A Tragic Legacy: How a Good vs. Evil Mentality Destroyed the Bush Presidency (25 page)

And, listen, we’re making good progress in Iraq. Sometimes it’s hard to tell it when you listen to the filter. We’re making good progress…. The situation is improving on a daily basis inside Iraq. People are freer, the security situation is getting better. The infrastructure is getting better—the schools are opening, the hospitals are being modernized.

In one illustrative December 2005 press conference, Bush insisted, in the face of all evidence to the contrary, “This is quiet, steady progress. It doesn’t always make the headlines in the evening news. But it is real and it is important. And it is unmistakable to those who see it close up.”

In March 2006, as the civil war was exploding in full force, Donald Rumsfeld, during a Pentagon press briefing, accused the media of exaggerating the situation in Iraq:

From what I’ve seen thus far, much of the reporting in the U.S. and abroad has exaggerated the situation, according to General Casey…. The number of attacks on mosques, as he pointed out, had been exaggerated. The number of Iraqi deaths had been exaggerated.

Once the president’s party was voted out of the majority in Congress in 2006 due largely to the chaos in Iraq, the White House still persisted in this bizarre reality-denying exercise, even sending out Laura Bush to make the same claim on television: “I do know that there are a lot of good things that are happening that aren’t covered. And I think that the drumbeat in the country from the media, from the only way people know what is happening is discouraging.”

In fact, reports about Iraq were not excessively gloomy and pessimistic. The exact opposite was true. It was the administration which routinely distorted what was occurring in Iraq in order to prevent a recognition—on the part of the American public, the media, and perhaps even the president himself—of just how dire the situation there was. As the Iraq Study Group (ISG) documented in 2006:

In addition, there is significant underreporting of the violence in Iraq. The standard for recording attacks acts as a filter to keep events out of reports and databases…. For example, on one day in July 2006 there were 93 attacks or significant acts of violence reported. Yet a careful review of the reports for that single day brought to light 1,100 acts of violence. Good policy is difficult to make when information is systematically collected in a way that minimizes its discrepancy with policy goals.

In an October 2006 interview with Fox’s Sean Hannity, the president expressly stated that, for him, the war in Iraq is not mere policy, and is not a matter confined to geopolitical considerations. Instead, it is the centerpiece of the Manichean battle to which he has devoted himself:

BUSH:
But, Sean, this is an ideological standoff between those of us who like liberty and freedom and have, you know, support a hopeful philosophy versus extremists and radicals who, you know, hate everything we stand for. And this is going to be a long struggle….

HANNITY:
Is this a struggle literally between good and evil?

BUSH:
I think it is.

HANNITY:
This is what it is? Do you think most people understand that? I mean, when you see the vacillating poll numbers, does it discourage you in that sense?

BUSH:
Well, first of all, you can’t make decisions on polls, Sean. You’ve got to do what you think is right. The reason I say it’s good versus evil is that evil people kill innocent life to achieve political objectives. And that’s what Al Qaeda and people like Al Qaeda do.

In the September 2006 interview he sat for with various right-wing pundits, the president, according to
National Review
’s Rich Lowry and Kate O’Beirne, emphasized: “A lot of people in America see this as a confrontation between good and evil, including me.” As Lowry wrote subsequent to that interview:

Bush’s faith in the rightness of his strategy in the broader war is deep-seated—it is, indeed, a product of faith. “Freedom is universal,” Bush says. “And I recognize there’s a debate around the world about the kind of—whether that principle is real. I call it moral relativism, if people do not believe that certain people can be free. I mean, I just cannot subscribe to that. People—I know it upsets people when I ascribe that to my belief in an Almighty, and that I believe a gift from that Almighty is universal freedom. That’s what I believe.”

For the president, the war in Iraq specifically, and the war to install democracy generally, is not a strategy subject to re-examination because it is grounded in, and compelled by, the inerrant will of God and by the mission that both Bush and the nation have been “called” to fulfill. As he said in his 2004 State of the Union address:

God has planted in every human heart the desire to live in freedom. And even when that desire is crushed by tyranny for decades, it will rise again.
(Applause.)
…America is a nation with a mission, and that mission comes from our most basic beliefs.

The president has repeatedly described the commitment to wage war in order to bring democracy to the world not merely in terms of a strategy to make America safe but also as a “calling”—the evangelical term for God’s planned purpose for an individual or a country. In his 2004 speech at the Republican National Convention, the president stated his views as follows:

I believe that America is called to lead the cause of freedom in a new century. I believe that millions in the Middle East plead in silence for their liberty. I believe that given the chance, they will embrace the most honorable form of government ever devised by man. I believe all these things because freedom is not America’s gift to the world, it is the almighty God’s gift to every man and woman in this world.
(Applause.)

