The headlines about Condoleezza Rice’s new memoir have mostly focused on the tit-for-tat between the former Secretary of State and former Vice President Dick Cheney, whom Rice called naive and said claims about her in Cheney’s memoir were an “attack on my integrity.” But the reality is that Cheney and Rice see eye-to-eye on some big issues too. Talking with USA Today about the book, Rice, like Cheney, credited President Bush for the Arab Spring:

The demise of repressive governments in Tunisia, Egypt and elsewhere during this year’s “Arab spring,” she says, stemmed in part from Bush’s “freedom agenda,” which promoted democracy in the Middle East. “The change in the conversation about the Middle East, where people now routinely talk about democratization is something that I’m very grateful for and I think we had a role in that,” Rice says.

Indeed, Cheney had a similar take. When asked about the Arab Spring in August, Cheney replied, “I think that what happened in Iraq, the fact that we brought democracy, if you will, and freedom to Iraq, has had a ripple effect on some of those other countries.” And of course, according to Rice, the only to get rid of Saddam Hussein was to invade militarily:

“It would be a mistake to make the leap of faith that this [Arab Spring] would somehow have worked in Iraq,” she says in her first newspaper interview about her memoir, No Higher Honor. [...]

“Gadhafi … wasn’t Saddam Hussein in terms of his reach and capacity,” she says. “I do think that an Arab spring in Iraq would have been unthinkable under Saddam Hussein.”

There isn’t any real evidence of this claim that Bush’s democracy promotion in the Middle East (i.e. invasion of Iraq) had something to do with the Arab Spring. And this claim also ignores the agency of Arab citizens themselves in their collective action to rise up against social and economic injustices.

A 2010 RAND report found that “Iraq’s instability has become a convenient scarecrow neighboring regimes can use to delay political reform by asserting that democratization inevitably leads to insecurity.” And now, ironically, the Iraqi government is “offering key moral and financial support” to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in his violent crackdown on pro-democracy activists there.

The Council on Foreign Relations’ Steven Cook addressed this question back in July. “It is time to put the Bush boosters’ arguments where they belong: in the trash heap of discredited ideas,” he said, adding, “There is no connection between the invasion of Iraq and Arab efforts to throw off generations of dictatorship.” (HT: The Hill)

President Bush sat down with USA Today to discuss the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks and his role in shaping U.S. policy in their aftermath. During the interview, Bush thought he’d take the opportunity to pat himself on the back for Osama bin Laden’s death:

Bush said the events that led to the death of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in May began during his administration.

“The work that was done by intelligence communities during my presidency was part of putting together the puzzle that enabled us to see the full picture of how bin Laden was communicating and eventually where he was hiding,” he said. “It began the day after 9/11.”

The reality, of course, is that Bush’s attempts to capture or kill bin Laden were huge failures. While it’s been well documented that the Bush administration missed an opportunity to get bin Laden in Tora Bora in 2001, Bush himself subsequently stated publicly that he wasn’t spending much time thinking about getting him. “I truly am not that concerned about him. I am deeply concerned about Iraq,” Bush said in 2002, “I really just don’t spend that much time on him, to be honest with you.” Bush told reporters in 2006 that hunting the al Qaeda leader was “not a top priority use of American resources.”

And in 2005, Bush shut down the CIA’s unit dedicated to finding bin Laden in order to shift resources to Iraq. “The Central Intelligence Agency has closed a unit that for a decade had the mission of hunting Osama bin Laden and his top lieutenants,” the New York Times reported in 2006, adding that resources “had been redirected from the hunt for Mr. bin Laden to the search for Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who was killed last month in Iraq.” When the right wing rushed to give Bush credit after bin Laden’s death in May, ThinkProgress produced this short video highlighting Bush’s failures:

Soon after he took office, President Obama steered the U.S. on a course to end the war in Iraq and put resources back into finding bin Laden. “Shortly after I got into office,” Obama said in an interview after bin Laden’s death, “I brought [then-CIA director] Leon Panetta privately into the Oval Office and I said to him, ‘We need to redouble our efforts in hunting bin Laden down. And I want us to start putting more resources, more focus, and more urgency into that mission.’”

Today, Al Jazeera reports on an explosive new story that finds that the very same Bush official who spearheaded normalizing relations with Libyan dictator Moammar Qaddafi was secretly working with the dictator as late as this month to design a public relations campaign to undermine both the rebel forces and NATO.

Al Jazeera’s Jamal Elshayyal unearthed files in Libya’s intelligence headquarters that suggest that David Welch — the former assistant secretary of state under President George W. Bush who brokered the deal that normalized relations between Libya and the United States and who later went on to work for the manufacturing and development giant Bechtel — met with Libyan officials in early August to coordinate on undermining the Libyan rebels and NATO forces by, for example, trying to establish ties between the uprising and al Qaeda:

