bush's approval rating had fallen to 46%. Then on September 30, the ISG released the Duelfer Report, its final report, confirming David Kay's assertion that there were no WMDs in Iraq. Some said that the WMDs were a lie to get access to oil reserves in Iraq and that Bush had committed young Americans lives for financial gain. Others felt that the President had had adequate reason to attack and that he truly believed there were WMDs there and thus was acting in the best interest of the United States. In January 2005 the ISG announced the conclusion of its search, that they had failed to find WMDs.

Build-up to re-election

The intense issues in the Middle East, such as security and the lack of WMDs fueled the fire for the 2004 election. During his campaign, Bush's platform changed little from that of the 2000 election, although he added several claims of success in fighting the war on terror and preventing another 9/11-style attack. Other presidential candidates criticized Bush for his failures in the war on terror, the war in Iraq, his policies on the environment, education, health care, the economy, creating a deficeit in the Federal budget and his near-unilateral approach to foreign policy. Bush portrayed his Democratic opponent John Kerry as soft and said he would "flip-flop", or change opinions, on issues for political gain; Kerry portrayed Bush as stubborn, rigid and unyielding in his views. Republicans said that Bush's stubborness was a positive character attribute. The campaign was bitterly fought and each candidate was accused of attacking the other in some form or another almost on a daily basis. The polls remained neck-and-neck most of the way to the election. The only time either candidate was significantly ahead in the polls was after their political parties' conventions. After the Republican's convention most polls showed an eleven point lead for President Bush, which kept dwindling as time went on. Despite outcries by law enforcement agencies across the country, Bush allowed the Federal Assault Weapons Ban to 'sunset' on September 13; this did not substantially affect his approval rating, having gone virtually unnoticed. Polls were very close to dead-even by the first presidential debate on September 30 2004.

During the three presidential debates, reactions to Bush's performance were mixed. He was said to have scowled during the first debate several times, which he later made light of. Most media sources agree that he lost the first two debates. But by the third debate, which media sources saw as a tie, Bush had noticeably straightened up and appeared as firm and confident as he had during past performances. Highly speculative claims that the President might have worn a wire or an earpiece of some kind during the last debate were suggested, based on pictures of Bush's back, taken during the debate, which show an apparent "bulge" clearly visible running down his back. No investigation was ever conducted of the claims and most agree that if the president had been coached through an electronic device his performances would probably have been better. Some technical problems with this scenario have been brought up as well. More details of the mysterious bulge.

On the eve of Election Day, most polls and mass media outlets predicted that John Kerry would win the presidency. Exit polls also reflected this projection. However, as polling centers closed and remaining votes were being counted, it became clear that Bush and Kerry were winning the same states that were won by their parties in 2000. Bush managed to win the swing states of Florida (by 400,000 as opposed to the 537 margin of 2000) and Ohio (by 119,000). He won his re-election bid by 34 electoral votes (the end total being: Bush-286, Kerry-252). The next afternoon John Kerry conceded his candidacy. During a speech that same day, Bush outlined what he hoped to do in his second term and stated that he interpreted the results of the election as a "mandate" from the American people. The passion for this election and its campaign resulted in a record voter turnout and something of a resurgence in the common American's interest in politics. It was often said that for Bush to have a successful second term, he must bridge the growing gap between Americans and win over his opponent's supporters. However, with a majority in both houses of Congress and the prospect of appointing three new Supreme Court Justices, getting his policies passed swiftly will not be likely to require bi-partisan cooperation.

See also: 2004 U.S. presidential election controversy

Intelligence Reform

As part of the recommendations made by the 9/11 Commission, Congress had planned to pass a major intelligence reform bill in the summer of 2004. However, the bill was slowed down mainly by disagreements between the Republicans in Congress. Armed Services Committee Chairman Duncan Hunter from California didn't like the bill because it supposedly moved too much control over intelligence operations and budgets from the military to a new national intelligence director. House Judiciary Committee Chairman James Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin wanted the bill changed to stop states from issuing driver's licenses to illegal immigrants. The Bush administration, however, continues to push for the intelligence reform bill as part of its "war on terror" initiative. At the end of the congressional year, Republican House Speaker Dennis Hastert pulled the bill from the floor on November 20, after running into opposition. The bill could have passed solely with Democratic votes, but the Republican supporters of the bill did not want to give Democrats the victory of such an important bill. [2]

On December 10 an agreement was finally reached on the language of the bill and it was approved by the senate in an 89-2 vote. The bill forced intelligence and law enforcement agencies to share information. It calls for a minimum federal standard for state drivers licenses and for Homeland Security to set a standard for identification used to board airplanes. The bill created a new federal counter-terrorism center and a new, controversial, United States Director of National Intelligence, who will have strong budgetary control. However, the complexity of the bill's language could lead to confusion over the director's exact powers. Bush, who passed the bill into law on December 17, was credited with pressuring Congress to pass the bill before the end of the year. Some considered it to be the largest legislation overhaul in 50 years.

Time Person of the Year

On December 19 2004, Time chose George W. Bush for its annual Person of the Year issue. Time gives the award to "the person or persons who most affected the news and our lives, for good or for ill, and embodied what was important about the year, for better or for worse," and said they gave to it Bush "for sticking to his guns (literally and figuratively), for reshaping the rules of politics to fit his 10-gallon-hat leadership style and for persuading a majority of voters this time around that he deserved to be in the White House for another four years." Bush was also Person of the Year in 2000 and his father, former President George H. W. Bush, received the title in 1990.

