Goodbye Bush

Julian Sanchez reflects on Bush's helicopter exit and the surprising lack of incoming rocket fire from the gathered crowd:

That George Bush got to leave the White House in a helicopter, rather than dragged from the rear bumper of a Buick, is a testament to the almost mindboggling restraint of the American people. It’s an act of mercy bordering on injustice that the man is facing execration rather than execution.

“Derangement” at this point consists in the failure to appreciate how easy he’s getting off.

And take your GWOT with you

One of my favorite books from high school is Orwell's 1984. Mostly for the lesson in how language can be used as a framing mechanism for controlling what can be effectively communicated, or even conceived of to start with.

Language is the the key to abstract thought, and abstract thought is the key to reason.

So, as I wave goodbye to the Bush years, I am extremely hopeful that Obama will quickly retire the ridiculous term "Global War on Terror." I always always always hated this formulation. Mostly, because since it was so purposefully inaccurate -- it has been said it made as much sense as declaring a War on Hand Grenades; since it is a tactic, not an enemy -- that it seemed to imply bad faith a priori on the part of those proffering it. And, in retrospect, I think it is clear this assumption of bad faith was true.

By contrast, here is a statement by UK foreign minister, David Miliband, in the wake of the recent terrorist attack on Mumbai.

I agree with every word of it:

Terrorism was not invented or started on 9/11. But since then, the notion of a "war on terror" has defined the terrain. The phrase had some merit: it captured the gravity of the threats we face, the need for solidarity amongst allies, and the need to respond with real urgency - and where necessary with force.

But for a couple of years now the British Government has used neither the idea nor the phrase "war on terror". The reason is that ultimately, the notion is misleading and mistaken. Historians will judge whether it has done more harm than good. But we need to move on to meet the challenges we face.

The issue is not whether we need to attack the use of terror at its roots, with all the tools available to us. We must. The question is how we best do so.

The notion of a war on terror gave the impression of a unified, transnational enemy, embodied in the figure of Osama Bin Laden and the organization of Al Qaeda. In fact, as India has long known, the forces of violent extremism remain diverse. Terrorism is a deadly tactic, not an institution or an ideology.

The global threat from violent extremism has become more real because technology enables terrorists to connect more easily with each other, whether to plot and plan or to ape each other's tactics and techniques. But it is also more potent because Al Qaeda and its ilk seek to aggregate different local, regional and religious problems into a single complaint: the alleged oppression of Muslims around the world.

Yet the motivations and identities of terrorist groups - from Hizbollah to the Taleban, Tamil Tigers and Lashkar e Toiba - are disparate not singular. The more we lump terrorist groups together and draw the battle lines as a simple binary struggle between moderates and extremists or good and evil, the more we play into the hands of those seeking to unify groups with little in common, and the more we magnify the sense of threat. The trap to avoid is inadvertently sustaining Al Qaida's propaganda - their claim that disparate grievances add up to a unified complaint. We should expose their claim to a compelling and overarching explanation and narrative as the lie that it is.

This strikes me as a mature, thoughtful, direct and steadfast statement about the principles that should underlie our ongoing confrontation with radical Islamic terrorists.

Of course, it stands in stark contrast to the black/white, Us/Them jihad against jihad that the Bush White House has subjected us to for the past 7+ years.

Christian Brose, in Foreign Affairs, highlights Bush's unyielding and mind-numbing consistency on this point right on through his farewell address to the country.

Here is Bush last night:

The battles waged by our troops are part of a broader struggle between two dramatically different systems. Under one, a small band of fanatics demands total obedience to an oppressive ideology, condemns women to subservience, and marks unbelievers for murder. The other system is based on the conviction that freedom is the universal gift of Almighty God and that liberty and justice light the path to peace.

I have little to quibble with in the descriptions; it's the comparison that bothers me. And the reference is clear. Here is President Harry Truman speaking to Congress on March 12, 1947:

At the present moment in world history nearly every nation must choose between alternative ways of life. The choice is too often not a free one.

