SOMETHING has been bothering George W. Bush for a few months. No, it’s not (or at least it’s not only) the Iraqi quagmire or the renewed war in Afghanistan. Nor is it easy to imagine him missing a night’s sleep over the increasingly fraught situation in Palestine.

Does he ever lie back and worry about his flaccid approval ratings at home? If he’s been briefed about them, perhaps he does. But there’s one matter on which the boy-president, as he has been described, requires no briefing. It begins with a six and ends with the zero.

Yes, Bush turns 60 tomorrow, and there are indications that he has approached the personal milestone with a mixture of shock and awe. In his State of the Union address last January, he announced: “This year the first of about 78 million baby boomers turn 60, including two of my dad’s favourite people: President Clinton and me.”

The baby boom is deemed to stretch from 1946 to 1964, so George W. and Bill are among the first batch of baby boomers to be experiencing the joys of sexagenarianism, alongside a handful of other public figures such as Steven Spielberg, Dolly Parton, Donald Trump and Cher. It must feel somewhat sudden to someone who lived in something of a drug- and alcohol-fuelled haze until 20 years ago, and when he brought up the subject again during a speech at an Omaha college some weeks ago, it seemed almost like an exercise in self-reassurance.

“I know I’m not supposed to talk about myself, but in a month I’m turning 60,” he told the students. “For you youngsters, I want to tell you something. When I was your age, I thought 60 was really old. It’s all in your mind. It’s not that old. Really isn’t.” A commonplace dressed up as a profundity? Yes, but it seems the president wasn’t being disingenuous. The notion that there’s life beyond 60 — and that it’s not all that different from life after 50 — appears to have struck him only recently.

Hence, evidently, the inescapable introspection. He told a Minnesota audience in February: “I’m a bike guy, and I like to plug in music on my iPod when I’m riding along, to hopefully help me forget how old I am.” (One day last month, The Washington Post reported, Bush biked for two and a half hours at a Secret Service training facility in Beltsville.) In March he quipped to General Pervez Musharraf, “I’m getting kind of old these days.” Last month he thanked the governor of Nebraska for “taking time out of your schedule to say hello to the old president. Getting older by the minute, by the way.” And not long afterwards, following his secret foray into Baghdad, he described himself as “a little jet-lagged, as I’m sure you can imagine. Nearly 60.”

I’m sure not too many Americans — and even fewer people outside the US — would object if, unable to cope with the pressures of being over 60, Bush decided to opt for early retirement. Provided, of course, that he took the considerably older Dick Cheney with him. Why, many of us would even be willing to chip in towards a farewell present — perhaps a stack of photo albums containing headshots of every Iraqi, American and Afghan who has died as a consequence of Bush’s orders, which could serve as aide-memoires whenever he chose to reflect on his legacy.

One can, of course, only speculate about the presents the president might receive tomorrow. In the past (albeit not necessarily on the occasion of his birthday) the trend as far as foreign dignitaries are concerned has strongly been towards all manner of weaponry (although not the mass-destruction variety): the inventory of official gifts from 2004 includes daggers, a machete, a braided whip and, from Jordan’s exceptionally obsequious King Abdullah, a small arsenal of guns, including a $10,000 sniper rifle. (Perhaps that’s why when someone suggested to Cheney a few weeks ago that he might consider giving his nominal boss a shotgun as a birthday present, the vice-president responded: “He’s got one already.”)

The 2004 inventory included a couple of potentially useful (and possibly cheeky) books for Bush from the Sultan of Brunei: The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook and Forgotten English. Cheney, meanwhile, received The Art of War from the Chinese vice-president. (The inventory also lists gifts to CIA agents, but without naming either the recipients or the donor governments; the identity of the latter can usually be guessed from the presents, and many of them were reportedly from Pakistan and the Middle East.)

Meanwhile, although there can be little question that the US Supreme Court holds a special place in Bush’s account on account of the role it played in gifting him the presidency in 2000, last week the justices delivered a present that proved altogether less welcome: they decided, by a majority of five to three, that the military tribunals authorised on presidential orders to try Guantanamo Bay inmates are unwarranted and illegal on the basis of American as well as international law.

