A Tragic Legacy: How a Good vs. Evil Mentality Destroyed the Bush Presidency (5 page)

The report rejected not merely the president’s handling of the war but also, more critically, the overall approach of the Bush administration toward the Middle East. The report’s key recommendations constituted wholesale rejections of the basic premises of the Bush approach to the Middle East—specifically, it concluded that the United States should open negotiations with the regimes in Iran and Syria to achieve stability in Iraq, and should also exert far more efforts toward facilitating an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement.

These recommendations, unanimously embraced by the commission, were clear repudiations of the pillars of the Bush foreign policy. The president’s approach to the Middle East was informed by his view that “Evil” regimes (his characterization of those that rule Iran and Syria) cannot be reasoned or negotiated with. The president has been equally insistent that the U.S. should remain firmly on Israel’s side rather than acting as an “honest broker” between it and its “Evil terrorist” enemies.

That such a panel—composed of wise, respected Washington elites, including some Bush supporters—would issue such a resounding rejection of the president’s handling of the war and his overall foreign policy constituted nothing short of the political establishment’s full-scale rebellion over the course the president had chosen for the United States. Writing in
Salon
, Gary Kamiya described the report as “a call for the United States to radically change its policies in the Middle East,” and explained:

Under normal circumstances, the chances would be nil that a bipartisan panel made up of such wild radicals as Sandra Day O’Connor, Vernon Jordan and Alan Simpson would bluntly assert that “the United States will not be able to achieve its goals in the Middle East unless the United States deals directly with the Arab-Israeli conflict,” or insist that we begin talking with states we deem supporters of terrorism. Holding Israel’s feet to the fire, which is what “dealing directly” with the conflict means, is politically radioactive in Washington—or it was.

But Bush’s Iraq debacle has exacerbated the contradictions and weaknesses of our Mideast policy and raised the stakes for the United States so high that it has become impossible for neutral observers to simply mouth the party line. Just as the thought of the gallows concentrates the mind, so a war that has cost almost 3,000 American lives and $2 billion a week, weakened America’s standing in the world, and strengthened our terrorist enemies, has forced the Washington power elite to acknowledge reality.

Bush’s almost immediate rejection of the report’s key findings, and his announced intention to escalate the war instead, was a potent sign of how isolated he had become.

T
he Iraq War had become so manifest a failure by the end of 2006 that some prominent war supporters and prowar pundits were not merely changing their minds about the war, but were affirmatively denying that they ever supported it in the first place. In January 2007, Joe Klein, the longtime columnist for
Time
magazine, claimed on a
Time
website: “I’ve been opposed to the Iraq war ever since…2002.” But on February 23, 2003—exactly one month before the invasion of Iraq—Klein had been a guest on
Meet the Press
and had this exchange with Tim Russert:

KLEIN: This is a really tough decision. War may well be the right decision at this point. In fact, I think it—it’s—it—it probably is.

RUSSERT: Now that’s twice you’ve said that: “It’s the right war.” You believe it’s the wrong time. Why do you think it’s the right war?

KLEIN: Because sooner or later, this guy has to be taken out. Saddam has—Saddam Hussein has to be taken out.

For a public figure like Klein to claim that he was opposed to the Iraq War—even though he went on national television one month before it started to pronounce that war “probably” is “the right decision at this point”—demonstrates just how damaging Klein perceives being associated with the president’s decision to invade.

Like Klein, Michael Ledeen—a contributing editor of
National Review
and a Freedom Scholar at the influential neoconservative think tank American Enterprise Institute—wrote on the
National Review
blog in November 2006: “I had and have no involvement with our Iraq policy. I opposed the military invasion of Iraq before it took place.”

Ledeen, however, wrote in August 2002 of “the desperately-needed and long overdue war against Saddam Hussein” and when he was interviewed for
Front Page Magazine
the same month and asked, “Okay, well if we are all so certain about the dire need to invade Iraq, then when do we do so?” Ledeen replied: “Yesterday.” There is obvious, substantial risk in falsely claiming that one opposed the Iraq War notwithstanding a public record of support. But that war has come to be viewed as such a profound failure that that risk, at least in the eyes of some, is outweighed by the prospect of being associated with Bush’s invasion.

Perhaps most notably, even the aggressively loyal band of Bush supporters who have long stood behind the president on virtually every issue—who cheered on and enabled almost every decision—has been abandoning him as the perception grows that he is a weak and failed president.

For the first several years of the Bush presidency—up to and including his re-election—Peggy Noonan, the former speechwriter to the president’s father who wrote Bush 41’s “thousand points of light” speech, employed her trademark effusiveness in her
Wall Street Journal
column and frequent television appearances in praise of the president’s character and integrity.

Yet by 2006, she began attacking him regularly—his performance in office as well as his character. Noonan focused specifically on what had previously been, in the eyes of his supporters, a great strength—namely his refusal to consider the possibility that he had erred and his belief that failure requires nothing more than increased determination to succeed. Noonan wrote in an October 2006 column:

I think that Americans have pretty much stopped listening to him. One reason is that you don’t have to listen to get a sense of what’s going on. He does not appear to rethink things based on new data. You don’t have to tune in to see how he’s shifting emphasis to address a trend, or tacking to accommodate new winds. For him there is no new data, only determination.