It is simply extraordinary that the president is committed to the continuation of a war not merely because it is purportedly in America’s national interest, but more so, because the war and the goals he is pursuing are compelled by God’s will, because Bush is, in essence, a warrior delivering God’s gift of freedom to the world. The role of the U.S. president, traditionally and properly, is to use the force of the U.S. government to advance American interests in the world, not to follow a perceived “calling” from God to do Good in the world. That foundational principle led to this 2004 exchange between Mike Wallace and Bob Woodward on
60 Minutes:

WOODWARD:
The president still believes, with some conviction, that this was absolutely the right thing, that he has the duty to free people, to liberate people, and this was his moment.

WALLACE:
Who gave George Bush the duty to free people around the world?

WOODWARD:
That’s a really good question. The Constitution doesn’t say that’s part of the commander-in-chief ’s duties.

WALLACE:
The president of the United States, without a great deal of background in foreign policy, makes up his mind and believes he was sent by somebody to free the people, not just in Iraq, but around the world?

WOODWARD:
That’s his stated purpose.

WALLACE:
Right.

WOODWARD:
It is far-reaching and ambitious, and I think will cause many people to tremble.

The president received a stinging rebuke in the form of the 2006 election disaster for the Republican Party. And the isolation he suffered became even more pronounced when the ISG shortly thereafter strongly repudiated the president’s approach in Iraq. In the aftermath of those humiliations, many seemed to expect the president humbly to acknowledge error, or at least to concede that the United States must gradually search for a way to extricate itself from Iraq. But for the president, re-examination of his Manichean premises is, by definition, not an option, and he thus reacted wholly opposite to normal expectations—he reemphasized his commitment to his war and even committed to escalation. That the president would never change course was placed further beyond doubt when Vice President Cheney appeared on Fox News on January 14, 2007, and proclaimed about Iraq, “We’ve made enormous progress.”

And thus the president stands, widely repudiated across the political spectrum, yet more convinced than ever of the rightness of his actions and entirely steadfast in his rejection of change. On January 14, 2007, the Associated Press described the president’s rigid commitment to his failed policies as follows:

President Bush once said he was determined to stick with the Iraq war even if his wife and his dog were the only ones left at his side.

It’s moving in that direction.

“He is as isolated as a president can be,” said Julian Zelizer, a political historian at Boston University.

When a president makes foreign policy decisions based not upon strategic calculations or prudential considerations, but instead upon Manichean, moral imperatives, then he is precluded from re-examination and change. With two years left in office, the president is an isolated and intensely unpopular president. Yet the war in Iraq rages on, and will continue to do so, at least until he leaves office, because the president’s core convictions allow no other course.

CHAPTER FOUR

Iran: The Next War?

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said on Friday Iran should not show weakness over its nuclear program, a day after Tehran ignored a United Nations deadline to stop nuclear work which the West says could be used for making bombs.

“If we show weakness in front of the enemy the expectations will increase but if we stand against them, because of this resistance, they will retreat.”

—REUTERS,
February 23, 2007

“Today, it should be clear that not only is weakness provocative,” Mr. Rumsfeld said, standing at a lectern with President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney at his side, “but the perception of weakness on our part can be provocative as well….

“A conclusion by our enemies that the United States lacks the will or the resolve to carry out missions that demand sacrifice and demand patience is every bit as dangerous as an imbalance of conventional military power,” Mr. Rumsfeld said in a buoyant but sometimes emotional speech.

—NEW YORK TIMES,
on former secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld’s farewell speech to the Pentagon, December 15, 2006

T
he simplistic and moralistic Bush mind-set—by which even the most vexing problems and complex conflicts are reduced to a contest of “strength” in the face of Evil—can perhaps be seen most clearly in the president’s treatment of Iran. Throughout 2006, the president’s Iran policy became mindlessly antagonistic, and was reduced eventually to the point where it was shaped by a handful of absolutist and moralistic premises which bordered on the cartoonish. Bush’s perspective amounts to this:

Iran is governed by Evil leaders. They are the moral and practical equivalent of Hitler’s Nazis. They are intent on regional, perhaps even world, domination. They are so insane and so Evil that they will attack other countries with nuclear weapons even if it means that they would then be annihilated. Particularly if they acquire nuclear weapons, they would pose a grave, imminent, and undeterrable threat to the United States. Their leaders do not fear death, and in fact crave it as a result of their religious extremism. They cannot be negotiated with because they are both Evil and deranged. The only feasible course of action with Iran is to treat it as a Nazi-like enemy, refuse to negotiate, and stop it by any means necessary, which—due to its leaders’ inability to be reasoned with—inevitably requires “regime change,” by military confrontation if necessary.

