A Tragic Legacy: How a Good vs. Evil Mentality Destroyed the Bush Presidency (41 page)

Mohammed al-Qahtani, detainee No. 063, was forced to wear a bra. He had a thong placed on his head. He was massaged by a female interrogator who straddled him like a lap dancer. He was told that his mother and sisters were whores. He was told that other detainees knew he was gay. He was forced to dance with a male interrogator. He was strip-searched in front of women. He was led on a leash and forced to perform dog tricks. He was doused with water. He was prevented from praying. He was forced to watch as an interrogator squatted over his Koran.

These are not merely al-Qahtani’s allegations and they are not in dispute. Rather, they are “among the findings of the U.S. Army’s investigation of al-Qahtani’s aggressive interrogation at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.”

The way in which Abu Ghraib and similar abuses were all dismissed as the isolated, rogue acts of a few deranged low-level soldiers is one of the administration’s worst deceits. Most of the abusive techniques were expressly approved at the highest levels of the administration, even
after
numerous intelligence officials and FBI agents vigorously complained about them. As Dedman reported:

In interviews with MSNBC.com—the first time they have spoken publicly—former senior law enforcement agents described their attempts to stop the abusive interrogations. The agents of the Pentagon’s Criminal Investigation Task Force, working to build legal cases against suspected terrorists, said they objected to coercive tactics used by a separate team of intelligence interrogators soon after Guantánamo’s prison camp opened in early 2002. They ultimately carried their battle up to the office of Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, who approved the more aggressive techniques to be used on al-Qahtani and others.

It was widely recognized even back then that these tactics were illegal, but nobody—not even those objecting to these tactics—was bothered by
that
. In the Bush administration, even knowing illegality has never been viewed as anything more than a petty inconvenience to be managed. Dedman continued:

Although they believed the abusive techniques were probably illegal, the Pentagon cops said their objection was practical. They argued that abusive interrogations were not likely to produce truthful information, either for preventing more al-Qaida attacks or prosecuting terrorists.

The officer in charge of Guantánamo during these abuses was General Geoffrey Miller, who was thereafter sent in 2004 to Iraq to import these interrogation techniques there. It was several weeks after his arrival in Iraq when the Abu Ghraib abuses were revealed. On his very first visit to Abu Ghraib, General Miller demanded that “interrogators adopt ‘emerging strategic interrogation strategies and techniques’ being used at Guantánamo.” Most revealing of all is the source the U.S. military used to develop these abusive techniques:

The al-Qahtani plan went much further. The law enforcement agents began to hear a new term, SERE, an acronym for Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape. SERE training is provided to U.S. Special Forces and other military personnel to prepare them to withstand torture if they become prisoners of war. It includes mocking of their religious beliefs, sexual taunting, and a technique called water-boarding, which induces water through the nose to make a prisoner feel like he’s drowning.

Intelligence interrogators had the idea to “reverse-engineer” SERE, to use its techniques to pry information out of the suspected al-Qaida and Taliban terrorists. Pentagon e-mails seen by MSNBC.com show that at least a half dozen military intelligence personnel from Guantánamo, including at least one medical adviser, went to Fort Bragg, N.C., on Sept. 16–20, 2002, for SERE training. It was an experiment, apparently not unlike what the CIA had been trying on the few high-value detainees kept at secret locations.

In other words, by studying the torture methods used by America’s enemies—those uncivilized, extremist regimes and groups which embody pure Evil—we learned how to torture people and then decided to copy their torture techniques. As always, the “rationale” of the Bush administration is that in order to defend our values and culture from the Evil forces seeking to destroy us, we have to emulate their behavior as much as possible.

It seems virtually certain that the entire top level of the Bush administration was fully aware of the techniques being used at Guantánamo. Many key Bush officials took frequent trips to Guantánamo and met with General Miller. One particular trip that MSNBC learned about took place in October 2002, when various top Bush administration lawyers—including Alberto Gonzales, David Addington, and John Yoo—visited Guantánamo. It was this same group that, just a couple of months prior to that trip, churned out the now infamous “torture memo” authored by Yoo in August 2002, which sought to both redefine and justify the administration’s use of torture.

Without defending those methods, one should not be entirely unsympathetic to the defense that in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, military and intelligence officials would be tempted to use unusually aggressive, even extreme, interrogation methods on the person who was likely intended to be the twentieth hijacker. But these extreme and vile techniques became standard operating procedure for interrogating detainees. Far worse, five years after September 11, the U.S. Congress voted expressly to authorize the use of most if not all of these techniques and empower the president to use them at will. Put another way, our country, after five years of distance from 9/11 and after much debate and deliberation, decided to enshrine this behavior as legally authorized and reflective of our new national values.

BORED BY GOVERNING

W
hen assessing the Bush presidency and the way it has transformed America’s national character, one of the most striking features is the administration’s almost complete neglect of any issues that could not fit within the president’s Manichean mission. Whereas domestic issues dominated America’s political debates throughout the 1990s, they disappeared almost completely during Bush’s tenure. Other than a single-minded devotion to reducing taxes—something he pursued relentlessly even in the face of record deficits—the president displayed almost no interest in domestic matters. In fact, the president has demonstrated almost no real interest in anything other than his perceived battle against Evil.

For that reason, many of the most significant and damaging failures that afflicted his presidency have been the result of his complete inability to remove himself from the Manichean framework and actually
govern.
While the Good vs. Evil mentality fueled the president’s political success for a couple of years in the wake of 9/11, his inability to operate within any other framework has doomed the rest of his tenure. The rhetoric and worldview of this president and his allies remain the same, but the public’s reaction has changed fundamentally.

