The Bush Interview

The obligatory trip round the Oval Office is now so much of a ritual that he approaches it with the wry, self-mocking tone of an ersatz tour guide.

It’s an executive office, he points out, a place where decisions are made. “So the first decision I had to make was what colour the rug should be.”

The next thing he learnt about the presidency, he says, is the importance of delegating: “So I asked Laura to design it.”

It is, he notes, a soft yellow, like the radiance of the rising Sun. “It says an optimistic person works here.”

His mood alters, though, as he turns from the brilliantine carpet to the brooding figures that adorn his walls — great war leaders in whom he obviously seeks inspiration. Abraham Lincoln looks down from his wall beside the main entrance. On the other side of the room a bust of Winston Churchill, a personal gift of Tony Blair to the current occupant, stares across at today’s successor to Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Mr Bush added a bust of President Eisenhower. It sits to the left of his desk, made from the timbers of HMS Resolute, a Victorian transport ship, another gift from the British. You’re probably the only people in here for whom I don’t need to explain what ‘HMS’ means,” he says. “My Texas friends have no idea what I’m talking about when I tell them.”

As expansive as he is, Mr Bush can’t help betraying a faint irritation at the intrusiveness of the modern media, with a reference to a famous brief medical emergency from a couple of years ago.

He points out the door in the well of the presidential desk, placed there by President Roosevelt to hide the fact that he spent his presidency in a wheelchair. “FDR was in a wheelchair and nobody knows. I choke on a pretzel and the whole world gets to hear about it.”

Across from the presidential desk, a portrait of the very first war leader of the United States, George Washington.

“He’s always been there,” Mr Bush notes. “No choice, really; the father of the nation. Had to be there. Rutherford B. Hayes just wouldn’t work,” he quips.

For all the geniality and joviality these are clearly rough times for America’s President and the strains of four and a half years of office are wearing steadily deeper creases into his face. He remains fit; a keen mountain biker, looking forward, he says, to riding around Gleneagles, if he gets the chance. But the stresses of the office are pressing harder than ever these days.

He has just returned late the previous night from Fort Bragg in North Carolina, where in addition to making his set-piece defence of the Iraq war, he met bereaved families of servicemen killed in the Middle East.

Mr Bush is beset now by rough political currents; faltering public support for the Iraq war; a domestic agenda that is going nowhere fast in Congress; the lowest opinion poll ratings of his presidency.

For all second-term presidents, political mortality is more evident with each day that passes. Oddly, hemmed in by tightening domestic political constraints and the slow but remorseless shift of public attention away from them towards the competition to be their successor, they can find themselves struggling to count.

The usual pattern is to turn towards the rest of the world, where presidents can wield America’s largely untrammelled power.

But for President Bush, foreign affairs offer no respite from his struggles, no freedom of manoeuvre; indeed they are the main focus of his difficulties.

In the 40-minute session in the Oval Office yesterday, Mr Bush was clearly striving hard to maintain the momentum of the past six months, a diplomatic push to align America more closely with its allies without deviating from its national interests. He promised more assistance for Africa, now steadily rising with each new summit meeting; more movement to meet the rest of the world something close to halfway on climate change, a phrase Mr Bush himself, however, conspicuously avoids using, suggesting he hopes to find agreement on means even if there is little on the principles. He has polite diplomatic words on the political turmoil in Europe.

“It’s going to be of great interest to me to watch how the European Union deals with its current problems, but I believe they will, over time.”

But this war President is unflinching on the principal foreign policy challenge. He rejects the idea that the war in Iraq may actually be producing more terrorism, creating a place where eager jihadists are trained to plot murder around the world. And he remains messianic about his ambition of promoting democracy around the world — not only in the Middle East, but in Africa and Europe.

Perhaps most revealing is his response to a question about Iran. His words are polite but the President’s body language is eloquent. As I read him a quote from the latest rantings of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian President, and remind him that the Iranian President was a leader of the students who took Americans hostage in Tehran in 1979, he is visibly agitated. He glances at his advisers with a look of disgust that suggests that the chances of a diplomatic solution to the Iranian nuclear crisis are remoter than ever.