One way of life is based upon the will of the majority, and is distinguished by free institutions, representative government, free elections, guarantees of individual liberty, freedom of speech and religion, and freedom from political oppression. The second way of life is based upon the will of a minority forcibly imposed upon the majority. It relies upon terror and oppression, a controlled press and radio; fixed elections, and the suppression of personal freedoms.

There was a time after 9/11 when America needed a president who saw the people who had just attacked us as a world-conquering, ideological counterweight to American liberalism. And Bush answered that call.

Now, more than seven years on, we need to insist -- without compromising one bit of our post-9/11 seriousness, vigilance, or willingness to defend ourselves -- that by raising al-Qaeda and company to our level, we are only degrading ourselves while painting them as the very thing they aspire to be.

Our enemy in this confrontation is a deviant bunch of bitter-enders, whose only ideas about organizing society have been rejected everywhere -- everywhere -- they've been forced on people. The sooner we start treating them as such the better.

Bush could never accept that, let alone do it.

It is said that consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds. In this case, there was more than a hobgoblin at work. It was the frickin' Godzilla of small minds on the loose.

Don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out

On the doorstep of the end of the Bush years, I just came across this great peice by Jay Rosen from back in 2006 that reaches to the philosophical core from which the fatal course of the Bush Presidency was set.

Rosen credits the reporting of Ron Suskind, particularly his Without A Doubt article from the New York Times Magazine, as revealing the intellectual scoop for how to interpret the Bush White House.

From Rosen:

A different pattern had appeared under George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. The normal checks and balances had been overcome, so that executive power could flow more freely. Reduced deliberation, oversight, fact-finding, and field reporting were different elements of an emerging political style. Suskind, I felt, got to the essence of it with his phrase, the “retreat from empiricism.”

Which is a perfect example of what Bill Keller and others at the New York Times call an intellectual scoop. (“When you can look at all the dots everyone can look at, and be the first to connect them in a meaningful and convincing way…”) Over the last three years, and ever since the adventure in Iraq began, Americans have seen spectacular failures of intelligence, spectacular collapses in the press, spectacular breakdowns in the reality-checks built into government, including the evaporation of oversight in Congress, and the by-passing of the National Security Council, which was created to prevent exactly these events.

[snip]

The alternative to facts on the ground is to act, regardless of the facts on the ground. When you act you make new facts. You clear new ground. And when you roll over or roll back the people who have a duty to report the situation as it is—people in the press, the military, the bureaucracy, your own cabinet, or right down the hall—then right there you have demonstrated your might.

It was Suskind's reporting that led to the coinage of the now famous phrase the "reality-based community." As noted, this seeming disdain for the facts wasn't so much an unintended result of anti-intellectualism run amock as it was a calculated method for clearing the ground for actions the White House wanted to take.

Facts or dissent could create roadblocks to desired actions. So, facts had to be subverted, channeled or ignored.

To paint Bush as simply a bumbling, redneck bumpkin who slid into the White House on Daddy's coattails is to undercut the level of intentionality at work here. It is a way of shifted or mitigating the blame. Or, to frame Bush, as some of his remaining supporters do (can there still be any?), as a good man led astray by bad advice.

This simply doesn't wash for me. His trajectory is more complex and directed than the simple narrative of "good man, bad advice" will allow.

It was more than dim-witted ignorance that was propelling him. It was arrogance that served to cover, for all his vaunted Texas swagger and machismo, a real weakness at the core of the man. A man whose doubt has to be covered with needless and unearned certitude.

A strong man can afford to be humble. A weak man cannot, as there is no pillar from which to hang his humility.

From Bob Woodward, via a post by Dreher:

During a December 2003 interview with Bush, I read to him a quote from his closest ally, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, about the experience of receiving letters from family members of slain soldiers who had written that they hated him. "And don't believe anyone who tells you when they receive letters like that, they don't suffer any doubt," Blair had said.

"Yeah," Bush replied. "I haven't suffered doubt."

"Is that right?" I asked. "Not at all?"

"No," he said.

