written December 3, 2006, and transferred here

A Nuanced View of Bush and the Iraq War

As we all know, politics is very partisan. The other side are demons and our side is, mostly, angels. It would bring a note of rare elevation to look at it all more dispassionately, and recognize the paradoxes in our present state of affairs. It might even be useful! This is an attempt at doing that.

George W. Bush has been President for almost six years. What is he like really? During his campaign he said that the US should be “humble.” A worthy belief, although the US has been quite the opposite during his term. Does anybody remember his inaugural address? It was quite compassionate and gentle. He has made remarkable moves in appointing the first two black Secretaries of State – in a row –, Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, both of them quiet rather than blustery. His wife Laura is a quiet former librarian. (But he gets few compliments for all this.) And he seems quite confident, claiming he has made few mistakes despite a war that is crashing down around his ears. What does it all mean?

George W. seemed to show no interest in world politics until he decided to run for President. He preferred drinking, drugging, partying, and sports events. Nothing was serious, and this has carried over into his new job. To many he seems remarkably stupid, but this probably is really mostly a lack of real interest. You can’t teach an old dog new tricks. So why did he run for President? The main reason was to beat his kid brother Jeb to it. In that he was completely successful: his first goal as President was achieved the day he took office. So what was he to do next? He was told by his backers, just do what we say, be a President and preside. And that is what he has done. He knows his family has always served the interests of the core group who run the world, so there is no point in arguing with them even if he did know better, which he doubts. Bush surely knew that Al Gore tried hard to push President Clinton into a ground war in Iraq to no avail, so the Iraq war would have happened if he had been elected. That must ease his conscience.

Has he been a total puppet then? Maybe not. The drive for war, publicly led by Cheney, began as soon as Bush took office, but didn’t take place until over two years later. Maybe Bush resisted. The phony 9/11 “attack” may have been necessary to make Bush do it, and yet it still took a long time. At last Bush and Rumsfeld went along with their bosses’ little game. It is no wonder that Rumsfeld often had a suppressed chortle and Bush a smirk when they discussed the necessity for the war – it was all a game, and they let us know by admitting afterwards that there were no WMDs in Iraq after all. (Discussion of this has been typically dumb: If the USIraq had WMDs, we wouldn’t have dared to attack them in the first place; what happened to all the Iraqi nuclear experts who could have told us afterwards where they were or not?; WMD was the only “legal” argument the administration could make, regardless of its truth.) knew that

Bush has been attacked for saying that he knows of few if any mistakes he has made. But he is right! His job was to launch a major war in Iraq using the method he was told to use, namely insufficient means; and he did it. His biggest “mistake” may have been at the very beginning of the war when the US military defeated Saddam’s regime much more quickly than expected, but that was soon remedied: The infrastructure was left to rust, the museums were allowed to be pillaged, and the small allied force, while enough for conquest, was indeed insufficient for occupation.

Bush has been ridiculed for his “Mission Accomplished” event on a US battleship a month or two after the invasion. But he was right in two ways: Firstly, his mission, launching the ground war in Iraq, was accomplished; and secondly, he had indeed overthrown the Saddam government. The war was won; but the resistance was just beginning. Why nobody thinks we won in Iraq is a mystery: When Hitler conquered France, he won geopolitically, regardless of the Resistance. As has been said many times, winning the war does not mean winning the peace, which is what the present conflict is about. If the insurgents set up a functioning government in territory they control, we can then consider that we have no longer won the war.

Bush’s mission remains accomplished: the war continues as desired by his backers. Why do they want this war? It’s not totally clear, but we do know that they want war hysteria. We were in a mass psychosis for over forty years during Cold War hysteria, and there was a palpable lack of official enthusiasm for its sudden end. Clearly the War on Terror, of which the Iraq war is a part, is its replacement. The 9/11 caper was its formal beginning, since nothing big enough had been carried out by our “enemies.” (It was an improvement on the Cold War, which had no big bang at all.) It did not lead to as much hysteria as might have been expected, thanks to people’s admirable good sense and perhaps to Bush’s moderate manner. The fifth anniversary of 9/11 was apparently used to stoke the hysteria, but to no avail. It is one of Bush’s “failures”, maybe an intentional one.

