A Tragic Legacy: How a Good vs. Evil Mentality Destroyed the Bush Presidency (24 page)

T
he Manichean cartoons that overrode virtually all substantive and responsible debate during the Bush presidency obscured a fundamental contradiction at the heart of the president’s approach to the world. Since the 9/11 attacks, the president has insisted upon two fundamentally inconsistent propositions, namely, that (a) we are called upon to spread democracy, because doing so is morally right, consistent with God’s will, and an effective tool for eradicating terrorism, and (b) the imperative of the first proposition is so overwhelming that we pursue it regardless of international objections or world opinion.

Let us stipulate that this second principle is valid—i.e., that if a country is forced to choose between taking measures to protect its citizens or being popular in the world, its leaders have the obligation to choose the former over the latter. If there is but one way that a country can defend itself from external threats, negative world opinion engendered by such a course is an insufficient reason to forgo it. That is true not only for the United States, of course, but for all countries. A government’s first obligation is to protect its citizens from genuine dangers posed by others, not to protect its international reputation. At a very high level of generality, that is all fair enough.

But in the specific case of the moralistic imperatives underlying the Bush worldview of national security, the twin pillars of that approach are plainly, and quite dangerously, in conflict. To spread democracy around the world, while at the same time inflaming anti-Americanism, is the very model of self-defeating behavior.

In December 2006, Venezuela’s president Hugo Chávez was overwhelmingly re-elected. Opposition to the United States played a significant role in his successful campaign. According to the Associated Press account of Chávez’s victory, Chávez repeatedly promised “a more radical version of socialism and [to] forge a wider front against the United States in Latin America.” Chávez is one of the most anti-American leaders on the planet. He made world headlines months earlier when, during a speech before the United Nations and in violation of all diplomatic decorum, he referred to President Bush as Satan while pantomiming that he was waving away the smell of sulfur left by Bush, who had addressed the General Assembly from the same podium the day before. Chávez’s flamboyant, indecorous attack on the U.S. president obviously did not impede his electoral prospects. To the contrary, his resolute anti-American rhetoric almost certainly bolstered his popularity among his citizens.

Over the last two years, anti-American factions, including those whom the president has identified as “terrorist groups,” have become increasingly popular in their countries—even ascending to power as a result of victories in the precise democratic elections which the Bush administration worked to bring about. The Palestinians democratically elected Hamas leaders. The Lebanese have elected Hezbollah to play a major role in their parliamentary government. The Iranian-allied militias in Iraq are substantially represented in the democratically elected Iraqi government, and the so-called Iranian Hitler, the stridently anti-American president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, was himself democratically elected.

If the leaders whom we are supposed to hate so much—including even those we are told are the terrorists—continue to be elected democratically, that fact would seem to negate the ostensible premise of the Bush foreign policy—namely, that America-loving allies will magically spring up all over the democratic world and help us fight terrorism.

More to the point, it is infinitely more likely that anti-American leaders will continue to be democratically elected if the U.S. persists in conduct seemingly designed to make much of the world resentful and suspicious of us. If we operate on the premise, as we have during the Bush presidency, that we must not be concerned with world opinion (as the president defiantly boasted during the 2004 State of the Union speech: “America will never seek a permission slip to defend the security of our country”), and if we continue to insist that our Crusade against Evil is so righteous and necessary that we are entitled to set our own rules, violate long-standing treaties, and trample on conventions we have long touted, then intense anti-Americanism is simply inevitable.

It is, after all, basic human nature for a person to become resentful toward those who explicitly and even boastfully disdain his opinions and concerns. And when arrogant behavior of that sort is systematically engaged in by a country that is the strongest military force on Earth—and therefore is incapable of being restrained—that antipathy will be exacerbated by magnitudes. Resentment by the weak toward the strong is also a natural human reaction, but it can be constrained and managed, even virtually eliminated, when strength is used responsibly and in accordance with agreed-upon principles. But when the strongest applies its strength to impose its will without regard either to the viewpoints of others or to any set of recognized conventions and norms, resentment will be at its maximum peak of intensity.

The results of this imperial mind-set are as predictable as they are threatening to U.S. security. The BBC’s World Service commissioned a worldwide survey of attitudes toward twelve major nations, and its findings, released in March 2007, revealed the following:

Israel, Iran and the United States were the countries with the most negative image in a globe-spanning survey of attitudes toward 12 major nations. Canada and Japan came out best in the poll, released Tuesday….

Israel was viewed negatively by 56 percent of respondents and positively by 17 percent; for Iran, the figures were 54 percent and 18 percent. The United States had the third-highest negative ranking, with 51 percent citing it as a bad influence and 30 percent as a good one. Next was North Korea, which was viewed negatively by 48 percent and positively by 19 percent.

American standing in the world under the Bush presidency has tumbled so drastically that we are now sandwiched between Iran and North Korea in terms of how the world perceives us.

If the United States continues to be overtly belligerent and essentially indifferent to world opinion, then pro-American candidates will increasingly have difficulty getting elected anywhere in the world, thereby subverting the central goal we claim we have of eliminating anti-American resentment by spreading democracy. The president’s homage to democracy has obscured this destructive contradiction at the heart of our national conduct since 2001. Certainly many additional issues account for Chávez’s support in Venezuela, Hamas’ electoral victory among the Palestinians, etc., but those whose foreign policy vision consists of alienating our allies, changing other countries’ governments at will, and invading whomever we want should not really be that surprised when anti-American sentiment is a potent campaign tool.

