A Tragic Legacy: How a Good vs. Evil Mentality Destroyed the Bush Presidency (3 page)

Women who cover their heads in this country must feel comfortable going outside their homes. Moms who wear cover must not be intimidated in America. That’s not the America I know. That’s not the America I value.

Attacks or intimidation efforts against Muslim Americans or Arab Americans, warned the president, would be aggressively prosecuted.

In addition to a firm insistence on tolerance for all citizens, including Muslims, the president expressed goodwill toward other countries—and toward Democratic leaders—in his opening remarks before the Joint Session, remarks that are striking in light of how little such sentiments would be present for the remainder of the Bush presidency:

Speaker Hastert, Minority Leader Gephardt, Majority Leader Daschle and Senator Lott, I thank you for your friendship, for your leadership and for your service to our country.
(Applause.)

And on behalf of the American people, I thank the world for its outpouring of support. America will never forget the sounds of our National Anthem playing at Buckingham Palace, on the streets of Paris, and at Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate.

Unquestionably, the 9/11 attacks would have united the country behind any president; external attacks on a nation virtually always prompt the citizenry’s solidarity behind their leaders. But sustained support for President Bush was not merely the by-product of emotion-driven reactions to the attack. The president himself was responsible for a wide and deep admiration and trust on the part of many Americans who, though initially skeptical of him, were eager that their country be led by an empowered and able president.

Predictably, the president’s approval ratings eroded from the unnatural 90 percent level, but, as noted, they remained high over the course of the next two years. And the March 2003 invasion of Iraq boosted the approval ratings once again to near 70 percent.

The president’s approval ratings did not decline substantially until it became apparent that, contrary to the predominant justification given for the invasion of Iraq, that country did not possess any weapons of mass destruction and was not even actively pursuing development of such weapons at the time the United States invaded. Though the lack of WMDs in Iraq was apparent for some time to those closely following political events, it was the issuance of the “Duelfer Report” in October 2004 which solidified that fact as undisputed conventional wisdom among the country’s media and pundit classes. That report, issued by the CIA under the supervision of its principal Iraqi weapons expert, Charles Duelfer, was intended by the Bush administration to constitute the official and definitive findings with respect to Saddam’s weapons programs. And those findings could not have been more definitive—or more incriminating.

Most Americans did not, of course, read that report, but its impact on America’s political discourse and public opinion about Iraq is nonetheless difficult to overstate. It single-handedly put an end to any ambiguity among America’s punditry, political elite, and other opinion-makers as to the complete nonexistence of the WMDs. In the wake of the “Duelfer Report,” the nonexistence of WMDs in Iraq became such a widely accepted fact that even Bush-friendly media outlets such as Fox News reported it in clear and unambiguous terms. As one Fox report from October 2004 put it:

The chief U.S. arms inspector in Iraq has found no evidence of weapons of mass destruction production by Saddam Hussein’s regime after 1991….

“It appears that he did not vigorously pursue those programs after the inspectors left,” a U.S. official said on condition of anonymity, ahead of the report’s Wednesday afternoon release by the CIA.

Such an incontrovertible finding was directly contrary to the most critical prewar claims that the president and his top officials had repeatedly represented not as being merely likely, but as
hard facts
beyond the realm of doubt. As the Fox report went on to note somewhat pointedly:

Vice President Dick Cheney said in an Aug. 26, 2002 speech, 6 1/2 months before the invasion, that “simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies and against us.”

The “Duelfer Report” was issued one and a half years after the invasion of Iraq. By then, in light of the failure to find any WMDs (despite the administration’s continuous assurances that they “knew” where they were located), it was readily apparent that there were none.

Nonetheless, up until the definitive conclusions were issued by an authoritative report, the president and his supporters were able to cloud the issue of WMDs with obfuscating assertions that no such weapons had been found “yet”—as though they existed but were hidden—or with murkier assertions that the United States
had
located something called “weapons of mass destruction related program activities.” No Bush official, and certainly not the president himself, acknowledged (until after the 2004 election) that Saddam simply had no WMDs. The “Duelfer Report” and its uncompromising, absolute language put an end to those evasions and compelled the widespread recognition of the truth.

An October 2004 article in the
Washington Post
provides a flavor of the type of statements about the administration’s prewar claims that became commonplace once the “Duelfer Report” was issued:

Duelfer’s report, delivered yesterday to two congressional committees, represents the government’s most definitive accounting of Hussein’s weapons programs, the assumed strength of which the Bush administration presented as a central reason for the war. While previous reports have drawn similar conclusions, Duelfer’s assessment went beyond them in depth, detail and level of certainty.

“We were almost all wrong” on Iraq, Duelfer told a Senate panel yesterday.

CNN led its coverage of the report’s findings by underscoring not only the complete absence of WMDs in Iraq for more than ten years, but the absence of any efforts whatsoever on Saddam’s part to develop such weapons:

Saddam Hussein did not possess stockpiles of illicit weapons at the time of the U.S. invasion in March 2003 and had not begun any program to produce them, a CIA report concludes.

In fact, the long-awaited report, authored by Charles Duelfer, who advises the director of central intelligence on Iraqi weapons, says Iraq’s WMD program was essentially destroyed in 1991 and Saddam ended Iraq’s nuclear program after the 1991 Gulf War.

In terms of assessing the Bush legacy, the definitive finding that Saddam had no WMDs whatsoever—issued by the president’s handpicked weapons experts—is certainly one of the most symbolically significant events, and one of the most consequential.

While Americans differed (and continue to differ) on exactly what caused the vast discrepancy between the president’s prewar claims and the reality in Iraq—an honest mistake, a reckless disregard for whether the claims were true, pressure on the intelligence community to issue findings that justified an invasion, or outright, deliberate deceit—there was little dispute, once the report was issued, that the primary justification used to persuade Americans to support the president’s attack on Iraq was simply false. It dramatically altered the opinions of many Americans with regard to the president, and it helped catalyze what can only be described as a near-total collapse of the Bush presidency.

