Lecture 20: American Carnage, American Dream

American Carnage, American Dream

This lecture combines the Clinton, George W. Bush, Obama, and Trump years. It is titled "American Carnage, American Dream" to contrast Obama's embodiment of the American dream with Trump's characterization of American carnage.

Contrasting Visions

Barack Obama: Embodied the American dream, rising from a fatherless, poor background to become editor of the Harvard Law Review, a senator, and the first African American president.
Donald Trump: In his 2017 inaugural address, depicted the US as plagued by crime, illegal immigration, foreign entanglements, and a loss of traditional values.
This contrast symbolizes the present moment, with many Americans feeling the country is on the wrong track, yet still harboring hope for resolution and improvement.

The Tension

The lecture aims to explore the tension between hopefulness and despair, carnage and dream.

9/11 Attacks

On September 11, 2001, 19 young Arab men, members of Al Qaeda, hijacked four planes on the East Coast.
They stormed cockpits, killed pilots, and took control of the planes after receiving flight instruction in American aviation schools.
Targets:
- 8:46 AM: First plane hit the North Tower of the World Trade Center in New York City, a symbol of American economic dominance.
- 17 minutes later: Second plane hit the South Tower.
- Third plane crashed into the Pentagon in Virginia, the headquarters of the US Department of Defense.
- Passengers on the fourth plane prevented the terrorists from reaching the Capitol; it crashed in a Pennsylvania field.
The collapse of the World Trade Center towers resulted in nearly 3,000 American deaths.
9/11 reshaped the debate about America's role in the world and how to protect its citizens.

Post-Cold War America

After the Cold War, Americans believed their nation would lead in creating a new world order.
Political debate focused on spreading democracy, protecting the US economy, and using military power.
The threat of anti-American Islamist extremists like Al Qaeda was largely ignored.
After 9/11, President Bush initiated wars in Afghanistan and Iraq to restore America's image of power.

The 2008 Election and Financial Crisis

In 2008, Barack Obama's election marked a historic moment.
The worst financial crisis since the Great Depression then rocked the American economy.

The Rise of Conservatism and Trump

A grassroots opposition to Obama's presidency and government programs emerged.
In 2016, Donald Trump became president by capitalizing on this opposition, cultural grievances, anti-immigration sentiment, and isolationism.
His presidency further divided the United States.
Trump attempted to block the certification of the election he lost.

Personal Reflections on 9/11

The lecturer recalls experiencing the events of 9/11 as a sixth grader and the sense of fear and the realization that American strength might be an illusion.
It was a pivotal moment in national and world history.

The Falling Man

An image titled "Falling Man" depicts a man falling from the World Trade Center during the attacks.
His identity remains unknown.
The photograph symbolizes an unknown soldier in an uncertain war, suspended in history.
Gwendolyn suggests focusing on who "we are" through watching this image.

Focus Questions for the Module

How did 9/11 shape American society and foreign policy in the 21st century?
What values and ideas shaped key American foreign policy decisions?
What new challenges and controversies did The United States face during the Bush, Obama, and Trump years?
How did liberals and conservatives modify their long-standing visions of the role that government should play?

George H.W. Bush Presidency

Followed Ronald Reagan as president.
He announced he had become president during a moment rich with promise.
The fall of communism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union confirmed this judgment.

Fall of the USSR

By the late 1980s, the USSR was crumbling from internal and external pressures.
Independence movements in Soviet-dominated countries in Eastern Europe emerged.
Hungary: Took down the barbed wire fence between it and democratic Austria in May 1989.
Poland: Solidarity won control of Poland's new parliament and formed the first democratic government in postwar Eastern Europe.
The Soviet Union reacted with apathy, reversing decades of policy that violently quashed movements within the Soviet bloc.
Countries in Eastern Europe lifted restrictions on speech, voting, and economic activity, unleashing popular revolt against communist rule.
The Berlin Wall fell in November 1989.
By the end of 1989, the Soviet Union no longer dominated Eastern Europe.
In August 1990, the Soviet Communist Party was dissolved.
The Soviet Union ceased to exist in 1991, and member states became independent nations.
The United States declared victory in the Cold War.

America's Approach

The question remained: How would The US approach these former countries?
How would it approach communism in places outside of Europe?

Bush's Championing

Bush championed that the Soviet Union fell and America endured not simply because the Soviet Union was wracked with internal conflict, but because American ideas had won out.
Democracy, free market, civil liberties, open elections.
The Soviet Union did not simply lose the Cold War. The Western democracies won.

The Berlin Wall

Television crews gathered to film and document the demolition of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989.
The Berlin Wall had long been seen in western eyes as a symbol, a potent symbol of communist depression.
A lone man destroyed the wall piece by piece with his hammer.
This image really resonated with Americans, seeming to symbolize the ability of common people to make history.
The East German guards were watching impassively. (We can't do anything about it.)
The fall of communism in Europe reinforced American faith in the superiority of capitalism over communism.

Questioning Capitalism

Some commentators urged The United States to think more closely about its own problems, to use this moment, to reform capitalism, to make it more fair.
Cartoonist Pat Olafont questioned the narrative that capitalism triumphed over communism and whether the fall of communism would usher in a better world.
There is a homeless man dressed in rags to suggest that there is no we in The United States.
Rich and poor viewed events like the fall of the Berlin Wall differently.
In the 1980s, the number of homeless people living and begging on the streets of The United States grew to a level that hadn't been seen since the progressive era.

Tiananmen Square

The US battle against communism was not over.
The Chinese communist regime made different choices when faced with a popular revolt.
In April 1989, university students occupied Tiananmen Square in Central Beijing to protest the removal of a high ranking communist official who had called for economic and political reforms.
Chinese communist officials debated whether they should end these demonstrations with violence or adopt a Mikhail Gorbachev like approach and accommodate some of the students' demands.
The Chinese Communist Party decided to end it with violence.
On June 4, tanks appeared in Tiananmen Square.
Troops shot hundreds of protesters as they cleared the area.
Two days later, a lone man made a solitary gesture of defiance by standing steadfast in the middle of the street as 17 tanks approached, and refused to move.
Americans hailed this unknown tank man for his inspirational defense of peace and human rights even though it's likely he was executed.

US and China Relations

As the economic relationship between The United States and China changed, China's violent suppression of democracy provoked different visions over how to proceed.
In 1900, America wanted to sell China goods.
By 1990, American companies increasingly outsourced manufacturing jobs to China using cheap Chinese labor to satisfy American consumers' demands for affordable goods.
Some critics have argued that by helping the Chinese government improve the standard of living for ordinary citizens, Americans were inadvertently bolstering the autocratic communist regime there.
Others have argued that exposing Chinese citizens to Western goods and values will someday sow the seeds for an eventual democratic and capitalist revolution there.
A prosperous and industrially strong China might replace The United States as the world's strongest military and economic power.

Bush's Domestic Record

George H.W. Bush was the last old guard Republican president.
Bush had a mixed domestic record.
He passed the Americans with Disabilities Act, which was a 1990 civil rights law that prohibited discrimination against disabled Americans in employment, public accommodations, and telecommunications.
During the campaign, Bush had courted the more conservative wing of the Republican Party by promising to crack down on crime.

Los Angeles Riots

One of these domestic debates over urban life exploded in 1991 in Los Angeles, when a riot broke out that brought simmering racial and ethnic tensions to the surface.
In March of that year, a 78 mile car chase along Los Angeles freeways ended when white police officers brutally beat Rodney King, an African American man, when he resisted arrest for speeding.
This encounter was captured on film.
Americans differed on what the video revealed.
Most African Americans and some sympathetic whites saw a poorly trained and racist police force that harassed blacks.
Others, including the jury that acquitted the officers, saw overworked police doing their job to protect law and order in a dangerous neighborhood.
The not guilty verdict set off four days of rioting in Los Angeles.

Clarence Thomas Nomination

The debate over race reached the Supreme Court when Bush nominated a conservative African American judge, Clarence Thomas, to the Supreme Court.
Controversy erupted over Thomas' appointment when Anita Hill, who was a former colleague of Clarence Thomas', accused him of sexual harassment.
Thomas responded by calling the televised confirmation hearings a high-tech lynching.
The senate would ultimately confirm Thomas by a narrow majority, but with workplace sexual harassment becoming front page news, an unprecedented number of women won congressional seats in the ninety two election.

