A Tragic Legacy: How a Good vs. Evil Mentality Destroyed the Bush Presidency (11 page)

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Authors: Glenn Greenwald

Tags: #Government - U.S. Government, #Politics, #United States - Politics and government - 2001- - Decision making, #General, #George W - Ethics, #Biography & Autobiography, #International Relations, #George W - Influence, #United States, #Presidents & Heads of State, #Political Science, #Good and Evil, #Presidents - United States, #History, #Case studies, #George W - Political and social views, #Political leadership, #Current Events, #Political leadership - United States, #Executive Branch, #Character, #Bush, #Good and evil - Political aspects - United States, #United States - 21st Century, #Government, #United States - Politics and government - 2001-2009 - Decision making, #Government - Executive Branch, #Political aspects, #21st Century, #Presidents

BOOK: A Tragic Legacy: How a Good vs. Evil Mentality Destroyed the Bush Presidency
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N
o meaningful analysis of the Bush presidency is possible without a thorough examination of President Bush himself. His strong personal convictions and rigidly held approach to decision-making have shaped every aspect of his presidency. To explore the way in which the president’s worldview has been shaped, the starting and ending point is his religious faith. Bush has made as explicitly clear as he can that his evangelical Christianity and absolute faith in God lie at the heart of everything he does, including the decisions he makes as president.

An important caveat is in order here. The claim that Bush’s faith is the centerpiece of his persona frequently provokes objections, particularly among his critics, that Bush’s religious beliefs are insincere and purely decorative. That claim is typically predicated on the argument that his decisions and actions are in conflict with Christian doctrine, and that his claimed Christianity must therefore be a sham.

Those arguing for the inauthenticity of Bush’s evangelical faith often cite as inconsistencies between Bush’s conduct and Christian morality his ordering of unnecessary wars, his condoning (if not ordering) torture, his willingness to deceive, or even his general lack of personal humility. The premise of this objection is typically that if a person acts contrary to Christian dictates with sufficient frequency, it is fair to conclude that his professed beliefs in Christianity are illusory.

Just from a strictly doctrinal perspective, there are numerous flaws with that reasoning. The belief in original sin and mankind’s fallen nature, for instance, means that all humans, even the most devout and faithful, will personally sin, and do so repeatedly. Independently, many evangelicals hold that a person who truly accepts Jesus as savior is saved permanently and irrevocably, without regard to the goodness of their subsequent acts.

But for purposes of understanding the president, all of those theological issues and questions as to whether he is a “true Christian” can be set aside. What matters is the president’s own understanding of his faith, not whether by the metrics of others he falls short of being “Christian.” Put another way, whether the president’s behavior is consistent with Christianity in some objective sense is an entirely different question from whether he
believes
that he is acting in accordance with God’s will and pursuant to the mandates of his religion as he understands them. To show that Bush’s behavior as president is “un-Christian”—as measured against some objective barometer of piety—is not to demonstrate that Bush touts his Christianity cynically.

What is relevant for understanding the president’s mind-set is that he himself believes that he is mandated to act in accordance with God’s will, that he is able (at least with respect to certain critical matters) to discern that will, and that he is, in fact, acting in accordance with it by virtue of the course he has chosen. These
subjective
beliefs the president holds have guided his presidency and governed the course of his administration and our country.

To his credit, Bush has always been quite up front and explicit that there is nothing that he thinks or does that is independent of his evangelical beliefs. For example, when he identified Jesus as his “favorite philosopher” in a 1999 debate against other Republican presidential candidates, Bush evinced unabashed candor and no hesitation in declaring the central role his Christian faith plays in his life. Most presidents and those who sought to be president—particularly in modern times—have indicated a belief in God and an embrace of some form of Christian faith, but few, if any, have so explicitly and continuously emphasized the central role that religious belief plays in their decision-making.

