1 Boring Old Man

Mr. Bush at His Best and Worst
January 17, 2009

Addressing the nation for the last time as President Thursday night, George W. Bush identified September 11, 2001, as the defining moment of his eight years in office. The lesson of that awful day, he suggested, was that "good and evil are present in this world, and between the two of them there can be no compromise. Murdering the innocent to advance an ideology is wrong every time, everywhere. Freeing people from oppression and despair is eternally right." Americans can never afford to grow complacent, and, above all, must "maintain our moral clarity," he said.

In those few sentences, Mr. Bush encapsulated both what was valuable in his approach to national security and foreign policy — and what has been so very troubling. He was and is essentially correct to define Islamist terrorism as an unappeasable menace. His certitude amid the crisis of 9-11 helped galvanize the initial national response, including the toppling of the Taliban in Afghanistan. Alas, that same certitude led Mr. Bush down many blind alleys and, in the worst moments, caused him to debase his country’s moral currency. In rejecting the Geneva Conventions, he seemed not to realize that the world, even those parts of it that were friendly toward the United States, does not assume American righteousness — and that even a necessary counterattack against al Qaeda and other enemies must therefore be constrained by law. History may credit him for avoiding a second attack on U.S. soil, but not for his handling of Guantanamo or "enhanced interrogation."

In Iraq, too, Mr. Bush gambled his nation’s international alliances and its international reputation. We agreed with him that Saddam Hussein’s defiance of multiple UN Security Council resolutions was intolerable, and that sanctions against his regime could neither contain the long-term threat of weapons of mass destruction nor deliver the Iraqi people from unendurable tyranny. Like the president, our sense of the war’s necessity was shaken by the absence of WMD. Unlike the president, our sense of his administration’s competence was shaken by the war’s disgracefully bad planning, which contributed to Iraq’s post-invasion plunge into horrific violence. The global backlash against the war, especially in Europe, has cost the U.S. dearly, making it more difficult to rally the world against Iran’s nuclear ambitions. Though relations with Europe have been significantly repaired, Iran exploited the divisions in Western ranks to make mischief in both Iraq and Afghanistan — and to advance its bomb-building…

Bush tells us that "good and evil are present in this world, and between the two of them there can be no compromise." Well, he compromised. The force he sent to Iraq would have been adequate to secure Afghanistan. Had there been an insurgency there, the loss of American lives and resources would have been worth the price. And he would’ve had his base in the Middle East to continue to battle Al Qaeda. It was a just war with a just cassus belli. He chose to follow the path of the neoconservatives and the Project for the New American Century rather that stick to American ideals and principles. The problem with binary thinking, "good and evil are present in this world," is that you assume what you think is "good." What Bush and Cheney thought wasn’t.

But, as matters in Iraq now stand, there is a decent chance of a reasonably pro-American incipient democracy in the heart of the Arab Middle East. This would be a major accomplishment, and one that would cast the invasion, the failures of the early years of occupation and the painful loss of more than 4,000 American lives and many thousand more Iraqi lives in a different light than that in which they are seen by most Americans now. It would also vindicate his unpopular decision to stabilize Iraq with more U.S. troops rather than abandon it to civil war and possible genocide – an instance in which Mr. Bush’s self-assurance and steadfastness paid off.