Bush's Foreign Policy

Bush's real interest was in foreign affairs.
Bush had been a naval pilot in World War two and a former director of the Central Intelligence Agency.
His administration felt uneasy about returning the Panama Canal to a Panamanian dictator.
In December 1989, Bush launched Operation Just Cause, which was the largest American military campaign since the Vietnam War, to remove Manuel Noriega from power in Panama.
It was a crisis in The Middle East that offered Bush the opportunity to propose a new focus for US foreign policy going into the twenty first century.

Persian Gulf War

When Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, the Bush administration was faced with a choice:
- Should The United States militarily intervene in the oil rich Persian Gulf?
- Should it remain neutral and use other methods to pressure the Hussein regime into reversing course?
The Bush administration decided to send American soldiers.
In Operation Desert Shield, the president assured the public that The United States was solely going to war to prevent Iraq from attacking peaceful neighbors.
Bush's chair of the joint chiefs of staff, general Colin Powell, established what is called the Powell doctrine.
- The United States should only go to war as a last resort when the president had full support from the nation and the international community
- If it could employ overwhelming military force to win without a serious loss of American life
- If it had a clear exit strategy.
Bush secured a UN resolution that included the militaries of The United States and 34 other nations to go to war against Saddam Hussein if he did not withdraw from Kuwait by mid January 1991.
Ultimately, Hussein did not do that.
In a short few months, United States and its allies crushed Iraq's defenses in Kuwait and its military.
The war lasted for only 42 days.
Bush declared that The United States had done its goal of ending Saddam's occupation of Kuwait and had no intention of conquering Iraq.
Victory in the Persian Gulf War along with the end of the Cold War led to a reevaluation of American foreign policy goals.
After defeating Hussein, Bush announced that The United States would build a new world order.
The United States would play an active global peacekeeping role dedicated to spreading democracy and prosperity.

Bush Quotes and Contradictions

There were conflicts and debates within The United States in the lead up to the Persian Gulf War about whether or not the war was actually about spreading democracy or whether it was just about maintaining US control over lucrative oil profits in The Middle East.
Many of the opponents of going to war urged George h w Bush to use sanctions.
Bush countered that Hussein's atrocities against his own people made him "worse than Hitler."
Bush seemed to be trying to remind Americans that The United States' failure to act when Hitler began his expansionist drive in 1938 had led to World War two.
George w Bush wanted to avoid a long protracted war that could become like Vietnam.
Critics later said that that was a dramatic hyperbole, that Hussein and Hitler were not even in the same moral universe.
Bush would later claim that he would later try to walk back those comments.

The Clinton Years

The Reagan years had redefined the American political landscape by shifting the political center away from New Deal and great society liberal assumptions that government could be a positive force in citizens' lives.
Clinton defeated George h w Bush in the nineteen ninety two presidential election and won reelection again in 1996.
Clinton was relatively unknown when the ninety two presidential campaign began.
As governor of Arkansas, Clinton had chaired the Democratic Leadership Council, a group that was committed to shifting the Democratic Party to the political center.
Clinton seemed to exude energy and seemed to possess a vast knowledge of government.
"I feel your pain" became Clinton's campaign mantra.

Ross Perot

The ninety two election also saw one of the most successful third party candidacies in US history in Ross Perot, a self made Texas billionaire.
His campaign focused almost exclusively on how the federal deficit had exploded under Reagan and Bush.
Perot would end up winning 19% of the popular vote, which was the best third party showing since Teddy Roosevelt had run as a progressive party candidate all the way back in 1912.
This enabled Clinton to defeat George h w Bush, but he only took 43% of the electorate.
Clinton would be able to bring his new vision of a new democrat, of a third way, not conservative or liberal, to national prominence.
Clinton was generally socially liberal, but he did embrace a lot of conservative fiscal ideas such as balancing the federal budget.