The U.S. had alienated most of the world by commencing an optional war “justified” by the urgent need to eliminate weapons that simply did not exist. At best, the revelation meant that the U.S. had committed a horrifying and embarrassing blunder in front of the entire world. And as the situation in Iraq became more chaotic and it was clear that the president had lost control of events in that country (if he ever had such control in the first place), the “blunder” became not merely embarrassing but dangerous, destructive, and increasingly difficult to defend.

The inescapable fact that WMDs did not exist had a more significant impact on the perceptions of Bush supporters than it did on Bush opponents, since the latter were predominantly already against the war and already harbored serious doubts about the president’s judgment and honesty. There were large numbers of Independents, moderates, and even liberal Democrats who were not natural political allies of the president but who put aside those political differences and supported the invasion of Iraq. Many did so despite holding reservations about the wisdom of invading a sovereign country that had not attacked the United States, but ultimately deferred to the president’s judgment and integrity by accepting his insistent claims that the invasion was critical to U.S. national security.

The realization by war supporters that the president’s primary prewar justification was false, and that their good-faith support for him had been exploited to enable an agenda having nothing to do with terrorism, led to a sense of deep betrayal and irreversible mistrust. From that point forward, many reasonable people were unwilling to place faith in the accuracy of the president’s statements.

Making matters worse for the president, the definitive finding that there were no WMDs came at the time when the occupation of Iraq—which Americans had been led to expect would be quick and easy—was plagued by chaos, violence, and increasingly high American casualties. That there was no end in sight was becoming rapidly apparent. And rather than making progress, Iraq began to resemble the lawless and violence-plagued state that—at the time of the Afghanistan invasion—Americans were told was the climate most likely to breed terrorism.

The revelation of no WMDs, coming as Iraq was falling apart, thus had the devastating effect of undermining Americans’ faith in the integrity of the president
as well as
his administration’s competence. Those two attributes—personal honesty and competence in foreign affairs—had been the pillars of the president’s political strength, and both were subjected to severe assault by the “Duelfer Report” and the accompanying deterioration of Iraq. Polls thus demonstrated not only that previously pro-Bush Americans were expressing disapproval of his performance as president, but that their assessment of the president as a person—his honesty, reliability, and judgment—was dramatically worsening.

According to the Pew Research Center, in September 2003, 62 percent of Americans believed President Bush was
trustworthy
. By July 2005, that number had dropped to 49 percent, and by March 2006, the number had plummeted to 40 percent.

Similarly, when asked to describe President Bush using only one word, the leading response in February 2005 was
honest,
given by 38 percent of respondents. The word
incompetent
finished a distant fifth, garnering only 14 percent. But only a year later, in March 2006, those numbers reversed.
Incompetent
became the leading response with 29 percent, while
honest
tumbled to sixth place, with only 14 percent—tied with the word
liar
(14 percent) and behind the epithet
idiot
(17 percent). As Pew put it in a March 2006 report accompanying its polling data:

President Bush’s declining image also is reflected in the single-word descriptions people use to describe their impression of the president. Three years ago, positive one-word descriptions of Bush far outnumbered negative ones. Over the past two years, the positive-negative balance has been roughly equal. But the one-word characterizations have turned decidedly negative since last July.

Currently, 48% use a negative word to describe Bush compared with just 28% who use a positive term, and 10% who use neutral language.

The 2007 Pew poll was even worse for the president.
Incompetent
continued to be the leading adjective, this time from 34 percent of the respondents. Second was
arrogant,
the adjective selected by 25 percent; the word
idiot
continued to attract a sizable portion as well (19 percent).

The Duelfer Report was issued in October 2004—less than one month prior to the 2004 election. As a result, the unraveling of the Bush presidency was still in its initial stage when America decided to re-elect him. Bush’s approval rating, after remaining near or above 60 percent for most of 2002 and 2003, descended to the 50 percent level in 2004—generally considered the danger zone for the re-election prospects of incumbent presidents—and it hovered there throughout the year, up to and including the election.

Opinion polls in the weeks before the election reflected a dead heat between Bush and John Kerry. Ultimately, Bush won the 2004 race by a popular-vote margin of 2.7 percentage points, the smallest margin of victory for any incumbent president since 1828. As the
Los Angeles Times’
Ron Brownstein noted after the election: “Apart from Truman in 1948 (whose winning margin was 4–5 percentage points), every other president elected to a second term since 1832 has at least doubled the margin that Bush had over Kerry.” And just as was true in 2000, Bush’s 2004 victory was dependent upon a narrow victory in a single state, this time in Ohio.

Most remarkable about the narrowness of Bush’s 2004 victory is the vast array of overwhelming electoral advantages he enjoyed as an incumbent War President. Those advantages ought to have made re-election nearly assured.

Incumbent American presidents rarely lose under any circumstances. But Americans have
never
voted a president out of office during wartime, having comfortably re-elected all four previous wartime presidents who ran again (Madison, Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, and Nixon).

Beyond those towering inherent advantages, Bush barely squeaked by despite running against John Kerry, one of the most politically ungifted major party nominees in several decades; despite Kerry’s running an inept and passive presidential campaign, leading former DNC chair Terry McAuliffe to call the campaign’s failure to attack Bush’s record “one of the biggest acts of political malpractice in the history of American politics” and despite a significant financial advantage. Even with all of those formidable advantages, facing a weak opponent and an unskillful campaign, the War President, after four years of governing, won only two states in 2004 that he did not take in 2000 (Iowa and New Mexico) and even lost New Hampshire for a net gain of only one state.