Bush's Legacy

Last week, in The New York Times, Timothy Egan took the measure of the second Bush administration. Bush's legacy, he wrote, is "a Mount Rainier of shame and failure." -- and it is defined by three catastrophes. Each of those catastrophes occurred despite the advice of Bush's chosen advisers -- all of whom were thrown overboard, when Bush judged that they were not team players.

Such was the fate of Paul O'Neill, who "sounded an alarm, saying Bush's rash economic policies could lead to a deficit of $500 billion." Then there was the case of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Eric Shenseki, who told his boss, Donald Rumsfeld, that any invasion of Iraq would require roughly the same number of troops who were deployed in Desert Storm. Rumsfeld saw to it that Shenseki applied for his pension early and did not attend the retirement party.

Then there was the case of the man who oversaw the first invasion of Iraq, Secretary of State Colin Powell, who warned that any invasion should be approached with a thorough understanding of the Pottery Barn Rule: "If you break it, you own it." Powell, too, was shown his way to the exit.

Mr. Bush simply could not tolerate ambiguity or dissent. As he told Bob Woodward, "I don't need people around me who are not steady. . . . And if there's a kind of a hand wringing going on when times are tough, I don't like it."

It is that childlike insistence that everyone has to play by George's rules which will mark Bush's legacy. "Historians will recall," writes Egan, "that in each of the major disasters on Bush's watch, there were ample warnings -- from the intelligence briefing that Osama bin Laden was determined to strike a month before the lethal blow, to the projections that Hurricane Katrina could drown a major American city, to the expressed fears that letting Wall Street regulate itself could be catastrophic."

Those same historians will recall Paul Begala's comment that Bush is "a high functioning moron." The comment is unfair; but it does raise the question of how Americans managed to choose Bush -- not just once, but twice. I suspect that their choice had less to do with rationality than it had to do with hubris and fear -- and a good politician's ability to exploit both.

"If ever there was an argument for voting against politicians who are confident about their cluelessness," Egan concluded, "Bush is it." That is a legacy which transcends both time and space.

The Delusional Presidency

When the dust has cleared and historians start to get their heads around the Second Bush Administration, they might -- in their search for primary sources -- turn to Jack Goldsmith's book, The Terror Presidency. Goldsmith is a conservative legal scholar who teaches at Harvard. But, in October 2003, he was appointed to head the Bush Administration's Office of Legal Council. Shortly after assuming his post, he determined that several of the administration's previously written legal opinions rested on "severely damaged legal foundations," because they were "sloppily reasoned, overbroad, and incautious in asserting extraordinary constitutional authorities on behalf of the president."

When Goldsmith sought to withdraw some of these opinions, he encountered stiff resistance, particularly from David Addington, who now serves as Dick Cheney's chief of staff -- and who has advanced the novel argument that Cheney is not a member of the executive branch of government. As Goldsmith tells the story, when he sought to withdraw the so called "torture memos," which interpreted the Geneva Conventions as allowing certain interrogation techniques like water boarding, Addington was furious. The fact that the United States had prosecuted water boarding as a war crime for one hundred years was irrelevant. "The president has already decided," Addington told Goldsmith, "that terrorists do not receive Geneva Convention protections. You cannot question his decision."

And therein lies the essential delusion of the Bush presidency -- in a time of war, when the nation's security is at stake, a president has full authority to do as he chooses. Congressional and legal oversight -- which would allow for second guessing -- be damned.

That essential delusion has, in the case of Iraq, led to a series of other delusions. The first was that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. The second was that the United States could bestow democracy on Iraq. The third was that the so called "surge" would buy Iraqis "breathing space" to achieve national reconciliation. The latest delusion, as was apparent last week, is that if the surge does not promote "top down" reconciliation, it will promote "bottom up" reconciliation -- with Anbar province serving as exhibit A for the defense. But, as many reporters who have been on the ground in Iraq will tell you, that reconciliation began before the surge was conceived.

