My visit with the President
Getting asked to the Pentagon and the White House was an honour, but it was also disheartening
MARK STEYN
"I ran into a kid the other day who used to work here," mused George W. Bush, "and he goes to a famous law school, and he said, 'The problem, Mr. President, is people don't believe we're at war.' I not only believe we're at war, I know we're at war."
It's not something previous commanders-in-chief have had to point out, and the President's curious situation might have taxed even the leaders whose busts adorn the Oval Office -- Lincoln, Churchill, Eisenhower. To some Americans, Mr. Bush is a wartime president engaged in the same scale of existential struggle as that eminent trio. To others, the "wartime" is largely a concoction of the President: there's no war, except for the photo op gone awry the neo-cons chose to stage in Iraq. To others -- supporters of the wartime President back in the early days -- it's a slightly different problem: Mr. Bush may be in war mode, but the war itself isn't. There was a sense, between 9/11 and the fall of Baghdad, that the United States was making up for lost time. Now time ticks on, in Iran and elsewhere.
In Washington last week on the book-plug circuit, I got the call from various high-ups to lunch at the Pentagon with Donald Rumsfeld and General Pace, and a couple of days later to swing by the White House and see the President. And, as I happened to be in D.C., I thought why not? I don't mean to sound disrespectful -- it was a great honour to be the only foreigner in the room aside from the bust of Sir Winston -- but it can be disheartening to have too much face time with the movers and shakers, especially when there doesn't seem to be that much moving and shaking going on. In the silence of his lonely room, the armchair warrior remakes the world; across the keyboard the horizons roll. In the corridors of power, alas, he discovers all the reasons why the grand schemes can't be accomplished. I forget who it was at the Pentagon who said that Congress always takes away money for things you want to do and gives you money for things you don't want to do. Oh, hang on, it was everybody.
Anyway, the President had requested the company of a handful of kindred spirits from the columnar crowd in order to lay out his thinking on Iraq and beyond. One assumed there were some low political motives not unconnected with recent polls and a looming rendezvous with the people's verdict next Tuesday But it was striking how non-electoral the discussion was: Mr. Bush never once referred to the Democrats. They're obsessed with defeating Bush, he's obsessed with defeating "the extremists" -- by which he means the enemy, not Nancy Pelosi and Howard Dean.
Still, for a broadly supportive group, we were somewhat tetchy. CNBC's Larry Kudlow wanted something big and rousing. When some dread State Department concept like "sanctions" or "resolution" passed the presidential lips, Mr. Bush would glance warily at the Washington Post's Charles Krauthammer. He recalled a previous visit in which the columnist had queried whether the administration was going to get "mired in diplomacy." Bush savoured the phrase, enunciating the syllables. "Mired in dip-lo-ma-cee," he said, as if it were the forlorn hook of some country ballad. "I think that's what you were wondering."
"I usually do," said Krauthammer, dryly.
The President had begun his remarks by saying that "we need to be on the offence all the time." And, for those of us who agree, that's part of the problem. "You say you need to be on the offence all the time and stay on the offence," I began. "Isn't the problem that the American people were solidly behind this when you went in and you toppled the Taliban, when you go in and you topple Saddam. But when it just seems to be a kind of thankless semi-colonial policing defensive operation with no end . . . I mean, where is the offence in this? Instead of talking to Syria, can't Syria get some payback for sending all these guys over the border to subvert Iraq? Shouldn't Syria be getting subverted in return?"
"Now you're thinking," said the President, and laughed. When I'd put a similar suggestion to the secretary of defense two days earlier, Mr. Rumsfeld's eye had flickered with the old flinty gleam from the glory-day press conferences of late 2001/2002. "That's an interesting idea," he said. Both men were humouring me, needless to say. They considered it long ago and either rejected it as politically too complicating, or they're doing it but in some below-the-radar way. And the latter doesn't solve the perception problem -- that the American people would value some evidence that their side is not merely hunkered down in defensive operations in Iraq.
"First of all, we are on the offence," the President insisted. "It's frustrating however, because you're right, it's the perception that this great military power full of decent people is just getting picked off and nothing is happening." He pointed out that's not the case -- that the insurgents are dogged by U.S. forces, hunted down, and killed in very large numbers. "A thousand of the enemy killed," he said of one recent engagement. "It's happening; you just don't know it. And there's no scorecard." Or, rather, there's only a one-sided scorecard: it's American military deaths and Iraqi civilian casualties that make the news. As for Damascus, he wandered off into mired-in-diplomacy-speak: "Syria needs to know that there are other people who are interested in isolating them economically than the United States, and we're working toward that end . . ."
Good luck with that. Syria is a useful way of looking at what's changed these last three years. A few weeks after the fall of Saddam, I stood on the Iraq-Syrian border with members of the Third Infantry Division and we joked about how nervous Boy Assad's border guards must be feeling these days. They were twitchy times for Assad. In short order, he found himself under pressure to get his foot off Lebanon's windpipe, and the other Arab dictators were quietly suggesting that, while they didn't like this cockamamie Bush plan to remake the map of the Middle East, if the Great Satan was determined to go ahead and he needed a pilot program, they weren't averse to him knocking off Assad. You get the feeling Syria's dictator is sleeping better than he has in a while.
The Commander-in-Chief doesn't micro-manage Iraq. We were sitting on the sofas in the Oval Office and he waved his hand toward the President's desk on the other side of the room and reminded us of the famous photographs of Lyndon Johnson poring over maps of Vietnam and picking out targets. This chief won't make that mistake, rightly concerning himself with the bigger picture. It was said of Ronald Reagan that he won the Cold War "without firing a shot," which makes it sound less of a war. But in advanced Western democracies it's the non-shot-firing aspects of war that are hardest to get right -- maintaining popular support, identifying strategic goals that can withstand the nightly barrage of the media defeatists and the default torpor of government agencies and multilateral gabfests. Musing on the enemy, Secretary Rumsfeld told me, "The people you're up against have brains, and they don't have bureaucracies," as if the two are mutually incompatible. "They don't have states to defend, and they don't have to tell the truth, and they're able to take advantage of public opinion." I'll say. The other day, a typically gloomy TV yakfest on the "civil war"/"quagmire" was interrupted by a commercial for a dream vacation in Iraqi Kurdistan.
There's something faintly unbecoming about the terms in which the Iraq debate is conducted. News anchors talk about whether people are "for" or "against" the war, as if the citizenry are Olympic skating judges awarding marks to some prancing ninnies out on the ice. Whether we (i.e. the Western world) know it or not, we're all out on the ice, and it's getting mighty thin in places. Yet this demeaning, immature conception of war as a reality show you're bored with is said to be the key factor in polls showing big Democrat gains in Tuesday's elections. I don't believe it myself: I'd bet on the Republicans to hold both the House and Senate. President Bush is a smart, far-sighted guy engaged in the correction of 40 years of disastrous State Department stability fetishization in the Middle East and, beyond that, in an ambitious remaking of the region that no European power attempted even in the heyday of empire. Would you want to try that in a land of two-year election cycles?
"You can make a case that the centre of gravity of the war is in the United States," said Donald Rumsfeld. "I mean, you can't lose it militarily over there. The only place you can lose it is here." |