Bush has never spoken publicly in any detail about his born-again conversion, though he has recounted that he was first “pointed to the path of God” in 1985, by the evangelical minister Billy Graham. In his 1999 campaign autobiography entitled
A Charge to Keep,
then-Governor Bush wrote: “Over the course of that weekend, Reverend Graham planted a mustard seed in my soul, a seed that grew over the next year.”

Moreover, Bush has spoken extensively about his religious awakening when describing the circumstances that enabled him to stop drinking. A 1999 campaign interview with the
Washington Post
contained this exchange:

Why did you quit drinking?
A couple of things happened. One, you know, the Billy Graham visit in 1985. I met with Billy, but it’s like a mustard seed. You know, he planted a seed in my heart and I began to change…. I realized that alcohol was beginning to crowd out my energies and could crowd, eventually, my affections for other people.
You quit drinking and you became more spiritual. Talk about that a little bit.
To put it in spiritual terms, I accepted Christ. What influenced me was the spirituality, sure, which led me to believe that if you change your heart, you can change your behavior. There’s a lot of drug rehabilitation programs and some that are based upon exactly what I went through, which is spiritually based—that’s what AA is really based upon.

Though Bush has denied throughout his presidency that he receives specific instructions from God, he did believe that his running for president was an event that God specifically willed. In
The Faith of George W. Bush,
author Stephen Mansfield—relying on televangelist James Robison as his source—reported that when Bush decided to run for president, “he spoke to various evangelical groups that he felt God had called him to run for president in 2000: ‘I know it won’t be easy on me or my family, but God wants me to do it.’”

Similarly, Jackson Lears reported in a March 2003
New York Times
article: “From the outset he has been convinced that his presidency is part of a divine plan, even telling a friend while he was governor of Texas, ‘I believe God wants me to run for president.’” And in a December 2005 Fox News interview with Brit Hume, the president was asked about the role faith played in his life, and he emphasized its core function: “I think once faith is central in your life, it stays central in your life. I read the Bible every day.”

Bush’s emphasis on the primacy of his faith and his corresponding certainty that he is acting in accordance with God’s will, even with respect to the decisions he makes as president, have led to some unfair caricatures of his religiosity. Unlike, say, Pat Robertson, who claims to be the beneficiary of one-on-one, literal conversations with the deity, the president generally makes no such grandiose claims.

To the contrary, he has repeatedly stated that God does not “instruct” him on what decisions to make. The president emphatically repudiates the notion that he carries on direct conversations with God in which he receives specific instructions as to what to do. In an October 2006 interview, Fox’s Bill O’Reilly queried the president regarding the claim that “God tells you what to do and you go out and do it.” The president replied: “I guess that I have pity for people who believe that. They don’t understand the relationship between man and the Almighty, then.”

Nevertheless, the president does commonly invoke the will of God as to specific issues in order to justify the decisions he has made as president. When Bob Woodward asked Bush if he consulted with his father about whether to invade Iraq, Bush—according to Woodward—responded that he did not, but instead appealed to “a higher father.” And during secretly recorded discussions in June 2003, between Palestinian prime minister Mahmoud Abbas (who had previously met with President Bush) and various Palestinian factions—recordings obtained and then disclosed by the Israeli newspaper
Haaretz
—the following exchange occurred:

Abbas said that at Aqaba, Bush promised to speak with Sharon about the siege on Arafat. He said nobody can speak to or pressure Sharon except the Americans.
According to Abbas, immediately thereafter Bush said: “God told me to strike at al Qaida and I struck them, and then he instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did, and now I am determined to solve the problem in the Middle East. If you help me I will act, and if not, the elections will come and I will have to focus on them.”

Moreover, the president has repeatedly contended that the aspiration of the country should be to divine God’s sense of “justice” and act accordingly, i.e.,
that
is how one can be “on the side of” God. Thus, as the president sees it, though God does not send him literal instructions, God does have preferences for the nation that the president can and ought to discern and obey. At a 2004 ceremony commemorating the Day of Prayer, the president put it this way:

God is not on the side of any nation, yet we know He is on the side of justice…. Our finest moments [as a nation] have come when we have faithfully served the cause of justice for our own citizens, and for the people of other lands.