Goldstein resigned his position nine months after he assumed it, presumably because the powers that be were not heeding his advice. And his advice was that there was a template for the way presidents should exercise power in wartime. That template was established by Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt, two presidents with some experience of conducting a war. Instead of relying on what Goldsmith calls "the hard power of prerogative," the second president Bush would have been wiser to practice "the soft factors of legitimization -- consultation, deliberation, the appearance of deference and credible expressions of public concern for constitutional and international values -- in dealing with Congress, the courts and allies."

The irony, of course, is that the first President Bush understood and practiced this template. It is tragic that, while the father provided his son with a "teachable moment," the lesson was lost. Obviously, the second president Bush has -- as the American author Nathaniel Hawthorne once phrased it -- "learned much amiss."

On Thursday, Mr. Bush announced that the thirty-one thousand soldiers in the surge would be home by the time he left office. He did not note that the joint chiefs have told him that the armed forces does not have the manpower to sustain the surge. Instead, he claimed that the reduction of troops represented a "return on success" -- meaning that there will be the same number of troops in Iraq when he leaves office as when the surge began. Clearly, Mr. Bush holds fast to his delusions.

American Napoleon?

Even George Bush's strongest supporters were surprised last week when he chose the Vietnam analogy to buttress his argument that there should be no draw down of troops in Iraq. Actually, he was using an argument that has long been a favourite of American conservatives, starting with Ronald Reagan. That argument is that America lost in Vietnam because it lost its nerve, once congressional Democrats -- taking advantage of the disarray following Richard Nixon's resignation -- stopped funding the war. Mr. Bush claimed that, if American troops leave Iraq, there will be a replay of helicopters leaving the roof of the U.S. embassy, accompanied by scenes of military equipment being pushed into the sea or being abandoned in the desert.

However, the Vietnam analogy is fraught with problems for Mr. Bush. To begin with, there is the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution and the argument -- which historians generally agree was a trumped up case -- for the escalation of the war. Recalling Lyndon Johnson's rationale for widening the war brings up echoes of those weapons of mass destruction and the mushroom cloud conjured up by National Security Advisor Condi Rice. Then there are Mr. Bush's and Mr. Cheney's personal histories, where -- by student deferments or family connections -- both men managed to avoid service in Southeast Asia, while others had no such option. It reminds people that those who serve in Iraq bear an unequal burden. Now most citizens, like Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney, can choose not to serve. Finally, there is that black marble wall in Washington, which is a reminder of those who died in the service of a failed policy.

There are more negative parallels between Vietnam and Iraq than positive ones; and Mr. Bush has given his critics lots of ammunition to use against him. Writing in his blog on August 22nd, Robert Reich -- Bill Clinton's first Secretary of Labour -- concluded, "The apparent stupidity of this man -- or his assumption of the stupidity of the American people -- is unfathomable."

But perhaps the Vietnam analogy really doesn't fit. In an article in The Nation for the week of September 10, Juan Cole, a professor of Middle Eastern and Southeast Asian History at the University of Michigan, argues that the real echo of Mr. Bush's invasion of Iraq is Napoleon's invasion of Egypt in 1798. "There are many eerily familiar resonances between the two misadventures," Cole writes, "not the least among them that both began with supreme arrogance and ended as fiascoes. Above all, the leaders of both occupations employed the same basic political vocabulary and rhetorical flimflammery invoking the spirit of liberty, security and democracy while largely ignoring the substance of these concepts."

Cole is not alone in seeing the similarities between the French Invasion of Egypt and the American invasion of Iraq. In a report on May 17th, 2004, CBS News correspondent Tom Fenton pointed out that two prominent historians saw Mr. Bush's decision to invade Iraq as folly. Henry Laurens, who Fenton called "an eminent specialist on the Arab world," noted that,"the French went in posing as liberators, proclaiming their goal was to free the Egyptians from the yoke of the Ottoman Empire. Impoverished, backward Arabs would welcome French soldiers and the revolutionary ideas they brought." But, even though Bonaparte's campaign began well, "remnants of the old regime began a guerrilla campaign in the countryside, and in the cities several insurrections had to be harshly repressed. The war widened, and the French finally lost Egypt against the forces of the British and the Ottomans." Harvard historian Samuel P. Huntington, author of The Clash of Civilizations, saw the American invasion of Iraq in similar terms. He claimed that "the American occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq has spread, rather than contained the war;" and, he concluded, the war against the Iraqi people was a struggle which the United States would "never win."

