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Two critical laments about GWB from domestic pundits, not
overseas. Maybe the tides are
turning. Don’t know. First, Joe Klein rekindles the All Hat
No Cattle caricature of GDubya and then, from an opposing angle, Michael
Kinsley wonders why GDubya can’t be more like Tony? Joe Klein: How Bush Misleads Himself
Bush must get
over his self delusions and take responsibility for Iraq Time, July 28, 2003
@ http://www.time.com/time/columnist/klein/article/0,9565,466118,00.html George W. Bush ducked
the first question he was asked during a joint press conference with Tony Blair
after the British Prime Minister's brilliant speech to Congress last
Thursday. The question had two
parts. Did he take responsibility
for the false claim in his State of the Union message that Iraq had recently
sought to buy uranium in Africa?
And why were the allies having so much trouble finding other countries
to help us in Iraq? The President
— who seemed a mite tetchy, as he often does when things aren't going well —
glowered: "I take the responsibility for making the decision...to put
together a coalition to remove Saddam Hussein, because the intelligence...made
a clear and compelling case [that Saddam] was a threat to security and
peace." Right, but that wasn't
the question, and one wonders why Bush didn't simply say, "Yep. My fault.
Some hard-working guy at the National Security Council got a little
overenthusiastic and stuck in that sentence. I didn't take it out. Won't do
that again." End of
story. Instead, we have the two-week
spectacle of Bushies on the run and the President undermining his reputation as
a straight shooter by forcing his CIA director, George Tenet, to take the
fall. Clint Eastwood would never
do that. Why has the uranium
story puffed up so huge? It
wouldn't have been a very big deal without the deepening crisis in Iraq. But it also has ballast because it
clarifies an aspect of George W. Bush's essential character — specifically, the
problem he has with telling the truth.
I am not saying Bush is a liar.
Lying is witting: "I did not have sexual relations with that
woman." This is weirder than that. The President seems to believe that wishing will make it so
— and he is so stupendously incurious that he rarely makes an effort to find
the truth of the matter. He
misleads not only the nation but himself. Every worst-case Saddam scenario just had to be true, as did
every best-case post-Saddam scenario.
Bush's talent for self-deception
extends to domestic and economic policy.
He probably believes that he's a compassionate conservative,
even though he has allowed every antipoverty program he favors to be
eviscerated by Congress. This
week's outrage is the crippling of AmeriCorps, which he had pledged to increase
in size. He probably believes that
his tax cuts for the wealthy will help reduce the mammoth $455 billion budget
deficit (which doesn't include the cost of Iraq), even though Ronald Reagan
found that the exact opposite was true and had to raise taxes twice to repair
the damage done by his 1981 cuts.
And Bush probably believed,
as the sign said, that the "mission"
had been "accomplished" in Iraq when he landed on the
aircraft carrier costumed as a flyboy.
He may even have believed that he was a flyboy. But the country can no
longer afford the President's self-delusions. He is entering the most crucial six months of his
presidency. As a team of experts
hired by the Pentagon reported last week: "The window for cooperation may
close rapidly if they [the Iraqis] do not see progress." Which brings us back to the second part
of the question the President didn't answer last week: Why is no one helping us
in Iraq? A simple answer: Why on
earth should they? The situation
is a mess, in large part because of American arrogance. We
insisted on doing the reconstruction on our own (only 13,000 of the
148,000 troops on the ground are British). It seems plain now that
going it alone isn't working.
Even Donald Rumsfeld came very close to admitting that on Meet the Press
a few weeks ago. Asked if we
should turn Iraq over to the United Nations, he said, "At some point, I
think that—" and then he caught himself and said, "They're already
playing an important role." In fact, the current
military situation is extremely dangerous, not just to the troops on the ground
but to our national security in general.
We are pinned down in Iraq and will be for years. We don't have the forces to meet
another challenge — in North Korea, or Afghanistan, or anyplace else. We don't even have the forces necessary
to relieve our tired troops in Iraq.
Last week India made clear — as France and Germany have — that it won't
help us without the U.N.'s imprimatur.
And now there is serious talk within
the White House about going back to the U.N. and asking for help. Help will not come
easily. "You can't have burden sharing without power sharing,"
a diplomat told me. The U.N. was
humiliated, and its weapons inspectors denigrated, by the Bush Administration
before the war. Some public
groveling from the President may now be in order. Indeed, Bush also
owes the American people a speech explaining
just how difficult the situation is, how long it's likely to remain
that way and how much it will cost.