Free Trade

We talked in our last lecture that globalization had negatively impacted the American economy in the nineteen seventies and nineteen eighties.
Clinton, instead of fighting against this trend of globalization, embraced it and accelerated it.
He broke with organized labor to back the 1992 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which was a treaty that lifted trade barriers amongst The United States, Mexico, and Canada.
Labor unions opposed NAFTA because they feared that it would encourage US factories to relocate to Mexico, which would result in fewer jobs for American workers.
American businesses liked NAFTA because it prohibited foreign companies based in Mexico, for example, from manufacturing knockoffs of American products.

Clinton's Domestic Decisions

Clinton also did some other things on the domestic sphere that seemed to herald a new kind of Democrat.
He expanded the war on drugs.
Mass incarceration will continue to grow under Clinton's watch.
He will institute don't ask, don't tell within the military.
He did try to institute a comprehensive health care plan (that failed to reach congressional approval).

Clinton's Scandals and Impeachment

Clinton was impeached over an affair with a White House intern named Monica Lewinsky in 1998 as a result of an investigation into some of the things that he had been doing that Clinton had been alleged to have been doing during his time as Arkansas's attorney general.
Clinton was not removed from office.
What it revealed though at the time was how Americans viewed sexual harassment or sexual power dynamics between men and women in workplaces.

Clinton-Lewinsky Scandal: Changing Perspectives

Many media outlets portrayed Lewinsky at the time as this self serving femme fatale who seduced the president.
Only very recently within the last decade have more and more Americans begun to reevaluate and reconsider what actually happened to Monica Lewinsky.
Rather than see her as some kind of slut or some kind of ambition seeking femme fatale, we've begun to see her more as a victim of a culture that delegitimizes women in the workplace, that continues to objectify them, and that continues to place women, especially women who have male bosses, at the at the whims of their male employer's sexual desires.

1994 Midterm Elections

The midterm elections in 1994 saw the ascendance of a new kind of conservatism led by Newt Gingrich.
Gingrich promised that if elected in '94, Republicans would end what he called the corrupt liberal welfare state.
The Republicans would capture both the house and the senate in '94 for the first time since 1952.
Gingrich's contract with America envisioned smaller government, less regulation, term limits for members of congress, welfare reform, and adding a balanced budget amendment to the constitution.
Little of Gingrich's ambitious agenda was enacted, partly because Bill Clinton stole some of Ingraham's thunder by undertaking his own program of social welfare reform.
Clinton would modify legislation passed during the New Deal and would reduce.
He did certain welfare reforms like reducing the time that families with dependent children could receive financial institute financial assistance.
He also tried to appeal to fiscal conservatives by balancing the federal budget for the time in thirty years.
Clinton, repealed certain provisions of the Glass Steagall Act that separated commercial and investment banking.
Gingrich's contract with America would inform a whole new generation of conservative politicians, including George h w Bush's son, George w Bush, who would end up winning the two thousand election.

The Computer Revolution

At key moments in American history, transportation or communication breakthroughs transform our lives.
In the nineteen nineties, computer technology, especially personal computers in the Internet, changed how Americans communicated, shopped, and received information.
The computer industry quickly became lucrative and supplanted the car and steel industries as the engines that drove American prosperity.
Computer giants, Microsoft and Apple became powerful corporations.

The Internet's Evolution

Virtual business meetings emerged.
Office workers working in the same building could send a stream of emails to each other throughout the day rather than phoning each other or delivering a message in person.
Many companies replaced paper records with computer databases that stored commercial and personal data.
A generation of youth hooked on computer games alarmed commentators who worried that their sedentary lifestyle was fueling an epidemic of childhood obesity.

Medical and Terroristic Uses

The Internet could be great for the medical community to research a medical condition, but it could also be used to help terrorists publicize their cause and their violence around the world.

Cultural Issues

LGBTQ Rights

A new front over civil rights has emerged in the last three decades, over the LGBTQ community.
Fundamentalist churches opposed legislation granting LGBTQ folks legitimacy, and they lobbied strongly for laws that prevented homosexuals from teaching in public schools, adopting children.
A much more insidious challenge loomed ahead in 1981, when Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) emerged.