The final paragraph of Cole's article is a cogent summary and comment on the parallels between Mr. Bonaparte's and Mr. Bush's forays into the Middle East. It bears repeating:

"It is no accident that many of the rhetorical strategies employed by George W. Bush originated with Napoleon Bonaparte, a notorious spinmeister and confidence man. At least Bonaparte looked to the future, seeing clearly the coming breakup of the Ottoman Empire and the likelihood that the European Powers would be able to colonize its provinces. Bonaparte's failure in Egypt did not forestall decades of French colonial success in Algeria and Indochina, even if that era of imperial triumph could not, in the end, be sustained in the face of the political and social awakening of the colonized. Bush's neocolonialism, on the other hand, swam against the tide of history, and its failure is all the more criminal for having been so predictable."

Man of the People?

Watching George W. Bush since November's election, I am reminded of an old movie. In 1957, director Elia Kazan, writer Budd Schulberg and actor Andy Griffith collaborated on the film, A Face in the Crowd. It is the story of an Arkansas good old boy who sings a pretty good song and whose "aw shucks" persona pave his way to television stardom. It is a role which Griffith has perfected over the years. But in this film, Larry "Lonesome" Rhodes is a kind of Darth Vader from Mayberry.

On television he comes across as a man of the people, a common man of uncommon wisdom. Unfortunately, as his star rises, so does his ego. At the end of the film he is full of contempt for his viewers, feeling he can say anything he wishes; but he saves his most caustic comments for the end of his show, when the credits role and the sound has been muted. Beaming at his audience, he looks at the camera and tells them that they are fools. He can manipulate them in any way he chooses.

Of course, one of the many people he has betrayed slips into the control room and turns up the sound. The public sees behind the persona and abandons him because, in the end, they are not the fools he takes them for.

These days Mr. Bush seems alot like the defrocked Lonesome Rhodes. His theme is consistent: he continues to proclaim that he is "the decider." But one gets the sense that the public has changed the channel. Bush's contempt for the rules against domestic spying, his inability to mount an effective cleanup of New Orleans, the swamp at his Justice Department and -- above all -- the continuing disaster in Iraq, have torn the mask away from the good old boy.

In the last chapter of her book, The March of Folly, Barbara Tuchman followed the quagmire of Vietnam from the end of the Roosevelt administration to the end of the Nixon administration. Calling the chapter "America Betrays Herself in Vietnam," she detailed how successive presidents fell victim to a kind of "self hypnosis," convincing themselves that unless the United States defeated the Communists in Vietnam, they would conquer all of Asia, eventually landing on the shores of San Francisco.

It is a history of paranoia and hubris, which no amount of evidence to the contrary -- of which there was plenty -- could alter. Certain that they were men of moral courage, five presidents (Democrats and Republicans) identified Vietnam -- which Lyndon Johnson referred to as a "raggedy-ass fourth rate country"-- as a clear and present danger. The last two presidents tried to bomb the place into oblivion, never understanding that each increasing show of force merely strengthened the resolve of the North Vietnamese, who were prepared to wait the Americans out.

There was an enemy, of course. But it was in Moscow, not Hanoi. And eventually the enemy did itself in, the consequence of the regime's own incompetence. Unfortunately, those who pulled the levers of power in Washington never understood this and they refused to change course.

But, despite Washington's ill conceived notion of courage, Tuchman did not disparage the real thing. In fact, she wrote, "Aware of the controlling power of ambition, corruption and emotion, it may be that in the search for wiser government we should look for the test of character first. And the test should be moral courage." However, she wrote, " there is always freedom of choice to change or desist from a counter productive course, if the policy maker has the moral courage to exercise it."

Thus, the true test of moral courage was the courage -- in the face of a failed policy -- to change course. With so much invested in Vietnam, several presidents refused to cut their losses and chart a new direction -- until the people, through their elected representatives, forced that change. Such, it appears, will be the fate of George W. Bush. There is an enemy out there. But it was never in Iraq. Having reached the pinnacle of success, Mr. Bush is becoming just a face in the crowd.