Terrorism, War, and Bush 43: Crash Course US History #46 episode transcript - U.S. History by Crash Course

View all full transcripts of U.S. History by Crash Course on the blog: view now

Do you like podcasts? Go to PodExtra AI homepage (podextra.ai) to play and view complete AI-processed content of podcasts: summaries, mindmaps, topics, takeaways, transcripts, keywords and highlights.

Terrorism, War, and Bush 43: Crash Course US History #46

From: U.S. History by Crash Course

In which John Green teaches you about the tumultuous 2000s in the United States of America, mainly the 2000s that coincide with the presidency of George W Bush. From the controversial election in 2000 to the events of 9/11 and Bush's prosecution of the War on Terror, the George W. Bush presidency was an eventful one. John will teach you about Bush's domestic policies like tax cutting and education reform, and he'll get into the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The event that came to pass during Bush's presidency are still very much affecting the United States and the world today, so listen up!

Full Transcript

Terrorism, War, and Bush 43 Crash Course US History 46

speaker01 00:00:00

Hi I'm John Green, this is Crash Course us history and today we've done it. We've finally reached the 21st century. Today we boldly go where no history course has gone before because your teacher ran out of time and never made it to the present. So if you're preparing for the AP test, it's unlikely that today's video will be helpful to you because, you know, they never get to this stuff.

speaker01 00:20:00

Is green awesome free period from the past? There's no such thing as a free period. There's only time and how you choose to use it. Also me from the past, where in your future, hold on I to take this stuff off? It's hard to take me seriously with that. Where in the future for you, which means that you are learning important things about the you who does not yet exist? You know about Lady Gaga, Kanye and Kim Bieber? Well, you're not going to find out about any of those things because this is a history class, but it's still going to be interesting.

speaker01 00:56:00

So the presidency of George WW Bush may not end up on your AP ex, but it's very important when it comes to understanding the United States that we live in today.

speaker01 01:04:00

The controversy starts with the 2000 election. Democratic presidential candidate Al I invented the Internet. Gore was sitting vice president and he asked Bill Clinton not to campaign much because a lot of voters kind of hated Bill Clinton. The Republican candidate was George W Bush, governor of Texas, and unlike his father, a reasonably authentic Texan. You know, as people from Connecticut go. Bush was a former oil guy and baseball team owner, and he was running as a compassionate conservative, which meant he was organizing a coalition, religious people and fiscal conservatives. And that turned out to be a very effective coalition.

speaker01 01:39:00

And George W and Bush got a lot of votes. He did not, however, get as many votes as Al Gore, but as you'll know, doubt remember from earlier in crash course us history in the United States, presidential elections are not decided by popular vote.

speaker01 01:51:00

They are decided by the Electoral College. So the election was incredibly close. It solidified the red, blue divide that has become a trope for politicians 2. And in the end Gore won the popular vote by about 500000 votes.

speaker01 02:04:00

However Al Gore did not have the necessary electoral votes to become president unless he won Florida, did he win Florida? I don't even want to go there. In Florida, the vote was ridiculously close. But George W Bush had a gigantic advantage, which is that his brother, Jeb Bush, was the governor of Florida when it came to certify the election. Jeff was like, yeah, my brother won, no big deal.

speaker01 02:26:00

But then the Gore campaign sued to have a recount by hand, which is allowed under Florida law. But then Bush's lawyers asked the Supreme Court to intervene, and they did. Their decision in Bush vs Gore remains rather controversial. They ruled that the recount should be stopped interfering with the state law and also the state's electoral process, which is a weird decision for strict constructionists to make. However, one of the strong points of the United States these past couple centuries has been that sometimes we have the opportunity to go to war over whether this person or that person should be president, and we choose not to.

speaker01 02:56:00

So regardless of whether you think the recount should have gone on or George W Bush should have been elected, he was. And he set to work implementing his campaign promises, including working on a missile defense system that was very similar to Star Wars. And that was Ronald Reagan. Star Wars, not George Lucas and Star Wars. Man, if we could get a federally funded new star Star Wars trilogy, that doesn't suck, that would be awesome.

speaker01 03:16:00

Anyway, in the first hundred days of his presidency Bush also barred federal funding for stem cell research and he supported oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. And speaking of environmental policy, the Bush administration announced that it would not by the 1997 Kyoto Protocol on carbon emissions, and that didn't go over well with environmentalists in the us or in all of these green parts of North America because they were like, you guys made all the carbon, which we said this is America. Bush also attempted education reform with the No Child Left Behind Act, which mandated that states implement rigorous standards and testing regimes to prove that those standards were being met. No Child Left Behind Act is especially controversial with teachers who are great friends of Crash Course us history, so we will say nothing more. Most importantly, George W Bush pushed through the largest tax cut in American history in 2001, claiming that putting more money in Americans pockets would stimulate growth in an economy it had stumbled after the bursting of the dot com bubble in 2000.