Some lawyers believe that the judgment, delivered in a case brought by a former aide to Osama bin Laden, goes beyond the tribunal issue and can be construed also as at least an implicit critique of torture, renditions and surveillance of US citizens. Others argue that it isn’t much of a snub at all, given that it leaves Bush the option of convincing Congress to sanction the extraordinary military commissions. There is some merit in both arguments: it is hard to see how the verdict can be interpreted as a sweeping indictment of the Bush administration’s more egregious “anti-terror” measures; at the same time, its reasonably clear message to the commander-in-chief is that he cannot literally do anything he pleases, in violation of the Geneva Conventions and the US Constitution. The frequent reference to the former is significant because the administration has consistently held that the Conventions do not apply to the “illegal combatants” incarcerated at Guantanamo Bay.

It’s important to remember, of course, that of the more than 700 detainees who are at, or have passed through, the little slice of Cuba that the US has occupied for more than a century, only 14 have ever been brought before the tribunals, with 10 of them charged with conspiring with Al Qaeda. It is widely accepted that the US does not have sufficient evidence against the others; in many cases it does not have any credible evidence at all.

Not surprisingly, justice is not a priority for the gatekeepers of Guantanamo. This was reinforced last week when The Guardian highlighted the case of Abdullah Mujahid, a former Afghan police commander, who two years ago gave American authorities the names of four witnesses who he said would corroborate his claims of innocence. After months of supposed efforts, the tribunal decided that the witnesses could not be found. It took The Guardian three days to track down the witnesses: one of them was dead, another was working for Hamid Karzai, one of was teaching at an American college and the fourth one was living in Kabul.

Bush has lately taken to saying that he would love to shut down the detention camps at Guantanamo, but feasible alternatives must first be found. Actually, alternatives do exist. The trouble is, they are believed to be much worse than Guantanamo. Apart from Bagram air base in Afghanistan, the location of the other prisons is a matter of speculation. There is no information on who is held there, let alone the conditions under which they are held. Sections of the US press know a lot more about these prisons than they are willing to let on, including their locations. Hardly an ideal way, one would have thought, of setting a democratic example.

In recent days The New York Times has been at the receiving end of flak from the White House and the Republican establishment because it decided to ignore official advice and publish a report on how the US is keeping tabs on international financial transactions. Last year it was attacked for revealing that spy agencies were tapping phones without court authorisation. Crucially, it sat on that story for a whole year. And in a semi-apologia this week, the newspaper’s executive editor admitted that the juiciest reports — the real scoops — generally go unpublished.

There are two reasons the NYT is under attack: as a distraction, and because the administration is headed by a simple-minded man who finds it hard to understand how any patriotic fellow American can oppose him. He’s evidently savvy enough, however, not to take any chances, not even with a remarkably timid Congress.

When Bush does not approve of legislation that’s sent to him for signature, he doesn’t veto it: he signs the bill, but simultaneously issues what is known as a signing statement, which effectively entitles him to interpret the bill as he sees fit, and to ignore any parts of it that don’t suit his interpretation.

The imperial presidency is hardly a Bush innovation, but none of his predecessors, as Elizabeth Drew put it in a recent issue of the New York Review of Books, made such a “systematic attempt to take power from the legislative branch”.

It is unlikely that any of his domestic prerogatives and problems, or the international crises he has spawned, were on the 60-year-old Bush’s mind at the weekend when he took Japan’s prime minister Junichiro Koizumi, a huge Elvis Presley fan, on a tour of the deceased king’s Graceland mansion in Memphis. It is equally unlikely that Koizumi, asked to croon an Elvis tune, specifically had Iraq on his mind when he burst into: “Wise men say, only fools rush in....” Inadvertent though it may have been, it was nonetheless a fitting birthday serenade.

Email: mahirali1@gmail.com