Why Bush Failed

Monday, May 14, 2007

By Jeffrey Hart

We are witnessing the comprehensive failure of an American president. Recently William Buckley said that Bush has been “engulfed” by Iraq and that if he were a European prime minister he would resign. Buckley has also said that Vietnam destroyed the Cold War liberals and led to Republican control of politics for a generation. And that Iraq would do the same for the GOP. What, then, are the roots of Bush’s failure?

The answer is easy. Bush and his advisors have been driven by ideas and theories disconnected from actuality. And actuality always wins.

In three important speeches, Bush provided spectacular evidence of his disconnect. On February 26, 2003, less than a month before “shock and awe” and Blitzkrieg to Baghdad, Bush told an audience at the American Enterprise Institute:

Human cultures can be vastly different, yet the human heart desires the same good things everywhere on earth.... freedom and democracy will always have greater appeal than the slogans of hatred and the the tactics of terror.

Happy thought. Mohamed Atta and the suicide bombers of 9-11 didn’t want the same good things as the people going to work in the World Trade Center that morning. Neither Genghis Kahn nor Adolf Hitler had democracy as a goal. Under Saddam, the Sunnis ran Iraq. Now the majority Shia intend to run it.

Speaking at Whitehall on November 19, 2003, about nine months into the Iraq war, Bush spread before his audience there a golden vision of the future:

The establishment of a free Iraq in the heart of the Middle East will be a watershed event in the global expansion of democracy . . . as the alternative to hatred and terror.

The global expansion of democracy. Sure. In a speech at Irvine, California on April 24, 2006, three years into his Iraq fiasco, Bush finally rolled out God:

I based my foreign policy on some things I think are true. One, I believe there’s an Almighty, and secondly I believe one of the great gifts of the Almighty is the desire in everybody’s soul regardless of what you look like or where you live to be free. And I believe liberty is universal [sic]. I believe people want to be free. And I know that the best way to defeat the enemy, the best way to defeat their ability to exploit their hopelessness and despair, it is to give people a chance to live in a free society.

I believe, I believe, I believe. Odd how the Almighty always seems to want the same things the believer wants. In fact, about a billion people want to follow the rules of Allah as set forth in the Koran. There is solid evidence that Bush believes he was chosen by God to be president and that God speaks through him. (Deborah Caldwell, “An Evolving Faith: Does the President Believe He has a Divine Mandate?” Christian Ethics Today, Spring 2005. But Bush would not like that word “evolving.”)

When you shake all this up with the neoconservative conviction that the United States is almost omnipotent you have an explosive cocktail indeed.

That was the notion behind the neoconservative Project for the American Century, founded in 1997 by William Kristol and Robert Kagan.

The American Century? Might not China have something to say about that?

Today the offices of the Project for the American Century have closed. They used to be in the American Enterprise Institute building in Washington. Where else would they have been? The American Century got lost somewhere near the Tigris and Euphrates.

That must be coming as a big surprise to many in the Bush administration. In an October 2004 New York Times Magazine article, Ron Suskind recalled a conversation with a “senior Bush aide” that perfectly epitomizes this baseless imperial hubris. The Bush aide dismissed all criticism from the direction of what he called the “reality based community,” aand went on to say:

That’s not really the way the world works anymore. . . . We are an empire now, and when we act we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality judicially as you will—we’ll act again, creating new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we will do.

That man was right. We are indeed studying what they have done and are doing.

Right now, the Bush “surge” of troops in Iraq is supposed to give the Maliki “Unity Government” some calm in which to make Shia-Sunni compromises and establish stability. As Genral Petraeus has said, “There’s no military solution in Iraq.” That is, there has to be a political solution.

But the Maliki Shia-dominated regime has shown no inclination to compromise with the Sunnis. Why should they? The Shia constitute a large majority, they have the oil, and they have every intention of running the place. Moqtada al-Sadr has his large Mahdi Army which can annihilate the Sunnis militarily, and will probably be the next ruler of Iraq—and allied with Iran, creating a crescent of Shia power from Baghdad through Teheran to Beirut. There is no chance that he would tolerate al-Qaeda in Iraq. That Almighty Bush had on his 800 call must have been Allah.

Bush has been a catastrophe. He ignored actuality in Iraq, in the women’s revolution, in science and stem cells, in fiscal policy, in his market fundamentalism, in his religious fundamentalism. Iraq is a trillion dollar strategic catastrophe: tens of thousands dead, two million Iraqis in exile. Somewhere President James Buchanan is throwing a champagne party. Buchanan is no longer the worst. Happy day for him. Eighteen months to go.

Why Bush Failed

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