speaker01 04:17:00

Oh, it's time for the mystery document. The rules here are simple, I guess. The author, the mystery document, I either get it right or I get shocked with the shock pen. All right, what do we got here today? I got a feeling it's going to be a sad one.

speaker01 04:33:00

It was a beautiful fall day with a crisp blue sky. I was coming into work late that day. I guess I didn't have first period class, it was only the 2nd or third day of school when I emerged from the subway. Union Square was strangely quiet, which only added to the beauty of the day.

speaker01 04:48:00

People were standing still, which is weird in New York under any circumstances, and looking down University Place toward Willer, Manhattan, before I even looked, I asked a passerby what had happened. She or he don't remember, said that a plane had crashed into the Trade Center. Then I looked and saw the smoke billowing out of the south tower. I thought it was an accident, but I knew this was not going to be an easy day. Well, it's obviously someone who was in New York City on September 11, 2001 only narrows it down to like 10 million people. However, I happen to know that it is Crash Course Historian in my high school history teacher Raoul Meyer, who wrote that account.

speaker01 05:23:00

This is the saddest I have ever been to not be shocked. So whether George Bush's domestic policy would of work is up for debate, but the events of September 11, 2001 ensured that foreign policy would dominate any discussion of the opening decade of the 21st century.

speaker01 05:36:00

That morning, terrorists affiliated with al Qaeda hijacked four airliners. Two planes were were 1200 and to Manhattan's World Trade Center. A third was crashed into the Pentagon in Washington, and a fourth also headed for Washington DC crashed in Pennsylvania when passengers overpowered the hijackers. Almost 3000 people died, including almost 400 policemen in five firefighters as Americans rushed to help in the search for survivors and to build a devastated city, a shared sense of trauma and a desire to show resolve really did bring the country together.

speaker01 06:07:00

President Bush's popularity soar in the wake of the attacks. And in a speech on September 20, the president told Americans watching on television that the terrorists had targeted America, quote, because we love freedom and they hate freedom. This is another critical moment in American history where the definition of freedom is being reimagined. And we were reminded in the wake of September 11 that one of the central things of government does to keep us free is to keep us safe, but at the same time, ensuring our safety sometimes means impinging upon our freedom and the question of how to keep America safe while also preserving our civil liberties is one of the central questions of the 21st century.

speaker01 06:42:00

At any rate, in that September 20 th speech, the president announced a new guiding principle in foreign policy that became known as the Bush doctrine.

speaker01 06:49:00

America would go to war with terrorism, making no distinction between the terrorists and the nations that harbored them. Bush laid out the terms for the world that night. Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists. But that dichotomy, of course, would prove to be a bit of an oversimplification.

speaker01 07:05:00

So on October 7, the United States launched its first airstrikes on Afghanistan, which at the time was ruled by a group of Islamic fundamentalists called the Taliban, who were protecting Osama bin Laden, al Qaeda's leader. This was followed by American ground troops supporting the anti-stalking Bank Northern Alliance in chasing out the Taliban and setting up a new Afghan government that was friendly to the United States. This new government undid many of the worst Taliban policies, for instance, women and girls to go to school and even to serve in the parliament. More women than girls in the parliament, naturally. But by 2007, the Taliban was beginning to make a comeback. And although fewer than 100 Americans died in the initial phase of the war, a sizable force remained. And in the ensuing 12 years, the number of Americans killed would continue to rise.

speaker01 07:46:00

And then by January 2002 Bush had expanded the scope of the global war on terror by proclaiming that Iran, Iraq, and North Korea were a, quote, axis of E that harbored terrorists, even though none of those nations had direct ties to the September 11 attack, the ultimate goal of the Bush doctrine was to make the world safe for freedom and also to spread it.

speaker01 08:06:00

And freedom was defined as consisting of political democracy, free expression, religious toleration, free trade, and free markets, freedoms. Bush said were right and true for every person in every society. And there's no question that the Saddam Hussein led Iraq of 2003 was not by any of those definitions free, but the 2003 invasion of Iraq by the United States was predicated on two ideas. First, that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, chemical and biological weapons that they were refusing to give up, and second, that there was, or at least may have been a link between Saddam Hussein's Iraq and the al Qaeda attacks of 9 11. So in March 2003, the United States, Britain, and a coalition of other countries invaded Iraq. Within a month, Baghdad was captured. Saddam Hussein was oustanding, created a new government that was more Democratic than Saddam's dictate, and then descended into sectarian chaos.

speaker01 08:56:00

After Baghdad fell. President Bush declared the end of major combat up in Iraq, but troops soon found themselves trying to manage an increasingly organized insurgency that featured attacks and bombings. And by 2006, American intelligence analysts concluded that Iraq had become a haven for Islamist terrorists, which it hadn't. And before the invasion, in fact, Saddam Hussein's socialist government, while it occasionally called upon religion to unify people against an enemy, was pretty secular, although fewer than 200 Americans had died in the initial assaults by the end of 2006, more than 3000 American soldiers had been killed and another 20000 wounded. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis had died in the conflict, and the costs of the war, which were promised to be no more than 60 billion, had ballooned to $200 billion.

