Historian Douglas Brinkley Move Over Hoover: Some presidents, such as Bill Clinton and John F. Kennedy, are political sailors - they tack with the wind, reaching difficult policy objectives through bipartisan maneuvering and pulse-taking. Franklin D. Roosevelt, for example, was deemed a "chameleon on plaid," changing colors regularly to control the zeitgeist of the moment. Other presidents are submariners, refusing to zigzag in rough waters, preferring to go from Point A to Point B with directional certitude. Harry S. Truman and Reagan are exemplars of this modus operandi, and they are the two presidents Bush has tried to emulate. The problem for Bush is that certitude is only a virtue if the policy enacted is proven correct. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/12/01/AR2006120101 511.html <http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/12/01/AR200612010 1511.html>
Has He Started Talking to the Walls? By Frank RIch, New York Times, Sunday, December 03, 2006 It turns out weve been reading the wrong Bob Woodward book to understand whats going on with President Bush. The text we should be consulting instead is The Final Days, the Woodward-Bernstein account of Richard Nixon talking to the portraits on the White House walls while Watergate demolished his presidency. As Mr. Bush has ricocheted from Vietnam to Latvia to Jordan in recent weeks, weve witnessed the troubling behavior of a president who isnt merely in a state of denial but is completely untethered from reality. Its not that he cant handle the truth about Iraq. He doesnt know what the truth is. The most startling example was his insistence that Al Qaeda is primarily responsible <http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/29/world/middleeast/29prexy.html> for the countrys spiraling violence. Only a week before Mr. Bush said this, the American military spokesman on the scene, Maj. Gen. William Caldwell, called Al Qaeda extremely disorganized in Iraq, adding that I would question at this point how effective they are at all at the state level <http://usinfo.state.gov/xarchives/display.html?p=texttrans-english&y=2006&m =November&x=20061121104654xjsnommis0.0743677> . Military intelligence estimates that Al Qaeda makes up only 2% to 3% of the enemy forces in Iraq, according to Jim Miklaszewski of NBC News. The bottom line: America has a commander in chief who cant even identify some 97% to 98% of the combatants in a war that has gone on longer than our involvement in World War II. But thats not the half of it. Mr. Bush relentlessly refers to Iraqs unity government though it is not unified and can only nominally govern. (In Henry Kissingers accurate recent formulation <http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/asection/la-fg-kissinger19nov19,1, 5247887.story> , Iraq is not even a nation in the historic sense.) After that pseudo-governments prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki, brushed him off in Amman <http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/30/world/middleeast/30prexy.html> , the president nonetheless declared him the right guy for Iraq <http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/asection/la-fg-bushmaliki1dec01,1, 6230912.story> the morning after. This came only a day after The Timess revelation of a secret memo <http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/29/world/middleeast/29military.html> by Mr. Bushs national security adviser, Stephen Hadley, judging Mr. Maliki either ignorant of what is going on in his own country or disingenuous or insufficiently capable of running a government. Not that it matters what Mr. Hadley writes when his boss is impervious to facts. In truth the president is so out of it he wasnt even meeting with the right guy. No one doubts that the most powerful political leader in Iraq is the anti-American, pro-Hezbollah cleric Moktada al-Sadr, without whom Mr. Maliki would be on the scrap heap next to his short-lived predecessors, Ayad Allawi and Ibrahim al-Jaafari. Mr. Sadrs militia is far more powerful than the official Iraqi army that weve been helping to stand up at hideous cost all these years. If were not going to take him out, as John McCain proposed this month <http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/iraq/2006-11-12-al-sadr-cover_x.htm> , we might as well deal with him directly rather than with Mr. Maliki, his puppet. But our president shows few signs of recognizing Mr. Sadrs existence. In his classic study, The Great War and Modern Memory, Paul Fussell wrote of how World War I shattered and remade literature, for only a new language of irony could convey the trauma and waste. Under the auspices of Mr. Bush, the Iraq war is having a comparable, if different, linguistic impact: the more he loses his hold on reality, the more language is severed from its meaning altogether. When the president persists in talking about staying <http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/28/world/middleeast/28cnd-prexy.html> until the mission is complete even though there is no definable military mission, let alone one that can be completed, he is indulging in pure absurdity. The same goes for his talk of victory, another concept robbed of any definition when the prime minister we are trying to prop up is allied with Mr. Sadr, a man who wants Americans dead and has many scalps to prove it. The newest hollowed-out Bush word to mask the endgame in Iraq is phase <http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory?id=2683555> , as if the increasing violence were as transitional as the growing pains of a surly teenager. Phase is meant to drown out all the unsettling debate about two words the president doesnt want to hear, civil war. When news organizations, politicians and bloggers had their own civil war about the proper usage of that designation last week, it