The issues that the president has been forced to confront from 2004 into 2007—the years his presidency gradually collapsed—have been wholly insusceptible to being depicted as a pure battle of Good vs. Evil. One of the most enduring blows to the president’s political strength occurred almost immediately after his re-election. In January 2005, the president announced what was to be the crown jewel of his domestic program, the initiative that would establish his domestic legacy: namely, his sweeping program to reform Social Security. But from the beginning, this initiative was an abject political failure, and that failure had a potent impact in stripping away the aura of political omnipotence the administration had previously enjoyed. With no enemy to demonize and no war to declare, the president’s Social Security rhetoric seemed empty and listless.

President Bush’s concerted nationwide campaign to advocate his program actually intensified rather than diminished opposition. For the first time in the four years of his presidency, even Congressional Republicans ran away from and publicly opposed the president’s plan, and it died a quick and ignominious death as a result of widespread rejection.

From almost the beginning of President Bush’s second term, issues began to dominate the political agenda that did not turn on Manichean moral dichotomies, but instead were shaped by more pedestrian—more complex, murkier, and enemyless—matters of competence and balanced solutions. In a severely weakened state, the president who had relied almost exclusively on a straightforward and elegantly simple Good-Evil paradigm lacked any framework for thinking about, and even talking about, these issues. And as these more complex issues predominated, he appeared increasingly aimless, inept, and even confused.

The disaster wrought by Hurricane Katrina, an event that entirely lacked an identifiable Enemy to attack, was precisely the type of issue that was wholly incompatible with the president’s binary moralistic framework. To respond appropriately, competence and management skills were required. The administration’s appallingly slow, inept, and virtually indifferent reaction to this disaster highlighted a long-lurking and obscured deficiency—a president who was deeply passionate about railing against the forces of Evil but who was entirely lost when it came to dealing with issues that could not be reduced to moralistic equations.

The politically damaging controversy of the United Arab Emirates/ Dubai deal further highlighted this inadequacy. When the controversy over the port deal emerged, the president sought to assuage widespread concerns by insisting that the UAE was an “ally in the war on terror” and that he had personally concluded that the deal posed no threat to American security.

But—as opponents of the deal were quick and eager to emphasize—the UAE is a country from which two of the 9/11 hijackers originated. It does not recognize Israel or even allow Israeli citizens to enter its country. And it maintains close alliances with some of the most extremist countries in the Middle East, including Iran, the country that the administration by then was already depicting as the new Nazi Germany. Ironically, opponents of Bush’s deal relied primarily upon an invocation of
his
relentlessly advocated worldview—that every country is either firmly on our side, the side of Good, or on the other side, the side of Evil—and opponents advocated within that paradigm to sow serious doubts about the allegiances of the UAE.

Even Congressional Republicans, frightened by the deal and by the president’s political weakness, invoked Bush’s trademarked dichotomized rhetoric against him, piously insisting that we should not turn over our ports to countries associated with terrorism. And with that attack launched at him, the president suffered another humiliating defeat. After having vowed to use his veto power for the first time in his presidency in order to compel approval of the port deal, the administration was forced to abandon it. Far worse for the president, this controversy even raised doubts about whether he was tough on terrorism, the sole political asset he had left; one March 2006 poll from Rasmussen Reports even showed that by then the public trusted Democrats more than Republicans to manage the terrorist threat.

And in Iraq, the president’s “successes” came early on, when Manichean precepts were applicable, and his failures came once they were not. The initial stage of the invasion of Iraq was widely deemed a success. Under the president’s command, the U.S. military invaded Iraq, marched to Baghdad, shattered the Hussein government, removed it from power, and then apprehended Saddam. There, the Good vs. Evil framework applied neatly; the goal was to defeat the Evil dictator and his army, and the president achieved that goal.

But once Saddam was gone, Manichean imperatives were worthless. There was no longer a clearly identifiable “Evil.” There were complex sectarian tensions, both among the various sects and within them. Military assaults could not achieve our objectives. To the extent they could be achieved at all, skillful diplomatic and political solutions were required—ones that focused not on the destruction of some identifiable Evil but on the building of coalitions, the engagement of potential though convertible enemies, and helping that nation to rebuild the civic institutions and infrastructure that our invasion had shattered. And as was true with all challenges faced by the president that did not enliven his Manichean evangelical mission, he was incapable of even minimal success and displayed virtually no interest in such matters.

Long after it was applicable, the president continued to speak of Iraq as though the country required nothing more than a determined, resolute commitment to waging powerful war on Evil. We were in Iraq fighting the terrorists. We could not leave because they would follow us back. Yet, to the extent the war in Iraq was ever accurately described in such simplistic Manichean terms, it had ceased to resemble the president’s basic black-and-white descriptions almost immediately following the occupation. But since the president knows no other approach, to this day his “policy” in Iraq amounts to nothing more than the view that the terrorists will win if we leave, which means we can never leave.

The president’s Manichean mind-set justifies every decision he makes and requires no limits and no reexamination. Like all other major policy initiatives of his tenure, like his presidency itself, the president’s signature mission, the war in Iraq, lay in ruins. And because the president’s core, defining convictions engendered that failure, he is without the ability to change course at all, even if he believed he should. Repudiated, disliked, rejected, and virtually alone, the president remains in power, seemingly unwilling and unable to do anything other than cling tenaciously to the same failed path.

BUSH MANICHEANISM RESHAPES THE POLITICAL SPECTRUM

A
nd thus we end where we began—with the observation that, whatever one might think of the president, it is impossible to contest the sweeping significance of his presidency. The president has not only altered the United States in long-lasting and fundamental ways, but he has altered the political landscape of the country to such an extent that there has been a significant political realignment as a result of his presidency.