The formal interview over, Mr Bush is once again in expansive mood. I am under firm instructions from my wife to pick up a souvenir of the trip and so I ask him if he would mind signing a picture of my daughters posed beside a cutout of Mr Bush himself.

“Oh, we can do better than that,” he says. He reaches into the drawer of the Resolute desk and diligently begins writing out greetings on presidential cards. I find myself in the faintly exhilarating position of dictating terms to the President of the United States; admittedly, only the names of each of my five children, but for a moment, it’s heady stuff.

Not content with dispensing the presidential autograph, Mr Bush reaches into a cabinet full of memorabilia and produces lapel pins and, for my colleague, a baseball with the presidential seal.

The shift to sport is an opportunity to ask him the question burning in the minds of many British people — what does he think of the takeover of Manchester United by Malcolm Glazer, the US sports franchise owner? “I read about that on ESPN.com,” he says.

But he is non-committal, so I ask him if, as a former owner of a baseball team, he would have liked a piece of an English cricket club. “I never watched cricket. I did play rugby at Yale, though — at full back,” he volunteers.

And as he reminisces fondly about his sporting youth, a remarkable realisation dawns: this most punctual President has waxed way beyond the scheduled time for our visit.

This is an edited transcript of the interview:

PRESIDENT BUSH: Looking forward to the G8. First of all, I enjoy the experience of working with leaders. I’m fond of Tony Blair, I like being around him. I like to be with all the leaders. I find it to be a heady experience and it energises me.

Secondly, I’m looking forward to the topics. There will be discussions other than the well-known topics. Hopefully discuss the Palestinian peace. Hopefully we’ll talk the freedom agenda. I look forward to talking about Africa. We got a great record in Africa, and the reason we got a great record in Africa is that I believe in the admonition, “To whom much has been given, much is required.” I can’t wait to share ideas about what we can do going forward.

I’m looking forward to the discussion on climate. This is an opportunity to take the dialogue beyond Kyoto. I fully recognise my decision in Kyoto was unpopular. I had a reason for doing so. I’ve explained it for now three or four years. But there’s a lot we can do together. And we got a good record, and we got some important things to share. We’re spending a lot of money on research and development. We got a strategy to move forward. It is important to bring developing countries into the dialogue.

It’ll be a great opportunity to be able to discuss not only how we can be good stewards of the environment, but how we can develop strategies to become less dependent on hydrocarbons and fossil fuels. And I’m looking forward to getting back to Scotland, which is going to be a neat experience for me.

THE TIMES: Billions of dollars flow out of the US every year in trade and aid to the developing world. And that figure has risen significantly on your watch. But having said that, the US Government still gives only 0.16 per cent of its GDP to overseas aid. Is that enough?

PRESIDENT BUSH: We’ll make some more commitments. First of all, the way I like to describe our relationship with Africa is one of partnership. That’s different than a relationship of cheque-writer.

In other words, partnership means that we’ve got obligations and so do the people we are trying to help . . . we have a partnership when it comes to African growth and opportunity. When you really think about how to get wealth distributed, aid is one way but it doesn’t compare to trade and commerce. And we’ve opened up markets and we’re beginning to see a payoff, more commerce.

Americans want to deal with poverty and hunger. Disease. But they don’t want their money spent on governments that do not focus attention on health, education, markets, anti-corruption devices. I can’t, in good faith, say, let’s continue to be generous but I can’t guarantee the money is being spent properly. It’s just not good stewardship of our own money, nor is it effective in helping people. Our approach, as well, has been when we see disaster, let’s move in to help people . . . I mean, I could proudly proclaim at the G8 that the US feeds more of the hungry than any nation in the world.

It is important for people to understand that the contribution of the citizens of the United States is made not only through taxpayers’ money but through private contributions. Our tax system encourages people to do this. My point to our friends in the G8 and to the African nations is that each country differs as to how we structure our taxes and how we contribute to help. And our contribution has been significant and there will be some more.