was highly instructive but about America, not Iraq. The intensity of the squabble showed the corrosive effect the presidents subversion of language has had on our larger culture. Iraq arguably passed beyond civil war months ago into what might more accurately be termed ethnic cleansing or chaos. That we were fighting over civil war at this late date was a reminder that wittingly or not, we have all taken to following Mr. Bushs lead in retreating from English as we once knew it. Its been a familiar pattern for the news media, politicians and the public alike in the Bush era. It took us far too long to acknowledge that the abuses at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere might be more accurately called torture. And that the manipulation of prewar intelligence might be more accurately called lying. Next up is pullback, the Iraq Study Groups reported euphemism <http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/30/world/middleeast/30policy.html> to stave off the word retreat (if not retreat itself). In the case of civil war, it fell to a morning television anchor, Matt Lauer, to officially bless the term before the Today show moved on to such regular fare as an update on the Olsen twins <http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6062492/> . That juxtaposition of Iraq and post-pubescent eroticism was only too accurate a gauge of how much the word war itself has been drained of its meaning in America after years of waging a war that required no shared sacrifice. Whatever you want to label whats happening in Iraq, it has never impeded our freedom to dote on the Olsen twins. I have not been one to buy into the arguments that Mr. Bush is stupid or is the sum of his Bushisms or is, as feverish Internet speculation periodically has it, secretly drinking again. I still dont. But I have believed he is a cynic that he could always distinguish between truth and fiction even as he and Karl Rove sold us their fictions. Thats why, when the president said that absolutely, were winning <http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2006/10/20061025.html> in Iraq before the midterms, I just figured it was more of the same: another expedient lie to further his partisan political ends. But that election has come and gone, and Mr. Bush is more isolated from the real world than ever. Thats scary. Neither he nor his party has anything to gain politically by pretending that Iraq is not in crisis. Yet Mr. Bush clings to his delusions with a near-rage watch him seethe in his press conference with Mr. Maliki <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/6158119.stm> that cant be explained away by sheer stubbornness or misguided principles or a pat psychological theory. Whatever the reason, he is slipping into the same zone as Woodrow Wilson did when refusing to face the rejection of the League of Nations, as a sleepless L.B.J. did when micromanaging bombing missions in Vietnam, as Ronald Reagan did when checking out during Iran-Contra. You can understand why Jim Webb, the Virginia senator-elect with a son in Iraq, was tempted to slug the president at a White House reception for newly elected members of Congress <http://thehill.com/thehill/export/TheHill/News/UndertheDome/112906.html> . Mr. Bush asked Hows your boy? But when Mr. Webb replied, Id like to get them out of Iraq, the president refused to so much as acknowledge the subject. Maybe a timely slug would have woken him up. Or at least sounded an alarm. Some two years ago, I wrote that Iraq was Vietnam on speed <http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/30/arts/30rich.html> , a quagmire for the MTV generation. Those jump cuts are accelerating now. The illusion that America can control events on the ground is just that: an illusion. As the list of theoretical silver bullets for Iraq grows longer (and more theoretical) by the day special envoy, embedded military advisers, partition, outreach to Iran and Syria, Holbrooke, international conference, NATO urgent decisions have to be made by a chief executive who is in touch with reality (or such is the minimal job description). Otherwise the events in Iraq will make the Deciders decisions for him, as indeed they are doing already. The joke, history may note, is that even as Mr. Bush deludes himself that he is bringing democracy to Iraq, he is flouting democracy at home. American voters could not have delivered a clearer mandate on the war than they did on Nov. 7, but apparently elections dont register at the White House unless the voters dip their fingers in purple ink. Mr. Bush seems to think that the only decision he had to make was replacing Donald Rumsfeld and the mission of changing course would be accomplished. Tell that to the Americans in Anbar Province. Back in August the chief of intelligence for the Marines filed a secret report uncovered by Thomas Ricks of The Washington Post <http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/10/AR200609100 1204.html> concluding that American troops are no longer capable of militarily defeating the insurgency in al-Anbar <http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/11/27/AR200611270 1287.html> . That finding was confirmed in an intelligence update last month. Yet American troops are still being tossed into that maw, and at least 90 have been killed there since Labor Day <http://www.defenselink.mil/Releases/Release.aspx?ReleaseID=10222> , including five marines, ages 19 to 24, around Thanksgiving. Civil war? Sectarian violence? A phase? This much is certain: The dead in Iraq dont give a damn what we call it. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Also See Robert Fisk Like Hitler, Brezhnev, Bush is in denial http://www.commondreams.org/views06/1201-34.htm <http://www.commondreams.org/views06/1201-34.htm>
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