It is fashionable in some circles, especially European circles, to take George W. Bush for a fool. I don’t subscribe to this view. I watch his press conferences, the give-and-take with the Washington press corps, all primed with their gotchas, and I see a quick-thinking, rational, intelligent speaker. Sure, his talking points are well rehearsed, but there is enough off-the-cuff repartee to convince me that this man is no fool.
And that makes the Iraq situation doubly tragic. Given the performance of the economy, George W. would be an immensely popular national and world leader today if it weren’t for one egregious misstep: his decision to invade Iraq.
To be sure, there are those of the other political persuasion who would try to make the most out of income inequality, Hurricane Katrina, and the loss of manufacturing jobs. But they would be swept aside under the weight of the facts: low unemployment, low interest rates, high stock prices. Sans Iraq, our President would be walking on water.
Instead, he is drowning. The opposition has in Iraq a weapon of political mass destruction. Congress has been lost, and W’s economic policies are imperiled. His defense secretary resigned in near disgrace, his Vice President’s aide has just been convicted of perjury, his attorney general may be hounded out of office.
Iraq wasn’t a minor mistake. It was, as the President’s enemies charge, the greatest foreign policy blunder in recent memory. Its negative effects will outlive us all. It has made a good portion of the world despise us. It has cost us thousands of lives and hundreds of billions of dollars. More than 100,000 Iraqis are dead because we insisted on liberating them. Not least, it has deepened the political divide in this country and sabotaged the President’s own party and his domestic agenda.
George W. Bush now sits at the center of a tragedy as profound as any of Shakespeare’s. As you will remember, the protagonist of every Shakespearean tragedy owed his destruction to some fatal character flaw. What was Bush’s flaw? History will render its judgment, but here’s a stab at it: The President authorized the invasion of Iraq, not because he was dumb, but because he was weak. Surrounded by advisors pushing for invasion, he put aside his own misgivings (I’m sure he had them) and went with the neocon flow. He was Macbeth giving in to the urgings of his wife. Our tragedy is compounded by the fact that there is not, in either party, a Macduff in sight.
It’s an old story, even older than Vietnam. It’s easy to go to war, especially when you’re the Commander-in-Chief and Congress has forgotten that war is technically its prerogative. It looks macho, but it’s really a sign of weakness. A strong president would find the courage to say no to the hawks and yes to the diplomats.
The writer Kurt Anderson reminds us that in 1848 a young Congressman named Lincoln wondered aloud what the dickens the U.S. was doing invading Mexico. President Polk, Lincoln said, must explain the war “with facts and not with arguments…..But if he cannot….then I should be fully convinced that he is deeply conscious of being in the wrong, that he plunged into it and has swept on and on till, disappointed in his calculation of the ease with which Mexico might be subdued, he now finds himself, he knows not where.”