THE TIMES: Mr President, one country there’s a little concern about, as you know, in Britain, particularly, is Zimbabwe.

PRESIDENT BUSH: Yeah.

THE TIMES: Which is headed by a brutal tyrant.

PRESIDENT BUSH: Yes, he is.

I think I’ve called him that. He’s ruined a wonderful country, a country that used to not only feed Africa — in other words, an exporter of food — and now an importer of food, because of (his) decisions.

THE TIMES: Should it be the responsibility of other African countries to do more to isolate that country, and should you make what they do a condition of rich countries giving them aid? And they don’t seem to take this seriously.

PRESIDENT BUSH: I think we ought to use the fact that we’re working in partnership with countries as an opportunity to convince Mugabe to make different decisions. On the other hand, I don’t think we ought to allow his tyranny to cause others to suffer on the continent of Africa. But I do think we ought to continue to speak clearly about the decisions he has made. And I do.

THE TIMES: On the other main G8 topic, climate change, do you believe the Earth is in fact getting warmer and, if so, do you believe that it is man who is making it warmer?

PRESIDENT BUSH: I believe that greenhouse gases are creating a problem, a long-term problem that we got to deal with. And step one of dealing with it is to fully understand the nature of the problem so that the solutions that follow make sense.

There’s an interesting confluence now between dependency upon fossil fuels from a national economic security perspective, as well as the consequences of burning fossil fuels for greenhouse gases. And that’s why it’s important for our country to do two things.

One is to diversify away from fossil fuels, which we’re trying to do. I think we’re spending more money than any collection of nations when it comes to not only research and development of new technologies, but of the science of global warming. You know, laid out an initiative for hydrogen fuel cells. We’re doing a lot of work on carbon sequestration. We hope to have zero emissions coal-fired electricity plants available for the United States as well as neighbours and friends and developing nations.

I’m a big believer that the newest generation of nuclear power ought to be a source of energy and we ought to be sharing these technologies with developing countries.

THE TIMES: Mr President, last night you mentioned the link between Iraq and 9/11, but there’s evidence of Iraq becoming a haven for jihadists, there’s been a CIA report which says that Iraq is in danger of — are you at risk of creating kind of more of the problems that actually led directly to —?

PRESIDENT BUSH: No. Quite the contrary. Where you win the war on terror is go to the battlefield and you take them off. And that’s what they’ve done. They’ve said, ‘Look, let’s go fight. This is the place.’ And that was my point. My point is that there is an ideology of hatred, an ideology that’s got a vision of a world where the extremists dictate the lives, dictate to millions of Muslims. They do want to topple governments in the Middle East. They do want us to withdraw. They’re interested in exporting violence. After all, look at what happened after September 11 (2001). One way for your readers to understand what their vision is is to think about what life was like under the Taleban in Afghanistan.

So we made a decision to protect ourselves and remove Saddam Hussein. The jihadists made a decision to come into Iraq to fight us. For a reason. They know that if we’re successful in Iraq, like we were in Afghanistan, that it’ll be a serious blow to their ideology. General (John) Abizaid (Commander of US forces in the Middle East) told me something very early in this campaign I thought was very interesting. Very capable man. He’s a Arab-American who I find to be a man of

great depth and understanding. When we win in Afghanistan and Iraq, it’s a beginning of the end. Talking about the war on terror. If we don’t win here, it’s the beginning of the beginning. And that’s how I view it.

We learnt first-hand the nature of the war on terror on September 11. And last time I went to Europe I said many in Europe viewed September 11 as a tragic moment, but a moment. I view September 11 as an attack as a result of a larger war that changed how I view the world and how many other Americans view the world. It was one of the moments in history that changed outlook. So as long as I’m sitting here in this Oval Office, I will never forget the lessons of September 11, and that is that we are in a global war against cold-blooded killers.

