So because of 9/11, it really doesn't matter what Bush said before the war, or what the intelligence actually showed, or whether Saddam Hussein had those weapons. If you understand the "context" of a world in which the United States has been struck by "terrorists with airplanes," anything that Bush decides should be done is, by definition, something that must be done. He's a war president. Don't forget it.
The strange thing is that while Bush is determined not to repeat the mistakes his father made 12 years ago, he is in the process of repeating, almost precisely, the first Bush administration's fatal mistake.
Here's what's missing from this analysis: The first Bush didn't lose because of defections from the right. He lost because mainstream Americans of middle-class means decided, fairly or not, that their president just didn't understand much of anything about their lives. They were worried about their jobs, their health care, their pensions, their housing and sending their kids to college. Voters freely conceded that the first President Bush was first rate when it came to foreign policy. That just didn't happen to be what they voted on in November of 1992.
The current President Bush is in the process of putting himself in exactly the same place. If Americans want a war president, he's their man. But in light of the failure to find those weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, many voters now wonder whether that was a war that needed to be fought.
chron.com |