Last week he took "responsibility" for the war. Now he must
take responsibility for the peace. I thought this would be interesting to some on the
list who have been watching the political fallout in the UK and USA over
WeaponsGate, in particular reference to our desire to see our elected
leadership held accountable, to show real leadership and not take for granted
the public’s right to know, much less it’s natal intelligence. Although, as one FWer said after
hearing Blair’s speech, was the word “justice” used? KWC Readme Humor, Humility, and Rhetorical Courage Many Americans
feel vaguely dissatisfied with the condition of our politics but have a hard
time articulating exactly why. If you're among them, you should take a close
look at Tony Blair's speech to a joint session of
Congress last Thursday. In his own country, the British prime minister is
regarded as an "American-style" politician, which is not a
compliment. Furthermore, the speech was built around a very tired clich�—the
importance of freedom (how people yearn for it, how other cherished values
depend on it, how it will triumph, and so on). And in his specific purpose of
justifying the war in Iraq, Blair was not persuasive (at least to me). Nevertheless, watching
on television, I found myself feeling, briefly, that politics mattered to me
and I, as a citizen, mattered to politics. These are the feelings that
Americans feel the lack of when they complain about politics and politicians.
How did Blair do it? This column has room for only a few examples. In part, of course,
it's just the British accent, which to American ears makes any words sound
authoritative. And in part it's simple eloquence. But Blair's speech also had
qualities that go beyond eloquence. They might be summed up as rhetorical
courage. These are qualities like complexity, humility, reality, irony, and
freshness. Rhetorical
courage comes down to a willingness to be interesting. Interesting can be
dangerous, so American pols tend to avoid it. All it takes for an
American politician to be branded as "thoughtful" is to quote
Santayana a few times about how those who don't learn from history are doomed
to repeat it. Blair built his discussion of terrorism around the opposite
point. "There never has been a time when ... a study of history provides
so little instruction for our present day." American pols have
asserted that terrorism is something new. But the notion that history is there
to draw lessons from is so deeply baked into our political rhetoric that it's
almost more like a rule of grammar than a factual proposition. Even if this
thought about nothing to learn from history had occurred to a president, or to
the folks he employs to have thoughts for him, he or they would likely suppress
it for fear of seeming to endorse a cavalier attitude about kids doing their
homework. And in American attack politics, that fear might be fully justified. "Even in all our might, we are taught
humility," Blair said, referring to the current closure problem in Iraq. American politicians often claim
implausibly to be "humbled" by whatever blah blah blah they happen to
be speaking about. The surprise here is that a politician is claiming humility
in the context of a genuine humiliation, and telling his audience to feel
humiliated as well. And throughout his speech, Blair demonstrated humility
without asserting it. In making the banal point that you should want freedom
for others as well as yourself, he said, "It is this sense of justice that
makes moral the love of liberty." What American politician, in a big
speech, would raise the issue of whether loving liberty is immorally selfish?
If weapons of mass destruction are never found, "history will
forgive" America and Britain because at least we destroyed an evil
government. American Iraq hawks make the same basic argument, but never framed
as a matter of the greatest nation on earth needing forgiveness from anybody,
let alone from history. Blair may not mean any of this. What's impressive is not his alleged
humility but his courage to be interesting, which is risky. Also his
flattering—and risky—assumption that we, his audience, can handle slightly complex ideas and don't mind being swept
up in his humiliathon.
An "idea" in American politics means a 14-point plan for reforming
Medicare. Blair's speech was full of ideas in the classic sense of thoughts
worth sharing, often shared in vivid language, just as often with no particular
policy implication except that citizens of a democracy are grown-ups. The prime minister
told a good joke, no doubt hoary in England, about the suffragist Mrs.
Pankhurst advising the first Labour leader, Keir Hardie*, to run on a platform of "votes
for women, chastity for men and prohibition for all." Heard any good
Warren G. Harding jokes lately? Heard any good jokes at all in a politician's
speech? A
joke must be dangerous to be good. It should at least come near to offending someone.
American pols, with some exceptions (John McCain for one), prefer to be safe
and stale. The context of this
joke was Blair's own seeming endorsement of doubling the American gasoline
tax—a notion he surely deserves points for bringing up. When this proposal came
up at a world leaders chin-wag, Blair reported, Bush gave the speaker "a
most eloquent look," which is a most eloquent way to put it. So is
casually referring to heroin as the "wicked residue" of the poppy.
American politicians confuse eloquence with grandiloquence and usually save
their modest stock of it for drumroll moments, not amusing asides. Tony Blair even stood
in front of the United States Congress and said, "As Britain knows, all predominant power
seems for a time invincible, but, in fact, it is transient." American politicians giving big speeches
sometimes say that America's position in the world is at stake in whatever
matter they happen to be addressing. But invariably they are certain that
Americans will rise to the challenge. Blair's revelation that America will not
be the No. 1 country in the world forever, whatever we do, is important news
indeed. And it took a foreigner to clue us in. Correction,
July 23, 2003: Keir Hardie was the first leader of Britain's Labour Party,
not Labour's first prime minister, as was originally stated. [Return to the corrected sentence.] Michael
Kinsley is Slate's
founding editor. |