With those premises bolted into place, the Bush administration has transformed what was—especially after the 9/11 attacks—a rapidly improving and cooperative relationship with the Iranians into a bellicose chest-beating exercise whereby the likelihood of military confrontation of some sort becomes increasingly likely every day. The two-dimensional Good vs. Evil framework that the president has applied to a complex and diverse Iran leaves virtually no other alternative.

Throughout 2006, it was unclear whether the president’s increasingly antagonistic rhetoric toward Iran was a political ploy to satiate his warmongering political base or whether, notwithstanding our incapacitating occupation of Iraq, the president himself really believed that war with Iran might be inevitable. But the 2006 midterm elections did not put an end to the president’s militarism toward the Iranians. Quite the contrary, once the elections were over—and even with a clear antiwar message delivered by voters—the president began sending signals that he would not only escalate America’s military commitment to the war in Iraq but also intensify our hostile posture toward the Iranians.

Thus, by the end of the year, the only options presented to the Iranians were (a) submit to the president’s demands by freezing their nuclear energy program as a precondition to any negotiations, or (b) accept the inevitability of some type of military strike by the United States and to prepare accordingly.

T
he mentality underlying the president’s view of Iran has long been evident. In Bush’s October 2002 Cincinnati speech discussed in the prior chapter, the president expressly denied the fundamental differences between competing factions in the Middle East and instead insisted that they were all “different faces of the same evil.”

And as early as his January 2002 “axis of evil” speech, it has been apparent that the president views Iran as part of the same undifferentiated mass of “America’s Enemies” that also includes Al Qaeda and included Iraq—notwithstanding Iran’s Persian rather than Arab ethnicity, notwithstanding its Shiite rather than Sunni religion, and notwithstanding its intense and protracted hostilities with both Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda. The president, who sees the world as one cleanly divided between Good and Evil, and who believes he has been called to the mission of battling Evil, is incapable of recognizing, let alone navigating and exploiting, the critical differences among the various factions that do not submit to America’s will. Thus, our “enemy” is not one terrorist group or one country, but a whole host of heterogeneous groups and nations that have been grouped together as “Evil” and targeted with the same single-minded policies of aggression.

Yet, in his 2002 Cincinnati speech, the president—in addition to compiling all of that “evidence” demonstrating the “grave threat” posed by Iraq—sought to assure Americans that the underlying rationale for invading Iraq would not compel a series of new wars thereafter. Instead, the president argued, the threat posed by Saddam Hussein was unique in both nature and severity; it was unlike any other anywhere in the world:

First, some ask why Iraq is different from other countries or regimes that also have terrible weapons. While there are many dangers in the world,
the threat from Iraq stands alone
—because it gathers the most serious dangers of our age in one place. Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction are controlled by a murderous tyrant who has already used chemical weapons to kill thousands of people. This same tyrant has tried to dominate the Middle East, has invaded and brutally occupied a small neighbor, has struck other nations without warning, and holds an unrelenting hostility toward the United States.

By its past and present actions, by its technological capabilities, by the merciless nature of its regime,
Iraq is unique.
As a former chief weapons inspector of the U.N. has said, “The fundamental problem with Iraq remains the nature of the regime, itself. Saddam Hussein is a homicidal dictator who is addicted to weapons of mass destruction” [emphasis added].

Despite those prior assurances to Americans of the “unique” threat posed by Iraq, the president, throughout 2006, has been applying almost identical language, and identical reasoning, to prepare the country for a potential military confrontation with Iran. His choice to depict Saddam as a Nazi-like Evil threat led inexorably to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and his similar depiction of Iran and its leaders portend the same outcome.

Thus, as the president sees and describes the world, Iran has now replaced Iraq as a “grave threat” and “state sponsor of terrorism” and the ruling Iranian mullahs and the elected Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad have replaced Saddam Hussein as the new “Hitler,” the current incarnation of pure Evil. Just as Saddam was allegedly too power-crazed and Evil to be reasoned with, so, too, is the Iranian government. And just as Saddam Hussein’s alleged development of nuclear weapons was such an intolerable threat to American security that the United States was compelled to stop Iraq by any means necessary, the president spent much of 2006 and early 2007 making the same argument with respect to Iran.

Indeed, the administration seems to be intentionally repeating most of its rhetoric almost
verbatim.
As early as January 2006, the
Washington Post
noted the obvious:

President Bush declared Friday that a nuclear-armed Iran would pose “a grave threat to the security of the world” as he tried to rally support from other major powers for U.N. Security Council action unless a defiant Tehran abandons any aspirations for nuclear weapons.

In using the phrase “grave threat,” Bush invoked the same language he used before launching the invasion of Iraq in 2003….