Bush’s evangelical fervor outweighs all other impulses and principles, including political conservatism. In that regard—and well prior to 9/11—Bush is a
fundamentally
different conservative, in both belief and temperament, than was Ronald Reagan. Whereas a belief in limited government was (at least ostensibly) Reagan’s overarching principle, Bush entirely subordinates political conservatism to (at most) a secondary consideration, endowing his faith with unchallengeable primacy. When those two belief systems clash, Bush’s religious convictions prevail. As Bush speechwriter David Frum described in his 2003 book,
The Right Man:

Goodness had been one of the main themes of Bush’s campaign speeches. He often observed that if the government could ever write a law that could make people love their neighbors, he would be glad to sign it. This was, when you think about it, an odd thing for a Republican president to say. If Congress had sent Ronald Reagan a law obliging people to love their neighbors, he would have vetoed it as an impertinent infringement of personal liberty, and unconstitutional besides.
But Bush came from and spoke for a very different culture from that of the individualistic Ronald Reagan: the culture of modern Evangelicalism. To understand the Bush White House you must understand its predominant creed. It was a kindly faith, practical and unmystical.

Whenever any competing considerations—including political conservatism—conflict with the imperatives of Bush’s theology, his moralistic conceptions prevail. And indeed, placing limitations on government has never been a priority for Bush. To the contrary, he has been committed to an expansion of government power as a means of coercing his conception of the moral Good. In this regard, one can describe Bush’s political philosophy much more accurately as a theory of evangelical governance than as conservatism, reflected by his commitment to use government power as a force to promote his conception of God’s will.

In his book
The Conservative Soul
, Andrew Sullivan—once a leading, vocal supporter of the president and the invasion of Iraq—describes the process by which he renounced his support for the Bush presidency. Sullivan came to believe that Bush’s conservatism was a fundamental departure from, and not just a modification of, the Reagan/Thatcher theories of conservatism which attracted him to that movement in the 1980s. To demonstrate this point, Sullivan highlights, as did Frum, the evangelical mission at the heart of the Bush presidency:

President Reagan’s most famous quote from his 1981 Inaugural Address was the following: “In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem.” President George W. Bush explained a markedly different philosophy in September, 2003: “We have a responsibility when somebody hurts, government has to move.”

According to the president, seeking God’s will and acting in accordance with it drives each of his decisions, particularly the most consequential ones. Bush himself described his mission to Bob Woodward as such:

“Going into this period [when he ordered the invasion of Iraq], I was praying for strength to do the Lord’s will…. I’m surely not going to justify war based upon God. Understand that. Nevertheless, in my case I pray that I be as good a messenger of His will as possible. And then, of course, I pray for personal strength and for forgiveness.”

Thus are all of the president’s most significant and most controversial policy decisions grounded in his convictions about God’s will and, in particular, his understanding of what approach to the world God’s will fundamentally requires. The following chapters examine specifically how these Manichean imperatives have been used to justify (both
to
the president and then
by
him) the militarism in Iraq, Iran, and the broader Middle East. For instance, the imperative of spreading democracy—no matter the necessary means (including brutal wars) and even in the absence of a connection to anti-American terrorism—is inherently Good and just, because it is in accordance with God’s will; God wills that every man, woman, and child be free, and any measures in pursuit of that ultimate end, including wars, are just and necessary. These policies are not subject to debate or uncertainty in Bush’s mind any more than his faith in God is, because the former stems directly from—is compelled by—the latter.

These premises operate within a broader belief system whereby Bush has become convinced that his presidency is part of, perhaps the catalyst for, a religious reawakening in the United States and a reemerging religious purpose for the country. And we know that because, among other reasons, the president has said so. In September 2006, the president met with a group of right-wing pundits in the White House. According to their published reports, he spoke extensively of his religious fervor, and particularly of his belief that America was in the midst of what he called a “Third Awakening.” One of the pundits who was present,
National Review
editor Rich Lowry, wrote:

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