speaker01 09:40:00

So that and we try very hard here at Crash Course to be objective, was a bit of a disaster.

speaker01 09:45:00

But let's now go back to the domestic side of things and jump back in time to the passage of the USA Patriot Act, which, believe it or not, is an acronym for the Uniting and Strengthening America by providing appropriate tools required to intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001 Congress. You don't pass many laws these days, but when you do, there's some winners. The Patriot Act gave the government unprecedented law enforcement powers to combat domestic terrorism, including the ability to wiretap and spy on Americans at least 5000 people connected to the Middle East were called in for quite and more than 1200 were arrested, many held for months without any charge. The administration also set up a camp for accused terrorists in Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, but not the fun kind of camp, the prison kind. It housed more than 700 suspects, The president also authorized the National Security Agency to listen into telephone conversations without first obtaining a warrant, the so itca AED warrantless wiretapping in 2013, Americans learned that NSA surveillance has, of course, gone much further than this with surveillance programs like Prism, which sounds like it's out of an Orwell novel.

speaker01 10:53:00

I mean, both like the name and the actual thing that it refers to mere. This would like us to point out that Prism is also the of a Katy Perry album proving that we here at Crash Course are young and hip. And with it, who is Katy Perry? She has that song in Madagascar, 3 little.

speaker01 11:11:00

The Supreme Court eventually limited the executive branches power and ruled that enemy combatants do have some procedurals. Congress also banned the use of torture in 2005 defense appropriations bill sponsored by Republican John McCain, who himself had been a victim of torture in Vietnam. But the Defense Department did condone the continued use of so icall the enhanced interrogation techniques like waterboarding, which most countries Duke considered torture.

speaker01 11:36:00

But George W H Bush won reelection in 2004, defeating the surprisingly weak John Kerry, who was characterized as a waffler on a number of issues, including the Iraq war Carrie's history as a Vietnam protester and also terrible wind surfer probably didn't help him much. Bush's victory is still a bit surprising to historians.

speaker01 11:53:00

Admittedly, at that moment, the Iraq War seemed to be going pretty well, but during Bush's first term, the economy, which is usually what really drives voters, wasn't that great at all.

speaker01 12:02:00

The recession began during 2001, and the September 11 attacks made it much worse. And while the GDP did begin to grow again relatively quickly, employment didn't recover. Hence, all the description of it is a jobless recovery. 90% of the jobs lost in the 2001, 2002 recession were in manufacturing, continuing a trend that we've been seeing for 30 years. The number of steel workers dropped from 520000 in 1970 to 120000 in 2004. And in his first term, George W and Bush actually became the first president since Herbert Hoover to oversee a net loss of jobs. Clear that that's not necessarily his fault. As I have said many times before, economics are complicated and presidents do not decide whether economies grow.

speaker01 12:45:00

But at any rate, George W Bush was re-elected and went on to have an extremely controversial second term in 2005.

speaker01 12:52:00

Several events undermine the public's confidence in the Bush administration. First, Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff was indicted, perjury, and then House Majority Leader Tom the Hammer delay was indicted for violating campaign finance laws. Then in August 2005 Hurricane Katrina slammed into the Gulf Coast near New Orleans, submerging much of the city, killing nearly 1500 people and leaving thousands stranded. Without basic services, disaster preparation and response was poor on the state, local, and federal levels, but the slow response of the Department of Homeland Security and Federal Emergency Management Agency was particularly noticeable as thousands of mostly African American New Orleans residents suffered without food or water. Damage to the city was estimated at around $80 billion, and the Katrina disaster also exposed the persistent poverty and racial divisions in the city, while the Katrina response probably contributed to the reversal of fortune for congressional Republicans in the 2006 midterms, it was more likely the spike in gasoline prices that resulted from the shutting down of refining capacity in the Gulf and increased demands for oil from rapidly growing China voters. Majorities in both houses and Nancy Pelosi of California became the first woman speaker of the House in American history and then in 2007 the country fell back into recession as a massive housing bubble began to deflate of the American banking system in 2008.

speaker01 14:17:00

Thought bubble, thank you once again for the tremendous downer. So the Bush years are still in the recent past, and it's impossible to tell just what their historical significance is without some distance the attack.

speaker01 14:28:00

September 11 had far ranging effects on American foreign policy, but also on the entire world. Under the leadership of George W and Bush, the United States began a global fight against terrorism and for freedom. But as always is what we mean by those words is evolve. And there's no question that in trying to ensure a certain kind of freedom, we have undermined other kinds of freedom. We'll get to the even messier and murkier world of the 2008 financial collapse next week. Until then, thanks for watching.

speaker01 14:55:00

Crash Course is made of all of these nice people, and it exists because of your support through some com, a voluntary subscript service that allows you to subscribe monthly to Crash Course for the price of your choosing. They great perks, but the biggest perk of all is knowing that you help make Crash Course possible, so please check it out. Thank you for watching, thanks for supporting Crash Course, and as we say in my hometown, don't forget to be awesome.