That January press conference marked a serious and deliberate escalation of the saber-rattling rhetoric toward Iran:

The “grave threat” language was not in any talking points prepared and distributed Friday across the U.S. government and surprised diplomats and even some of Bush’s own aides.

But by and large, he has shied away from those words regarding Iran.

In August 2006, the president delivered a speech at a fundraising event for Senator Orrin Hatch which left no doubt that, in his mind, there is nothing at all unique about Iraq. Instead, as he sees it, there is a whole host of other equally evil and threatening “state sponsors of terrorism” against which he is willing to wage war based on exactly the same reasoning he deployed to persuade the country of the need to invade and occupy the “uniquely” dangerous Iraq. The president explained:

The enemies of liberty come from different parts of the world, and they take inspiration from different sources. Some are radicalized followers of the Sunni tradition, who swear allegiance to terrorist organizations like Al Qaeda. Others are radicalized followers of the Shia tradition, who join groups like Hezbollah and take guidance from state sponsors like Syria and Iran.

According to the president, Iran (and Syria) are “state sponsors” of terrorism, which are tantamount to—perhaps even teamed up with—Al Qaeda. What do we do with state sponsors such as Iran and Syria? In the president’s worldview, the answer is obvious, as the president emphasized in the same speech: “If you harbor terrorists, you are just as guilty as the terrorists; you’re an enemy of the United States, and you will be held to account.” Under what he calls the Bush Doctrine, when the president labels another country a “state sponsor of international terrorism,” it is the functional equivalent of a declaration of war; that is how they are “held to account.”

In the president’s August 2006 speech, the specific assertion that Iran is a “state sponsor of terrorism” was accompanied by this crystal-clear ultimatum to the Iranians, employing language virtually identical to that directed at Saddam Hussein in the fall of 2002:

This summer’s crisis in Lebanon has made it clearer than ever that the world now faces a grave threat from the radical regime in Iran…. The Iranian regime denies basic human rights to millions of its people. And the Iranian regime is pursuing nuclear weapons in open defiance of its international obligations.

We know the death and suffering that Iran’s sponsorship of terrorists has brought, and we can imagine how much worse it would be if Iran were allowed to acquire nuclear weapons. Many nations are working together to solve this problem. The United Nations passed a resolution demanding that Iran suspend its nuclear-enrichment activities. Today is the deadline for Iran’s leaders to reply to the reasonable proposal the international community has made. If Iran’s leaders accept this offer and abandon their nuclear weapons ambitions, they can set their country on a better course. Yet, so far, the Iranian regime has responded with further defiance and delay.

It is time for Iran to make a choice. We’ve made our choice: We will continue to work closely with our allies to find a diplomatic solution—but there must be consequences for Iran’s defiance, and we must not allow Iran to develop a nuclear weapon.

These threats were issued with the same language as that used toward Iraq and are equally incoherent. If, for instance, Iran is such a crazed regime, how can we ever trust that they have given up nuclear weapons development? And even if they do that, they would still allegedly remain “state sponsors of terrorists,” and thus must be “held to account” under the Bush Doctrine. That would mean that even a vigorous inspections and verification process or even a cessation of Iran’s nuclear research activities would not alleviate Bush’s perceived need for regime change ( just as Saddam’s capitulation to the U.N. weapons inspection process did not avert Bush’s invasion of Iraq).

Indeed, just as was true with Iraq, the president’s emphasis has been
not only
on Iran’s alleged attempt to acquire nuclear weapons
but also
on its government’s alleged connection to “the terrorists” as well as its repressive internal practices. Just as was true for Iraq, this formulation means that there is but one solution that would satisfy Bush—
not
merely a suspension of Iran’s nuclear program, but
regime change.
And given that there is no chance that a “diplomatic solution” will result in “regime change,” the president’s claimed commitment to diplomacy is illusory, just as it was with Iraq.

The president himself has emphasized that his thought process with regard to Iran is virtually identical to that which guided him in the weeks prior to the invasion of Iraq—with the sole exception that he apparently views a diplomatic solution with the Iranians as being
less likely
than it was with Saddam’s regime, and that war with Iran is therefore even more probable than it was with Iraq.
National Review
editor Rich Lowry was a member of a small group of conservative pundits to sit for an interview with President Bush in September 2006. On September 13, Lowry wrote about the president’s remarks on Iran:

Time is also something Bush emphasizes in the Iran crisis. But his language suggests that the Robert Kagan–thesis that the seemingly interminable Iran diplomacy
is the necessary run-up to a strike on Iran
has something to it. Bush says, “It is very important for the United States to try all diplomatic means.”

That’s what we did in Iraq: “I’m often asked what’s the difference between Iran and Iraq. We tried all diplomatic means in Iraq.”
Iran, he seems to imply, might eventually prove impervious to diplomacy, but that’s something we have to find out
[emphasis added].