I found what appeared to be the minutes of a meeting between senior Libyan officials – Abubakr Alzleitny and Mohammed Ahmed Ismail – and David Welch, the former assistant secretary of state who served under George W Bush and the man who brokered the deal which restored diplomatic relations between the US and Libya in 2008. [...]During that meeting Welch advised Gaddafi’s team on how to win the propaganda war – suggesting several “confidence building measures”, the documents said. The documents appear to indicate that an influential US political personality was advising Gaddafi on how to beat the US and NATO. [...] Minutes of this meeting note his advice on how to undermine Libya’s rebel movement, with the potential assistance of foreign intelligence agencies, including Israel. “Any information related to al-Qaeda or other terrorist extremist organisations should be found and given to the American administration but only via the intelligence agencies of either Israel, Egypt, Morroco, or Jordan… America will listen to them… It’s better to receive this information as if it originated from those countries…”

Watch Al Jazeera’s video report about the documents:

It is unclear exactly what would motivate Welch to help Qaddafi battle the pro-democracy uprising and even his own country, but it should be noted that Welch’s position at Bechtel put him in a spot where he was incentivized to maintain strong business relationships with Libya. Shortly after helping normalize relations between the two countries, Welch became a vice president at Bechtel, overseeing the company’s Middle Eastern operations. Under Welch, the company rapidly expanded in Libya, even setting up its first office in the country since the 1960s.

Also included among the documents that Al Jazeera uncovered was evidence that Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), a Libya war foe, had contacts with Qaddafi’s regime and had asked for evidence of corruption or al Qaeda contacts among the rebels.

Commentary’s Abe Greenwald has written a long piece examining “What We Got Right in the War on Terror” over the last 10 years. It’s worth reading, if only to understand how the George W. Bush boosters are still very much committed to creating their own reality.

To take one example, here’s Greenwald giving Bush credit for the Arab awakening:

It was the Freedom Agenda of the George W. Bush administration—delineated and formulated as a conscious alternative to jihadism—that showed the way. Indeed, the costly American nation-building in Iraq has now led to the creation of the world’s first and only functioning democratic Arab state. One popular indictment of Bush maintains that he settled on the Freedom Agenda as justification for war after U.S. forces and inspectors found no Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. The record shows otherwise. “A free Iraq can be a source of hope for all the Middle East,” he said before the invasion, in February 2003. “Iraq can be an example of progress and prosperity in a region that needs both.”

And something of the kind has come to pass. “One despot fell in 2003,” [Fouad] Ajami has said. “We decapitated him. Two despots, in Tunisia and Egypt, fell, and there is absolutely a direct connection between what happened in Iraq in 2003 and what’s happening today throughout the rest of the Arab world.”

It’s probably a devastating enough rebuttal just to note that that quote from Fouad Ajami, one of the Iraq war’s most committed cheerleaders, constitutes the entirety of Greenwald’s evidence that the Iraq war spurred the democracy movements throughout the Arab world.

This is understandable, as there is no real evidence for the claim. Arabs themselves clearly don’t agree, as all available polling shows the war to be overwhelmingly unpopular in the region. An April 2010 RAND study also concluded that, rather than encouraging reform, “Iraq’s instability has become a convenient scarecrow neighboring regimes can use to delay political reform by asserting that democratization inevitably leads to insecurity.”

Examining the claim in an article back in July, the Council on Foreign Relations’ Steven Cook concluded, “It is time to put the Bush boosters’ arguments where they belong: in the trash heap of discredited ideas”:

There is no connection between the invasion of Iraq and Arab efforts to throw off generations of dictatorship. Other than helping to shape the Middle East’s discourse about political change, the effects of the Freedom Agenda are inconclusive at best. It is entirely possible that the uprisings would have happened without George W. Bush, or if he had been more like his father. Bush 41 placed a premium on international order rather than democratic change and, let’s not forget, presided over massive pro-democratic change anyway.

Back to Greenwald:

Meanwhile, as the noble call for representative government continues to be heard by Muslims around the region, let us not forget that the one existing democratic country among them is the successful American project in Mesopotamia.

From Saturday’s New York Times:

As leaders in the Arab world and other countries condemn President Bashar al-Assad’s violent crackdown on demonstrators in Syria, Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki of Iraq has struck a far friendlier tone, urging the protesters not to “sabotage” the state and hosting an official Syrian delegation.

Mr. Maliki’s support for Mr. Assad has illustrated how much Iraq’s position in the Middle East has shifted toward an axis led by Iran. And it has also aggravated the fault line between Iraq’s Shiite majority, whose leaders have accepted Mr. Assad’s account that Al Qaeda is behind the uprising, and the Sunni minority, whose leaders have condemned the Syrian crackdown.

Today’s Los Angeles Times:

A series of blasts and gunshots ripped across Iraq on Monday, killing at least 70 people and wounding more than 300 in a spasm of bloodshed that raised fresh concerns that the nation’s security forces might be overwhelmed by insurgents when American soldiers withdraw later this year. [...] It appeared Iraq was in a time warp, a nation still struggling with terrorists, sectarian gangs and militias at a time much of the Arab world is moving to replace extremism through revolutions for democracy.

As my colleagues and I wrote in our May 2010 report, The Iraq War Ledger, there is simply no conceivable calculus by which Operation Iraqi Freedom can be judged to have been a successful or worthwhile policy. The war was intended to show the extent of America’s power. It succeeded only in showing its limits. We’ll be dealing with the implications of that for many years to come, regardless of whether the war’s advocates can bring themselves to face it.

Cross-posted from Middle East Progress.