AIDS Crisis

In The United States, AIDS disproportionately struck gay individuals, the nation viewed the epidemic as more than a public health crisis.
Religious conservatives viewed AIDS as god's retribution.
AIDS patients told heartbreaking stories of losing their jobs, being turned away from hospital emergency rooms, and facing eviction from apartments by landlords who feared that they would contaminate them.
The gay community lobbied vigorously for increased federal funds to find a medical cure for the disease.
Larry Kramer worked to popularize the safe sex message that eventually gained currency in the gay community.

Competing Voices

One was humanizing AIDS victims and drawing attention to the mounting death toll.
The AIDS Memorial Quilt began touring the country.
Squares were the size of a human grave, and they portrayed a mixture of embroidered personal remembrances and treasured possessions like jewelry, for example.
Radical activists adopted a less poignant and more militant tone. Embracing the slogan silence equals death.

ACT UP

The AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power also known as ACT UP staged its first funeral demonstration in 1987 to demand better medical treatment.
These, quote, unquote, funeral demonstrations involve protesters laying down on busy streets like Wall Street in New York City until police carried them away, employing the same civil disobedience tactics used by the civil rights movement in the nineteen sixties.
On 09/14/1989, '7 ACT UP members handcuffed themselves to the balcony of the New York Stock Exchange to protest the huge profits that Burroughs Welcome, a pharmaceutical company, had amassed selling AZT, which was the only drug then available to inhibit the progression of AIDS.

Post AIDS

By 1996, a drug cocktail dramatically reduced AIDS related deaths, And a relentless safe sex campaign and increased screening of donated blood also lowered the infection rate.
Even though the development of a successful drug cocktail, to combat AIDS in the mid nineties, came to, you know, dramatically increase the long term prospects and life expectancies of those afflicted with the disease, new problems loomed on the horizon.
Controversies over LGBTQ rights overlapped in many ways with the growing economic power and social status of women.

The Changing Family

More and more women entered the workforce in the eighties and nineties.
In 1998, '40 '7 percent of American families were in unmarried households compared to just 26% in 1972.
Gender roles within families also changed.
Most married couples worked outside of the home.
Changing family structures prompted debates between the new right and liberal democrats.

Defense of Marriage Act

While many Americans were willing to tolerate same sex couples living together, people on both ends of the political spectrum drew the line at marriage.
In 1996, Congress passed the Defense of Marriage Act, a law that defined marriage as a legal union between a man and a woman.
Under this statute, states that banned same sex marriages did not have to accept legal marriages performed in other states.
On 02/2011, only Massachusetts, Connecticut, Vermont, New Hampshire, Iowa, DC, and New York allowed same sex marriages.
Today, LGBTQ rights remain in deep peril. Violence disproportionately affects transgender folks, particularly transgender women of color.

2015: Obergefell v Hodges

It would only be with the passage of the Overfell decision in 2015 that gay marriage would be that struck down the Defense of Marriage Act, that gay marriage would become a reality nationwide.

Immigration

Another issue that has inflamed the cultural wars in this country is immigration.
Johnson eliminates the immigration quotas that had been first established with the Johnson Reed Act in 1924.
After congress eliminates that law in 1965, a new wave of immigrants come to United States.
Most of these new immigrants came from Asia, Africa, and Latin America.
Hundreds of thousands more entered the country via illegal means.
There are also cultural concerns.
The conservative movement in particular feared dire cultural consequences if the nation fragmented into what they believe were permanent ethnic enclaves.
And there were movements in the nineteen nineties that arose to make English the nation's official language, protecting the nation's cultural cohesion.

Immigration and the Workforce

Both Democrats and Republicans worried that immigrants who are willing to work for less and take jobs that other that native born Americans often didn't want, there was fears that they were taking there were nonetheless fears that they were taking immigrants were taking away jobs from native born workers.
Critics especially criticized illegal immigration, arguing that people who snuck across the border often violated other laws as well.
Unions complained that undocumented workers could not join labor unions, which made it more difficult to organize labor and to improve working conditions and wages.

Supporters of Immigration

Champions of immigration pointed to the nation's past success in assimilating immigrants and argued that immigrants took low paying jobs that few Americans wanted.
Complaints about multiculturalism were seen as a racist attempt to protect The United States as a primarily white society.
The great replacement theory argues that immigration is a ploy to dilute the power of native born whites.
Debates about whether immigration is championed, avoided, or tightly regulated continue to dominate our public discourse today.

