President Bush, Do the Right Thing: Endorse Harris

You did much to defend America against international threats to freedom. You must now help us defeat the domestic threat.

Former U.S. President George W. Bush looks on before kickoff between the Dallas Cowboys and New York Giants at AT&T Stadium on November 12, 2023 in Arlington, Texas. (Photo by Cooper Neill/Getty Images)

I SERVED FOR NEARLY 1,500 DAYS in Iraq and Afghanistan under Presidents Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden. However, I spent the most time deployed—and, more importantly, in the field—under former President Bush’s administration.

I went downrange for the first time in 2006 as part of a police transition team tasked with training the Iraqi police. It turned out to be the most dangerous place on the battlefield. Iranian-backed Shia militants had infested the ranks of those we were meant to train, and our “partners” were openly trying to kill us. Even though we confiscated their phones before every patrol, we routinely got ambushed, and our “partners” fled each time. Those of us who survived bear visible and invisible scars, many of them the result of witnessing the sorts of things that one witnesses during a civil war: gang rapes, torture, complex suicide bombers, and some events that I still cannot write about because when I do, I break down and weep.

Despite the horrors of that deployment, I volunteered to go to Afghanistan in 2008 as part of a provincial reconstruction team. By 2008, President Bush’s decision to fire Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had yielded tangible results in Iraq. In Afghanistan, however, the storm clouds were on the horizon. The Taliban, with Pakistani ISI support, were inflicting casualties across the battlefield—and off it. At the beginning of that year, six people died when a hotel in Kabul was bombed; Sirajuddin Haqqani, now the Taliban government’s first deputy leader and interior minister, planned the attack.

While my team tried mightily to expand the nascent Islamic Republic’s reach to the hinterlands, the Taliban responded by killing my contractors who were trying to improve roads for all Afghans. They also killed my good friend, Capt. Jesse Melton, and a member of my team, Senior Airman Jonathan Yelner, and they left my interpreter, Ritchie, who is now an American citizen, a double amputee. We endured unimaginable hardship because we believed in the mission—in freedom, security, and peace.

Despite all that heartache and despair, I fondly remember President Bush’s time in office. While President Bush made some terrible mistakes, I never doubted his desire to win both wars. I cannot say the same about Presidents Obama, Trump, or Biden. Moreover, unlike former President Trump, Bush did not seek to divide the nation. In the tense days that followed 9/11, he said Islam was a religion of peace, which undoubtedly helped prevent large-scale retaliatory violence against American Muslims. And while we must acknowledge and reckon with the battlefield excesses and crimes committed during the War on Terror, we can't let this reckoning prevent us from acting decisively in the present.

Bush will never go down as one of America’s greatest presidents, but I would take him over his successors. He joined with Sen. Ted Kennedy to implement No Child Left Behind, which met with varying degrees of success, but was a good-faith effort to solve one of our country’s major long-term challenges. Other Bush-era programs were unqualified successes: PEPFAR, a massive initiative focused on combating HIV and AIDS, saved tens of millions of lives and resulted in an average 2.1 percent rise in GDP for participating countries. While historians will judge him harshly for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, I firmly believe his reputation will continue to climb as the years pass.

But a president’s greatness is measured not only by his time in office, but also by his time outside of office. President Jimmy Carter will never be regarded as one of America’s great presidents, but his humanitarian work over the last several decades has become an important part of his legacy. 

President Bush has an opportunity to improve his legacy right now. He should follow Vice President Dick Cheney’s lead and heed Liz Cheney’s recent call to support Vice President Kamala Harris for president.

President Bush owes it to the combat veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to support Vice President Harris. He repeatedly sent me and thousands of America’s sons and daughters into harm’s way to advance his Freedom Agenda to establish and maintain freedom abroad. He should uphold the same ideal on the home front and endorse the candidate in this year’s election who represents the best chance to preserve freedom in America.

Vice President Harris is not a conservative. But she’s also not a convicted felon who tried to overturn the results of a legitimate election. President Bush surely understands the danger that President Trump represents. The future of NATO hangs in the balance. Should the Republican ticket prevail, is there any doubt that President Trump will repeat the mistakes of the disastrous Doha Agreement by betraying our Ukrainian allies to their Russian foes? Should he do that, some of the very same NATO soldiers that I fought alongside in Afghanistan—especially Polish and Romanian troops—would be on the frontlines in Eastern Europe.

Bush’s Republican party is no more. And he and other “compassionate conservatives” will never have a seat at Trump’s table, nor should they want one. As Sen. John McCain did before him, it’s time for President Bush to put the country first, and to join with even his critics and enemies in opposing Trump’s threat to American democracy.

It’s time for Bush to show political courage and endorse Vice President Kamala Harris. She’s not perfect. She’s not my preferred choice. But as President Bush is well aware, you go to war with the allies you have, not the ones you’d prefer to have.

President Bush, it’s time for you to help preserve our republic again—not from a foreign enemy this time, but a domestic one.