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Saturday, Jul 11, 2009
Bush's black-and-white rhetoric fails to grasp the complexity of the world. It doesn't even reveal the truth about the darkness of Iraq.
Feb 14, 2002 | President Bush has enthusiastically reintroduced the word "evil" to our political language. Conservatives hail this as a return to American bedrock values, dropping all the diplomatic finesse and calling a spade a spade. And in the days after Sept. 11, as I pondered the diabolical deliberation that went into turning twin towers full of humanity into giant fireballs, I found his rhetoric bracing as well. But months later -- by the time White House speechwriter David Frum came up with his "axis of evil" formulation for the Jan. 29 State of the Union speech, which Bush happily embraced as its emotional centerpiece -- I had come to think of Bush's rhetoric as part of the problem instead of the solution.
Bush utters the world "evil" the way a child does when it first dawns on him that there is darkness and danger in the world, and only his goodness and courage stands in its way. His axis-of-evil war cry, of course, was an attempt at Rooseveltian grandeur -- but because it mangles geopolitical reality (unlike the enemies FDR faced, there is no alliance between Iraq, Iran and North Korea), it simply confuses the American public and underlines what a dismal imitation of a great president our current leader is. It reminds us that this is a man who entered the 2000 presidential race in midlife with the barest, most homespun grasp of the world beyond America's borders, and after a year of Condi Rice tutorials and on-the-job training, is just a step away from calling Greeks "Grecians."
The fact that Bush and Frum -- a conservative intellectual who should know better -- were not widely ridiculed for this addled terminology is one more depressing comment on our slack-jawed media and political opposition. One of the strangest responses to Bush's rhetoric came in Wednesday's New York Times, from the normally sound-minded columnist Thomas Friedman, who while thoroughly rejecting the intellectual merits of the axis-of-evil worldview, nonetheless embraced its wacky spirit because it's necessary to be "as crazy as some of our enemies." And Al Gore, suddenly back from the Land of Nod, typically played it both ways in a New York speech on Tuesday, praising Bush for zeroing in on the odd trio of evil, but then covering his liberal base by deploring that other dark triangle, poverty, disease and oppression. It's time to stop all this dancing around and call Bush's speech what it is: a flight of idiocy.
Did the president miss the briefing on the history of Iraq-Iran relations, the one that pointed out that the two countries are mortal enemies, one a Shiite theocracy riven by democratic yearnings, the other a Sunni-led and thoroughly secular Stalinist dictatorship, and that they bled each other nearly dry in one of the goriest wars of the 20th century? And how did starving and benighted North Korea get in there anyway? Former U.N. ambassador Richard Holbrooke offered the most likely explanation, telling CNN's Jeff Greenfield that Bush probably threw in Beloved Leader Kim Chong-il's bizarre dictatorship just to show the U.S. wasn't going after only Islamic countries.
Bush's speeches -- or the speeches written for Bush -- do nothing to expand America's knowledge of the world we live in. There is no nuance or complexity in the president's political language, and perhaps in his mind, and of course the world is filled with it. In fact, his own presidency is replete with it. Just days before his State of the Union speech, Bush pushed through the appointment of Otto Reich as assistant secretary of state for the Western Hemisphere, despite his ties to the Cuban terrorist behind one of the worst crimes in aviation history. As Holbrooke dryly noted to Greenfield, "One person's terrorist is another person's freedom fighter." Then there's China. Demonized in the early days of the Bush presidency by administration hard-liners as a bellicose foe in the Cold War mode, Beijing has now become one of our best friends in the war on terrorism.
Bush sees the world in the black-and-white terms of the born-again fundamentalist that he is. He has vowed to root out evil wherever it is in the world (why not original sin too while he's at it?), and each day the press is filled with the names of new countries that the U.S. is targeting. In addition to the triad of evil, there is Yemen, Somalia, Indonesia, Algeria, the Central Asian republics, and of course American soldiers are already on the ground in the Philippines, where the full might of the U.S. arsenal is now being turned on a motley band called Abu Sayyaf, which as the New York Times' Nicholas Kristof has reported, is not an Islamic terror group, but "simply a gang of about 60 brutal thugs" with no proven ties to al-Qaida.
In the past few weeks, Bush's axis-of-evil hard line has succeeded in strengthening the hand of the militant mullahs in Iran and turning street demonstrations in Tehran that once hailed American democracy into "Death to the U.S.A." chants; in bringing Iran closer to its hated Iraqi enemy, with Saddam Hussein extending a friendly hand to the mullahs for the first time since their epic war in the 1980s; and in driving the North Korean dictatorship deeper into its cave, further entombing the "sunshine" peace process boldly started by South Korea's president Kim Dae Jung. It has also driven an ever-deeper wedge between the U.S. and its European, Asian and Arab allies, who have lined up to denounce Bush's foreign policy. South Korean official Choi Jin Wook called Bush's new line "very scary," while Chris Patten -- the European commissioner for international relations and a close associate of Tony Blair, the best friend in the world America could ever hope for -- blasted it as "absolutist and simplistic" and "unilateralist overdrive." All this and a skyrocketing military budget that threatens, along with Bush's ill-conceived tax cuts, to return the country to economy-wrecking Reagan-era deficits. Seldom has one State of the Union speech had such a global impact.
In a matter of weeks, Bush has poisoned the deep well of international sympathy that overflowed after Sept. 11 (when even Parisians were carrying signs saying "We're all Americans") and revived an American unilateralism more virulent than even in the first days of his administration. Instead of focusing on rebuilding Afghanistan and reinvigorating the Mideast peace process -- and thereby adding to America's luster by showing the world, and particularly its Islamic populations, that we stand for the progress of humanity and not just our own aggrandizement -- Bush has declared that the world is our buffer zone and we're prepared to police it on our own.
This is not to deny that the world can indeed be dark and dangerous and that America must sometimes venture into it bristling with our unmatched weaponry. Over the past months, I have strongly supported Bush's demolition of the al-Qaida network and Taliban government in Afghanistan. (And I will applaud even louder when the job is finished and U.S. forces have either captured Osama bin laden, Mullah Omar and their top aides or verified their deaths.) In addition, I have sharply criticized antiwar leftists who advocated a therapeutic response to terrorism, with none of the human mess that war entails. By denying their own country the right to defend itself militarily, these intellectuals and activists have so compromised themselves that, for now at least, they have lost their political credibility.
Nor is it to deny that, in the case of Saddam Hussein, America faces a dictator who is not only evil, but potentially threatening to our security as well, because of Saddam's undying embrace of doomsday weapons and his record of using them, as well as his intermittent courtship of terrorists. (Iran and North Korea present problems of a different sort, but ones that -- as President Clinton and our European allies have emphasized -- are best dealt with through engagement rather than Bush-style rejectionism.) Saddam is clearly the Bush team's fattest target, the great whale they let go when they were managing the first term of the Bush dynasty. On Tuesday, the administration underscored its seriousness about eliminating Saddam by sending out their voice of moderation, Colin Powell, to tell a Senate committee the dictator was definitely in its cross hairs this time, with or without the support of our allies.
But even in Saddam's case, there is less black-and-white than Bush junior's twangy rhetoric allows for. The history of U.S. relations with Baghdad is a case study in complexity, to put it mildly. Bush should just ask his father.