Now try to square this attitude with the following description, by Rosen, of the White House debrief of the first leader of the post-war Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, Jay Garner:

When Jay Garner returns to the White House from running the American effort in Iraq, Bush, Cheney, Condi Rice and Rumsfeld are there to greet him. Not only does he know to give a falsely upbeat assessment in his written report and stick to cheerful banter during the meeting, but he finds that no one asks him a single question about the situation on the ground in Iraq. [em: mine]

Here you have the best possible reporter, but there is no report. The scene (as described by George Packer) is highly ritualized. A message is being sent about who gets to define what’s happening on the ground, and it isn’t the people on the ground.

Honestly, it is hard to read such stupid s*** like this and not want to strangle the dumb m*****f***** with my own bare hands. He had a f***ing responsibility here that was much bigger than any self-aggrandizing dreams of himself!! A responsibility to the lives of 150K+ soldiers (not to mention the millions of Iraqis), and the cavalier attitude that he managed to revel in while simultaneously abdicating this responsibility through willfully blind recklessness and outright incompetence is truly enraging.

Rather than suffusing himself to the responsibility of his Presidential authority, that authority was bent in the service of his own ego.

For instance, Bush has a well-known habit for giving nicknames to everyone around him. On the one hand such behavior could be be seen as an ice-breaker, a way of tearing down the formal stiffness that might naturally be present when one finds oneself addressing the President of the United States.

On the other hand, it is an interpersonal power play. Bush can nickname, jibe, even soft-handedly demean the other person with full knowledge that the same will never be returned in kind, given the authority of his position. And, thereby Bush can relish in the capacity to lord his authority over others around him, even in such an insignificant manner.

This is the mark of a weak man and tyrant by nature.

And while Bush is often criticized due to his various malapropisms and mangled syntax, it was this quote that always riled me the most:

I'm the commander, I do not need to explain why I say things. That's the interesting thing about being the President. Maybe somebody needs to explain to me why they say something, but I don't feel like I owe anybody an explanation.

There is an imperial sensibility at work here. I am in command and what I say goes.

In such circumstances, loyalty is the highest value in one's subordinates. Since disunity is a threat to a weak king. It threatens to pull back the curtain, to reveal the man who is really there. And, that is something that Bush couldn't abide.

So as this sorry chapter in our political history draws down, I find that this commenter to James Fallows blog captures the sentiment of these times for me properly:

I too thought the final Bush press conference was a remarkable performance; if an actor were to memorize and replicate it, it would seem like something out of Eugene O'Neill, staged in a barroom, and we might feel pity.

The inept man without words realizes that he cannot say what he must say: an admission of failures across the board, a realization that his pipe dreams were deadly, an understanding that his nation and the world now hold him in low esteem and wish him gone.

And not to be able to say these things is to remain their captive forever. But there is no expiation for Mr. Bush, and that is the objective tragedy. How can he live without awareness?

He also must see how much Barack Obama is his opposite, how much he is admired and welcomed to the office, so unlike the stolen Bush arrival in 2000. It's a remarkable achievement for Mr. Bush: every moment of his presidency is touched with a shame that cannot be bathed away. I think he will disappear; I cannot see any post-presidential role he could fulfill without the full recollection of that shame.

And, this is a shame that is fully deserved. And, so it is not with a twinge of sadness or pity that I read the following revelation from the devastating retrospective assessment of Bush by the Economist which characterizes his presidency as one of "partisanship, politicization and incompetence."

He leaves the White House as one of the least popular and most divisive presidents in American history. At home, his approval rating has been stuck in the 20s for months; abroad, George Bush has presided over the most catastrophic collapse in America’s reputation since the second world war. The American economy is in deep recession, brought on by a crisis that forced Mr Bush to preside over huge and unpopular bail-outs.

America is embroiled in two wars, one of which Mr Bush launched against the tide of world opinion. The Bush family name, once among the most illustrious in American political life, is now so tainted that Jeb, George’s younger brother, recently decided not to run for the Senate from Florida. A Bush relative describes family gatherings as “funeral wakes”. [em: mine]

Well, he's getting a full f***ing dose of reality now, isn't he? Too bad for the rest of us it was eight years too late.

I, for one, won't be sending the SOB any flowers.