And you are seeing that now being played out in Iraq, and we’re going to win in Iraq and we’re going to win because, one, we’re going to find (Osama bin Laden) and bring him to justice, and two, we’re going to train Iraqis so they can do the fighting. Iraqis don’t want foreign fighters in their country, stopping the progress toward freedom. And the notion that people want to be free was validated by the over eight million people who voted.

Frankly, I rejected the intellectual elitism of some around the world who say, “Well, maybe certain people can’t be free”. I don’t believe that. Of course I was labelled a, you know, blatant idealist.

But I am. Because I do believe people want to be free, regardless of their religion or where they are from. I do believe women should be empowered in the Middle East. I don’t believe we ought to accept forms of government that ultimately create a hopelessness that then can be translated into jihadist violence. And I believe strongly that the ultimate way you defeat an ideology is with a better ideology. And history has proven that. Anyway, you got me going. Starting to give the whole speech again.

THE TIMES: Iran, quickly. About the new President. He was a ringleader of those who took Americans hostage in 1979. He said today, the wave of the Islamic revolution will soon reach the entire world. Is this the kind of guy you — the US and its European allies — can really do business with?

PRESIDENT BUSH: Time will tell. The first serious interface with the West will be on the EU-3 discussions about the nuclear ambitions of Iran. And our position is very clear. And that is, is that they should not be able to develop the technologies that will enable the enrichment of uranium which will ultimately yield a nuclear weapon.

I say that because they tried to do that clandestinely before, which obviously shows that there’s a conspiratorial nature in their thinking. And secondly, that their stated objective is the destruction of Israel.

In diplomacy, it’s important to establish common goals. Once you establish a common goal and common objective, it then makes it much easier to work together to achieve diplomatic ends. Our common goal is that Iran should not have a nuclear weapon.

THE TIMES: Tony Blair has taken great risks and shown great loyalty to you over the last four years, and on occasion at great cost to himself domestically. What have you done for him, and is it enough?

PRESIDENT BUSH: The decisions we have made have laid the foundation of peace for generations. His decision-making was based upon what he thought was best for the free world, for Great Britain and the free world.

What doesn’t happen in our relationship is we sit down here and calculate how best we can help each other personally. Our job is to represent something greater than that.

I admire Tony Blair because he’s a man of his word. I admire Tony Blair because he’s a leader with a vision, a vision that I happen to agree with. A vision that freedom is universal and freedom will lead to peace. I admire him because in the midst of political heat, he showed backbone. And you know, and so he’s been a good ally for America.

THE TIMES: Very quick question on Europe. Europe is in turmoil at the moment politically. Tony Blair takes over the presidency of the EU on Friday. He wants to push — he has a vision of an EU which is open, which is open to trade, which liberalises its markets, which is economically free and dynamic. And he’s got a struggle on his hands.

PRESIDENT BUSH: Yeah.

THE TIMES: You said you want a strong Europe. What’s your vision of a strong and integrated Europe?

PRESIDENT BUSH: My vision is one that is economically strong, where the entrepreneurial spirit is vibrant.

And the reason I say that is because Europe’s our largest trading partner. We trade a trillion a year.

Secondly, a strong Europe is one where we can work in common cause to spread freedom and democracy. A viable EU is very important for sending messages to places like the Ukraine, Georgia, Kosovo, that with the right decision-making by their governments that they are a part of the greater Europe, which is, I think, a really important role for the EU.

BUSH ON...

AFRICA

‘Americans want to deal with poverty. But they don’t want their money spent on governments that do not focus attention on health education’

WAR ON TERROR ‘So as long as I’m sitting here in this Oval Office, I will never forget the lessons of September 11, that we are in a global war against cold-blooded killers’

DEMOCRACY ‘Frankly, I rejected the intellectual elitism of some around the world who say, “Well, maybe certain people can’t be free.” I don’t believe that’

CLIMATE CHANGE ‘I’m looking forward to the discussion on climate. This is an opportunity to take dialogue beyond Kyoto . . . there’s a lot we can do together. And we got a good record’