The Clinton Legacy: Neoliberalism

The weakened Democratic presidencies of Carter and Clinton shows that liberalism, as it had been defined by the New Deal coalition from 1932 to 1968, was on the defensive.
Conservatives were winning the ideological war that held that government programs were a drain on the public dole, that government programs incentivized laziness, incentivized a poor work ethic.
This new ethos of small government that began during the Reagan administration furthered by Newt Gingrich's contract with America will reach fruition in many cases with the presidency of George w Bush in February.
Capitalism and free markets become staples of both major political parties in ways that they had not been for most of the twentieth century.

Foreign Policy in the 1990s and Beyond

Clinton Foreign Policy

The Cold War is over in 1991.
In the nineteen nineties, the nation faced new foreign policy dilemmas.
In particular, whether or not the nation should intercede on humanitarian grounds to stop massacres in parts of the world that were not strategically important to The United States.
In 1992, for example, images of a civil war induced famine in Somalia flooded American airwaves and newspapers.
President George h w Bush responded to the public outcry over these images by sending US Troops to help restore order to provide aid, which president Bill Clinton continued.
Public opinion shifted dramatically in 1993, however, when news cameras captured the image of cheering Somalis dragging the corpse corpse of an American soldier through the streets of Mogadishu after rebel Somali warlords had downed a US Blackhawk helicopter.
The United States withdrew its troops from Somalia.
Clinton removing very reluctantly when humanitarian crises sprouted up again (as happened in the Rwandan Genocide).

Somalia (and Its Blowback):

The episode in Somalia influenced Osmana Bin Laden who concluded that the United States had a preference of being risk adverse to minimize casualties.
During his first years in office, Bill Clinton also had to respond to the phenomenon of ethnic cleansing, the intentional mass killing of one ethnic group by another in the Balkans, a mountainous region of Southeastern Europe.
Clinton resisted intervening until July 1995 when Serbian forces forced 25,000 Bosnian Muslim women and children to leave the town of Serbrenica and murdered the 7,500 Muslim men and boys who remained behind.
The United States would then participate in NATO airstrikes and helped broker a peace accord.
Preoccupied with these humanitarian tragedies overseas, Americans paid less attention in the early nineteen nineties to signs that the terrorist threat was moving closer and closer to home.

The 1993 WTC Bombing:

Many Arabs saw The United States and Israel as one, blaming both for taking away land that belonged to Palestinians.
In 1993, Kuwaiti and Iraqi born terrorists exploded a massive car bomb in the parking garage of the World Trade Center.
The explosion killed six people and created a six story hole in the ground.

9/11 - A Fundamental Rupture Point

President George w Bush immediately announced that the American government would make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them.
The Taliban refused, and Bush received overwhelming support from congress, the American people, and foreign nations when The United States unilaterally attacked Afghanistan in February.
But the two month conflict failed to capture Bin Laden, who escaped into neighboring Pakistan and would live on for another decade.

The War on Terror and Abu Ghraib

Americans supported the invasion of Afghanistan, but many grew increasingly uneasy about how the Bush administration was conducting the so called global war on terror.
Critics worried that Bush and his administration were condoning torture by allowing CI agents to use waterboarding, which is an interrogation technique that simulates drowning, to try and extract information from captured Al Qaeda suspects held prisoner at The US Naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
The decision to incarcerate captured prisoners indefinitely and deny them the right to a fair trial aroused controversy.
In response to the controversy surrounding Guantanamo Bat, the Bush administration created the Department of Homeland Security and approved the Patriot Act, in which expanded government power. (Critics would eventually see the government acting unconstitutionally).
In the weeks after the nine eleven attack, the FBI arrested hundreds of Arabs and Muslims in an effort to destroy any remaining Al Qaeda cells in The United States.
Thousands of Arab Americans, like Japanese Americans in World War two, would hang American flags outside their businesses to counter suspicions that all Muslims were terrorists.
America's War On Terror soon spread to Iraq.