Contracts with Armstrong Williams

On January 6, 2005, it was discovered that the Department of Education had paid The Graham Williams Group, a company run by columnist and commentator Armstrong Williams, $240,000 to:

• Regularly mention the No Child Left Behind Act in columns and during broadcasts;
• Create one minute "reads" with Education Secretary Rod Paige to be used as ads on radio during 2004 and do not mention that they are government funded;
• Creating a video promotion for No Child Left Behind that appears to be a news story but never indicates that the report was funded by taxpayer dollars;
• For Armstrong to interview Paige and other department officials for television.

The Education Department, through the Ketchum public relations firm, arranged with Williams to use contacts with America's Black Forum, a group of black broadcasters and journalists, "to encourage the producers to periodically address" No Child Left Behind. Williams also persuaded Steve Harvey to have Paige appear twice on his syndicated radio show. The department already paid Ketchum $700,000 to rate journalists on how positively or negatively they report on No Child Left Behind. It is questionable whether or not this agreement was legal since congress prohibited the use of propaganda. The Education Department stated that the contract was "permissible use of taxpayer funds under legal government contracting procedures" and it was an attempt to educate poor and minority communities about the benefits of the law. Williams claims that he felt the contract was a way for him to promote something that he truly believed in, although he regretted his decision to participate. He is one of the leading African-American conservative commentators in the United States and a former aid to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. It has been suggested that the department chose Armstrong, rather than another conservative commentator, (such as Rush Limbaugh), because of his minority based audiences. Since the story has been uncovered Williams's newspaper syndicate, Tribune Media Services, has canceled his column and one television network has dropped his program pending an investigation. The Government Accountability Office has already twice ruled that the Bush administration's use of prepackaged videos to promote Medicare and drug policy is "covert propaganda" because their videos do not state that they are creations funded by the United States government.

Response to the 2004 Indian Ocean Earthquake

The president was beginning his post-Christmas vacation at his Crawford, Texas ranch when he was informed of the devastating earthquake. The first estimates of the damage were 22,000 people killed, of whom, six were Americans. Bush said the earthquake was a "terrible loss of life and suffering". A $15 million aid package was put together to help the Asian countries suffering from the devastation. Immediately after, the US and other Western nations were criticised first by the UN and then by The New York Times for not giving enough and being "stingy". They also claimed that this was half as much as Republicans were planning to spend on inauguration festivities; however, that money would all come from private donors. The New York Times also criticised Bush for waiting three days to express his condolences to the countries hit by the disaster.

Further criticism pointed to undelivered relief funds for the 2003 Earthquake in Iran and also that foreign aid money makes up less than one quarter of one percent of the United States budget. As further details of the devastation were revealed, Bush stepped up US relief efforts to $35 million in response and sent his brother, Florida Governor Jeb Bush and Secretary of State Colin Powell to Asia to assess the damage. After Japan announced they were pledging US$500 million, the largest amount of any country so far and the death count was firmly stated as around 150,000, Bush again increased the United States aid package to $350 million, the second largest contribution. On February 9, as relief efforts continued to unfold, Bush asked Congress for a total of $950 million.

It is notable that these financial pledges do not include costs associated with use of U.S. military personnel in the relief effort. As of January 12, 15,000 troops had been committed, including 25 ships and nearly 100 aircraft. Duties included logistical support, delivery of emergency supplies, and search and rescue. [3]

Private relief funding was also substantial. On January 3 2005, the president named his two immediate predecessors, Bill Clinton and George H. W. Bush, to head up a major campaign to gather private funding to assist the tsunami victims. By January 11, only eight days later, $360 million had already been raised; the total was expected to eventually reach $700 million. [4]

Major Bills Passed

Although many bills passed during Bush's first term, there are several initiatives that he not only spearheaded, but tend to shape his first term whilst representing his general ideology. Here is a list of these bills and the dates they were passed:

• USA Patriot Act - October 26 2001
• No Child Left Behind Act - December 13 2001

References

Pro-Bush

• Fred Barnes. Rebel-in-Chief: How George W. Bush Is Redefining the Conservative Movement and Transforming America (2006)
• L. Paul Bremer III, My Year in Iraq: The Struggle to Build a Future of Hope (2006) by Bush's ambassador.
• George W. Bush. George W. Bush on God and Country: The President Speaks Out About Faith, Principle, and Patriotism (2004)
• James Mann. Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush's War Cabinet (2004)
• Bob Woodward. Plan of Attack (2003) on Iraq war

anti-Bush

• Bruce Bartlett, Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy (2006), conservative attack by former aide
• Seymour M. Hersh. Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib (2004)
• Stefan Halper. America Alone: The Neo-Conservatives and the Global Order (2004)
• Ron Suskind. The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O'Neill (2004), complaints of ex Treasury Secretary

mixed

• George Packer. The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq (2005)* James Risen. State of War: The Secret History of the C.I.A. and the Bush Administration (2006)

See also

• George W. Bush's second term as President of the United States
• George W. Bush main article
• President of the United States of America