But whereas certain fans began abandoning Bush on the ground that he is too stubborn and resistant to change even in the face of failure, others began turning against him on the exact opposite ground—namely, that he had become too weak and irresolute. Former Bush speechwriter David Frum—whose 2003 book had anointed Bush
The Right Man
and “tells the story of Bush’s transformation: how a president whose administration began in uncertainty became one of the most decisive, successful, and in the US at least, popular leaders of our time”—painted a picture of Bush in a November 2006
Wall Street Journal
op-ed as a weak, confused, defeated figure:

The Bush administration woke up yesterday morning to a deeply ugly political situation. Those polls that show the president below 40 percent approval? They would look even worse if they surveyed only Republican members of Congress. As for the president’s opponents: They are slavering for a nice two-year-long munch on the administration’s haunches.

Worst of all, the administration seems to have exhausted its energy. Frustrated by Iraq, wounded by Katrina, thwarted in its two most recent major domestic initiatives (Social Security and immigration), the administration looks baffled, uncertain and often strangely passive.

John Podhoretz has long used his pundit space in the
New York Post
and
National Review
to hail the greatness of George Bush. Further, his
Bush Country
(2004) is devoted, literally, to establishing Bush’s greatness. Therein, he described the invasion of Iraq as “the gift George W. Bush has given to the world” and even praised him as the “best presidential speaker since Franklin Delano Roosevelt.” A more adoring fan of President Bush would be hard to find. Yet in his
New York Post
column, Podhoretz called a December 2006 press conference regarding Iraq “unquestionably the most dispirited performance of his presidency.” Podhoretz went on to argue that the performance was indicative of a weakened, crippled president:

The question was this: How would Bush, who himself had only suffered electoral success since seeking higher office in 1994, handle defeat? The answer: Not well….

As usual, the president took pains to warn the enemy in Iraq that “they can’t intimidate America.” But, by offering no real sense that he knows what “the way forward in Iraq” is, he seemed unsteady—and unsteadiness is exactly the quality that should and will gladden the hearts of the enemy in Iraq.

If you combine the effect of yesterday’s press conference with his remarkably depressing interview with
The Washington Post
the day before—when he said that victory was “achievable” in Iraq, a defeatist word that must have had Winston Churchill rolling in his grave—you can’t help but feel that Bush has had the stuffing knocked out of him by the twin blows of the November election results and the bloody chaos in Baghdad.

Yet this is not a moment when we or the troops in Iraq can afford to have a winded and stunned president.

Fundamental shifts in one’s perception of President Bush are now commonplace from those who had previously revered him.
Washington Post
reporter Bob Woodward has written a three-book series about the administration, with a focus on the president’s personality traits and decision-making methods.
Bush at War
, the 2002 first of the three, is almost entirely brimming with praise for Bush the Great and Strong Leader.

But in September 2006, Michiko Kakutani, book critic of the
New York Times
, noted that in
State of Denial
, the third and last in the series, the president described by Woodward appears to be a completely different person than the one he glorified in his 2002 treatment:

President Bush [in
State of Denial
] emerges as a passive, impatient, sophomoric and intellectually incurious leader, presiding over a grossly dysfunctional war cabinet and given to an almost religious certainty that makes him disinclined to rethink or re-evaluate decisions he has made about the war.

It’s a portrait that stands in stark contrast to the laudatory one Mr. Woodward drew in “Bush at War,” his 2002 book, which depicted the president—in terms that the White House press office itself has purveyed—as a judicious, resolute leader, blessed with the “vision thing” his father was accused of lacking and firmly in control of the ship of state.

Thus, while the Bush in Woodward’s 2002 depiction is an admirable man of resolve, by 2006 the president is a profoundly flawed “prisoner of his own certitude.”

As 2006 drew to a close, Tony Blankley, a
Washington Times
editor and former press spokesman to Newt Gingrich, described the president’s predicament as one of great loneliness, abandoned even by most of his prior supporters, and under attack from all precincts:

The American presidency has been called “A Glorious Burden” by the Smithsonian Museum, and the loneliest job in the world by historians. As we approach Christmas 2006 Anno Domini, President Bush is surely fully seized of the loneliness and burden of his office.

For rarely has a president stood more alone at a moment of high crisis than does our president now as he makes his crucial policy decisions on the Iraq War. His political opponents stand triumphant, yet barren of useful guidance. Many—if not most—of his fellow party men and women in Washington are rapidly joining his opponents in a desperate effort to save their political skins in 2008. Commentators who urged the president on in 2002–03, having fallen out of love with their ideas, are quick to quibble with and defame the president.

Blankley is one of the remaining few who admire Bush, yet even his depiction of the formerly cocksure and powerful president as an abandoned and lonely figure is almost pity inducing.

And on Fox News, long an outpost of pro-Bush loyalty, the prowar, generally pro-Bush Mort Kondrake appeared the day after Bush’s 2007 State of the Union address and summarized the Bush legacy as follows:

In this world in which we live, the chances are that unless something miraculous happens, that George Bush is going to leave us with a world in which everything’s a mess and we’ve got to restore our likeability in the world without losing our leadership capacity.

And in the wake of the growing scandal in March 2007 involving the administration’s firing of eight U.S. attorneys, conservative pundit Bob Novak—noting that virtually nobody, including House Republicans, was defending the president—made this rather startling observation in his syndicated column:

With nearly two years remaining in his presidency, George W. Bush is alone. In half a century, I have not seen a president so isolated from his own party in Congress—not Jimmy Carter,
not even Richard Nixon as he faced impeachment
[emphasis added].