Bush's Doctrines, Iraq, and the Run-Up to War

Containing Saddam Hussein's ambition to acquire weapons of mass destruction had been an ongoing goal since the end of the Persian Gulf War.
Neoconservatives who take office in the Bush administration make removing Saddam Hussein a primary goal of American foreign policy.
Included people like Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and Vice President Dick Cheney.
These advisers would urge a new doctrine called the Bush doctrine.
The Bush doctrine would champion preemptive war.
The unilateral right to attack nations that harbored terrorists, to launch preemptive military strikes to prevent future attacks on The United States to replace autocratic governments with democratically elected ones.
The Bush doctrine first comes into play in Iraq.

False Claims and Justification

In building his case for invading Iraq, President Bush repeatedly claimed that Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction and that Hussein had links to terrorist organizations, including Al Qaeda, which had been responsible for nine eleven.
Bush viewed that deposing Saddam Hussein was a key American foreign policy goal, falsely claiming that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction and that Saddam was responsible for the 9/11 attacks, even though he had little evidence.

Bush and the War Efforts (A Summary)

The Iraq war initially followed an intense bombing campaign followed by a ground invasion.
No weapons of mass destruction were found.
Iraq then elected a democratic government struggles to contain ethic and religious strife.
US Soldiers became an occupying force for the next eight years, and they would come under daily attack.
American national interests was to build a stable democratic and militarily weakened Iraq.
Some critics argue that Bush misled the American people by making false claims about WMDs and about Saddam's ties to Al Qaeda.

The Growing Threats to the Economy and Planet

The computer revolution, shifting demographics, the rise of global terrorism, ethnic cleansing, were not the only factors changing Americans' daily lives.
Scientists also increasingly worried about accelerating climate change.
Environmental scientists claimed that average temperatures have risen about 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit over the last one hundred years, a phenomenon called global warming.
The current global temperature has actually increased to about 1.2 degrees Celsius, which is about 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit above preindustrial levels.
Global warming or climate change was attributed to the widespread burning of fossil fuels like coal and oil that pumped c o two into the air.
C o two or carbon dioxide was one of several greenhouse gases that trapped the sun's heat in the Earth's atmosphere.
The United States is historically the world's greatest emitter of carbon dioxide.

Is the US Morally Responsible?

This raises a key question. Is The United States responsible, morally responsible, to developing nations in places like Africa, Southeast Asia, who are going to bear the brunt of climate change related disasters, migrations, droughts, flooding, even though these nations have emitted relatively little c o two?
Why does global warming matter?
For one, the Arctic ice cap is melting at an alarming rate.

Environmental Concerns:

The melting of the Earth's ice caps causing sea levels to rise.
Rising waters threaten to inundate Coastal cities.
Climate change has affected rainfall patterns and storms that increase droughts, wildfires, and hurricanes.
Denial is evident in the fact that George w Bush administration refused to ratify the Kyoto Protocol.
A consensus has begun to emerge that the ongoing American presence in the Middle East bred resentment among Arab populations that helped Islamist terrorists recruit members.
Republican champion in bolstering oil production at home by lifting restrictions on things like drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge or off seas.
The IPCC report noted that the world has a decade to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels.

The 2008 Election and Obama's Rise

George w Bush's administration was quite unpopular by 02/2007.
Barack Obama, a little known black politician, represented Illinois in the senate against an established figure in the Republican Party, John McCain.
Obama pledged transformative changes in the way the country operated, ending the war in Iraq, rolling back Bush's tax cuts for the wealthy.
Obama managed to draw enthusiastic support from whites, blacks, young and old, Hispanic and Asian.
Obama managed to draw enthusiastic support from whites, blacks, young and old, Hispanic and Asian.
On 11/04/2008, Obama became the first black president of The United States by winning a decisive victory.

Great Recession Causes and the State of the Economy

The causes for the Great Recession as it has become known are varied and multifaceted.
It was largely due to relaxed regulations of financial institutions, risky investment behaviors, risky Wall Street speculation.
Many took advantage of risky but easily accessible mortgage policies that appeal to borrowers with low incomes or poor credit ratings.
Many homeowners found themselves owing banks and mortgage companies more than their homes were worth and wound up in foreclosure.
Wealth remained concentrated in the hands of a relative few, making it extremely difficult to support an