Still, the war is going well, that is, it is going badly. The Sunni and Shiites are massacring each other, partly because we never had enough troops to keep things under more control. But maybe it would have made no difference. Their blood war is not in their interest – it keeps the US in Iraq, although once started it gets a life of its own. Could it be that we started it? After all, the current war is just episode four of a long term genocidal attack on the people of Mesopotamia (Iraq), the birthplace of civilization. First was the Iran-Iraq war, in which the US and Israel supplied both sides so as to keep them killing and eliminating each other; and Israel unlawfully bombed Iraq’s planned nuclear facility; then there was Operation Desert Storm, which drove Iraq out of the bizarre principality of Kuwait; then there were the sanctions, which wrecked the lives of the Iraqi people, not Saddam, and killed a quarter of a million children; and finally the sanctions were lifted and the US invaded Iraq, which was even worse. Why would we change our policy and not encourage internecine warfare?

The Democrats have won back a majority of Congress, and there are hopes that this will lead to an end to the war. But they would need to have the Presidency first and then abandon the core group, a radical and dangerous move. In the meantime, why would the core group change its policy? Current policy is wrecking what was once the most successful Arab country, neutralizing its natural hostility to fascist Israel, depressing our people and making them less effective, creating huge profits in the war industry, and discrediting American views of freedom and progress throughout the world. This war is the perfect war, unlike the Vietnam War, which we could lose, and did. This one we can neither lose nor win.

For Bush this is a great success, and yet at the same time a bitter pill. It is what happens when one becomes president for the wrong reason. He has to be extremely angry that he has been led into pursuing such an awful policy; and yet he copes with it by saying to himself that it is not really his policy, which is true in a way. One thing that clearly emerges from all this is that Bush is a very private person. But he has to be: He can’t say what he thinks and mention the good things he has done without betraying those who financed him and got him elected. And he can’t say that only 3,000 Americans have been killed compared to 50,000 in Vietnam, without creating a rather partisan uproar. (Indeed, many more would have been killed if 1960s medical procedures were still used, and so there are many more severely wounded; also, hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians have been killed, and despite our ethnocentrism and racism, they do count.)

So Bush has to keep quiet. He doesn’t mind now if his brother Jeb runs in 2008, which is unlikely, or 2012, which is much more likely. Good luck to him, the little brat.

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written January 16, 2007, and transferred here

Bush’s View, I think

This war in Iraq is pretty awful, but it’s not really up to me. That is the only explanation of why I don’t feel more anxious. I am a pretty straightforward guy, and I do feel bad for the families of those killed and for those killed and wounded, but this is the program. When Scott Pelley on Sunday’s Sixty Minutes asked, did I feel I had misled the American people, I responded “About what?” About weapons in Iraq, and the kind of war it was. With a relief I said no, not really. He didn’t ask – about who is behind the policy. That would have been more painful. But I never get asked that question.

Presiding over a bloody war and being attacked by politicians is painful, but it is not as bad as being impeached. Why? Because impeachment means you don’t know if you are going to keep your job, or where you will end up. No matter what happens in this war, I know I will not be impeached. That is part of the deal for us Bushes. Do what we ask, and you won’t have any trouble. And I have some power here too – if my backers and friends go after me, I can expose them. Of course they could forestall that by getting me killed, but all in all that’s a mess and they do not want to start that, any more than I do.

How do I know they are right about Iraq? I don’t -- but the simple fact is that there is a group of experts, my friends’ experts, that run everything. Of course they aren’t always right – they’re human. But they are in charge. Anybody who thinks that order of things can be changed through politics is dreaming. If I wasn’t president, there would be someone else – and they would be doing the same thing!

I’m a pretty happy man now, actually. In six years I have learned quite a lot about foreign and domestic policy, and can fancy myself something of an expert! I don’t have to worry about what I say, now that the 2006 election is over. I no longer have to listen to Donald Rumsfeld and pretend that our policy was well thought out. I know the policy was chosen at the beginning, by our friends, and we went with it. It’s as simple as that. It seems to be a policy of permanent war, which is rather depressing, but there is more to it than that. Actually, I don’t fully understand it, and I don’t have to.

It’s great being king of the world, and I’m looking forward to the next two years. After that, it’s not my responsibility – my friends will have to find appropriate new candidates or persuade the current ones, not me.