Independently, engaging in such resentment-inducing behavior is almost certain to fuel the extremist beliefs that motivated the 9/11 attackers. Consider the president’s own explanation for why 9/11 occurred: “anger and resentment grew, radicalism thrived, and terrorists found willing recruits.” Similarly, the president himself said in a September 2006 interview with the
Wall Street Journal
’s Paul Gigot: “But in the long run the only way to make sure your grandchildren are protected, Paul, is to win the battle of ideas, is to defeat the ideology of hatred and resentment.”

The president’s own premises demonstrate that policies which alienate most human beings on the planet and inflame hatred toward the United States—such as invading and bombing other countries or making a flamboyant showing that the U.S. can and will do whatever it wants regardless of world opinion—seem guaranteed to exacerbate the threat of terrorism like virtually nothing else could.

Of course, this contradiction disappears if all we really mean by “democracy” is a country run by leaders who obey America’s dictates even if their power has nothing to do with elections. And whatever it is that is driving our foreign policy, a premium on democracy does not seem, in reality, to be high on the list, given that some of our most important allies (Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, the UAE, arguably China) are profoundly undemocratic, while some of our worst enemies and even some of the “terrorist enemies” themselves have been democratically elected. But one thing that ought to be clear is that democratic elections do
not
inherently produce governments friendly to the U.S.

Numerous other irrational and even internally contradictory premises were simply overlooked, by consensus, during the war intoxication that drove the country to support invading Iraq. The Middle East is characterized by centuries-old conflicts, sectarian factions, and competing interests, yet all of that was dismissed by the president’s simplistic embrace of the moralistic premise that Saddam was Evil and therefore had to be destroyed.

Iran, for instance, has long been the prime enemy of Iraq, and is now routinely cited by the president himself as the greatest threat to peace in the region, if not the world. Yet in the 1980s, Iraq and Iran waged vicious war for eight years, and they served to contain each other’s regional ambitions. The greatest impediment to increased Iranian power was the Ba’athist regime in Iraq—the one that George Bush, driven by a moralistic mission rather than geopolitical considerations, removed. Predictably, as
Time
’s Joe Klein reported:

The U.S. “has been Iran’s very best friend,” a diplomat from a predominantly Sunni nation told me recently. “You have eliminated its enemies, the Taliban and Saddam Hussein. You have even reduced yourselves as a threat to Iran because you have spent so much blood and treasure in Iraq.”

Moreover, the Shiite Iraqi government that our military has fought to install and then protect has developed, as one would expect, extremely close ties with the Iranian government. Thus, we are essentially fighting
for
Iran. And the longer we stay and the more we fight and drain all of our resources in order to stabilize the Iraqi government, the more we promote the interests of the country that the administration now says is the greatest threat to American interests. Every time the administration or its supporters talk about the dangers posed by Iran, it ought to be immediately pointed out that nothing has strengthened Iran more than our invasion of Iraq.

It may not be entirely accurate to say that Iran is the
sole
beneficiary of our invasion of Iraq, since there may be one other. As Thomas Ricks reported in the
Washington Post
in September 2006:

The chief of intelligence for the Marine Corps in Iraq [Peter Devlin] recently filed an unusual secret report concluding that the prospects for securing that country’s western Anbar province are dim and that there is almost nothing the U.S. military can do to improve the political and social situation there, said several military officers and intelligence officials familiar with its contents….

One Army officer summarized it as arguing that in Anbar province, “We haven’t been defeated militarily but we have been defeated politically—and that’s where wars are won and lost.”…

Devlin reports that there are no functioning Iraqi government institutions in Anbar, leaving a vacuum that has been filled by the insurgent group al-Qaeda in Iraq, which has become the province’s most significant political force, said the Army officer, who has read the report.

Al Qaeda thrives in anarchy. By throwing Iraq into chaos—about which our own military says: “there is almost nothing the U.S. military can do to improve the political and social situation there”—we have transformed Iraq from a place where Al Qaeda could not operate into territory plagued by the very anarchy in which it thrives. Put another way, the two largest beneficiaries of this war—likely the only two—are Iran and Al Qaeda.

So, to recap the Iraq War: There were never any WMDs. The proliferation of government death squads and militias in Iraq means that, even compared to the Saddam era, human rights violations and torture have increased to record levels. Iranian influence has risen massively, as a result of a Shiite fundamentalist government loyal to Tehran replacing the former anti-Iranian regime. Iraq was a country in which Al Qaeda could never operate, but now it holds virtually free rein over large swaths of that country. We have squandered hundreds of billions of dollars and thousands of lives. At least tens of thousands, and more likely hundreds of thousands, of innocent Iraqis have died as a result of our invasion. And we have—according to the consensus of our own intelligence community—directly worsened the terrorist problem, and continue to exacerbate it with our ongoing occupation. But those who objected to the war plans on the ground that it would result in precisely these outcomes were demonized as weak-willed allies of Evil and thus ignored.

BUSH’S MANICHEAN PRISON

A
s the course the country has embarked upon in Iraq has yielded unmitigated disaster, the president’s response, as examined in the prior chapter, is to redouble his commitment to that failed course. Even as the American electorate, the Washington Establishment (in the form of the Baker-Hamilton Commission/the Iraq Study Group), and even members of his own party urge him to re-examine and abandon the mind-set that has led the United States into this debacle, Bush insists that he was right all along and that he is more certain than ever that this is so.

Even as it became evident that our occupation of Iraq was a disaster, that that country was spiraling out of control and descending into uncontrollable chaos and civil war, the president continuously denied that reality, because it conflicted with his morally grounded convictions of the rightness of the invasion. Rather than accept facts that conflicted with his beliefs, he instead repeatedly blamed the media for distorting the situation in Iraq or even exaggerating the violence there. As early as October 2003, at a press appearance with the president of Kenya, President Bush began insisting that the situation in Iraq was better than it appeared from media reports: