Site Presented By
Tuesday, Feb 9, 2010
Bush's presidency has been a historic disaster. There's still time to rectify his Iraq blunder -- but first, he has to go.
Nov 1, 2004 | "The pure products of America go crazy," wrote William Carlos Williams. The words could serve as a motto for the age of Bush. In years to come historians will likely judge the Bush presidency one of the worst in the history of the republic -- an amalgam of arrogance, radicalism and folly so egregious it's almost laughable. Abandoning common sense in foreign affairs, weakening the rule of law, handing the nation's wealth over to the super-rich, and squandering the friendship and sympathy of the world in rigid pursuit of a chimerical dream of a world that cannot threaten us, the Bush presidency has betrayed the nation's deepest principles, both liberal and conservative.
Alarmed and outraged, half of a bitterly divided nation protested, but it did so alone. Cowed by 9/11 and intimidated by a right-wing media machine that wielded the flag like a spear, Congress and the media, the institutions that should have checked Bush's mad rush to war, abandoned their posts until it was too late. From its dubious beginning to its fear-mongering, vote-suppressing end (one hopes), the Bush era has been a perfect storm in which all the worst aspects of our national temper -- insularity, empty swagger and ignorance -- have come together.
Perhaps the most dispiriting aspect of the whole sorry chapter has been the collapse of national memory and accountability. One outrage follows the next with dreamlike regularity, lies about aluminum tubes to 9/11 revelations to Ahmed Chalabi to Joseph Wilson to cooked intel to Abu Ghraib to illegal detentions to lost explosives, and nothing ever happens, no one is ever punished, everything is for the best in the best of all possible six-gun-brandishing worlds. In an age of reality-TV war, where nothing is asked of Americans except that they rage and fear on color-coded command, the death of responsibility offers a happy ending to all -- except for those killed in Iraq.
Yes, everything changed after Sept. 11: The country lost its mind. Heretical as it is to say, the terror attacks proved that it is possible to overreact -- more specifically, to react foolishly -- to an attack that left 3,000 dead. Bush launched America upon a rash and pointless war that is likely to go down in history as one of the greatest foreign policy disasters in U.S. history. The war achieved exactly what it was designed to prevent: It has strengthened radical Islam and increased the number of terrorists. The explosives debacle at Al-Qaqaa perfectly encapsulates this bitter irony: We invaded Iraq to keep dangerous weapons out of the hands of terrorists, but the invasion put those weapons in their hands. In Greek tragedy, this is a classic punishment for hubris. In "The Twilight Zone," it's a favorite plot twist. The Bush presidency has been a tale out of Aeschylus, adapted by Rod Serling.
When Bush invaded Afghanistan, the world approved. That failed state, run by a brutal theocracy that harbored al-Qaida, was a legitimate state target in the so-called war on terror. But when Bush expanded that "war" to include Iraq, he proved himself to be not a warrior but a crusader -- a zealot who dragged the nation on a weird, obsessive quest that combined political calculation, nationalist fervor and anti-Arab ideology. With tawdry mendacity, that crusade (Bush actually called it that before advisors pointed out that the word could have negative associations in the Middle East) was sold to the American people as a preemptive act of self-defense, as Congress rolled over and the media credulously passed on lies and half-truths from "senior government officials." The administration and its mouthpieces in the media shamelessly exploited the fear, patriotism and anger stirred by the 9/11 terror attacks to stifle serious debate about the war, painting opponents as Neville Chamberlains who lacked the backbone to fight "evil."
Launched against a regime that posed no more threat than a host of others around the world, the Iraq war represented a radically lower standard for what constitutes a just war. As Eugenia C. Kiesling, a historian at the U.S. Military Academy, has written, "The Iraq war ... was caused largely by the U.S. demand for unrealistically absolute security. Not since the Romans has any polity justified preventive wars on the grounds that no military threat be permitted to exist." It was a gratuitous war, a strategic aggression whose grandiose goals -- democratizing the Middle East, resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, defeating "terrorism" -- were bizarrely disconnected from reality.
The results of that bungled war have been catastrophic. Yes, we removed a loathsome dictator, a feat worthy of celebration, but the mountain of Iraqi bodies we are piling up in the process is growing so high -- a reliable study claims 100,000 civilians have been killed in the war -- and the future of that tortured land so dark, that it is no longer clear whether the invasion will ultimately be morally justifiable. (In the context of a war now justified as a liberation, the administration's refusal to count civilian Iraqi casualties is disgraceful.) Even if Iraq staggers its way through and manages to establish some form of democratic governance, the United States will not be seen as a liberator. Too much Iraqi blood has been shed.
In any case, assessing the morality of this war requires looking beyond the fate of the Iraqis -- a fact overlooked by the liberal hawks, intoxicated by the rare sensation of playing John Wayne in a fight with the bad guys. A nation's first responsibility is to its own citizens. The price for saving Iraq -- if in fact we end up saving it and not destroying it -- has been to greatly strengthen radical Islam around the world, end the lives of more than a thousand Americans, and make America, and the rest of the world, less safe. That is not a price worth paying.
And what of Bush's Utopian dream of transforming the Middle East? Making war, it turns out, is a highly problematic way of bringing heaven to earth.
Get Salon in your mailbox!
