Great essay by Barnett today. He reviews an "Esquire" article. I love this line.
The reason he will be difficult to unseat in November—no matter what his approval ratings are in the summer—is that his opponents operate out of the moral certainty that he is the bad guy and needs to be replaced, while he operates out of the moral certainty that terrorists are the bad guys and need to be defeated.
Tom Junod’s article is entitled, “The Case For George W. Bush,” and it’s his usual scary smart. What I like about Junod so much is that he’s always willing to question himself. Some find that weak; I find it incredibly strong.
Junod’s piece starts out with a little Bush bashing, which is easy, since W. often comes off like such a lightweight frat boy in his public appearances. Comparing that man to Reagan is simply beyond me for that reason alone.
Then Junod starts burrowing in on your conscience by asking “What if he’s right?”:
As easy as it is to say that we can’t abide the president because of the gulf between what he espouses and what he actually does, what haunts me is the possibility that we can’t abide him because of us—because of the gulf between his will and our willingness. What haunts me is the possibility that we have become so accustomed to ambiguity and inaction in the face of evil that we find his call for decisive action an insult to our sense of nuance and proportion.
The people who dislike George W. Bush have convinced themselves that opposition to his presidency is the most compelling moral issue of the day. [Barnett: God! Is that man dead-on or what?] Well, it’s not. The most compelling moral issue of the day is exactly what he says it is, when he’s not saying it’s gay marriage. [Barnett: so sadly true.] The reason he will be difficult to unseat in November—no matter what his approval ratings are in the summer—is that his opponents operate out of the moral certainty that he is the bad guy and needs to be replaced, while he operates out of the moral certainty that terrorists are the bad guys and need to be defeated. The first will always sound merely convenient when compared with the second. Worse, the gulf between the two kinds of certainty lends credence to the conservative notion that liberals have settled for the conviction that Bush is distasteful as a substitute for conviction—because it’s easier than conviction.
Those are two of the most powerfully argued paragraphs I’ve read in years, because they get right to the heart of the matter, which is who are we and what do we believe in? Art Cebrowski, my old boss in the Office of the Secretary of Defense likes to say of transformation, that if a new technology makes sense for 20 years from now, then why not seek it today? I feel the same way about terrorism and the Bush Administration’s bold approach to the Middle East: if the only way terrorism is ever going to go away is for the Middle East to end its disconnectedness and join the world, then why wait through decades of terrorism? Why not pursue it now if it will eventually make sense anyway?
In the second section, Junod compares Bush to Lincoln—not in terms of intellect but actually in terms of their seemingly fruitless early years as leaders of nations at war and their relative low popular standing (Lincoln being about the most unpopular president in history until he was assassinated). Point being: Lincoln spoke eloquently about shedding lots of blood for a moral cause blessed by the Almighty, and today he’s considered our greatest president. But, as Junod points out . . .
Today, of course, those words, along with Lincoln’s appeal to the better angels of our nature, are chiseled into the wall of his memorial, on the Mall in Washington. And yet if George Bush were to speak anything like them today, we would accuse him of pandering to his evangelical base. We would accuse him of invoking divine authority for a war of his choosing . . ..
Another great riff soon follows:
We were attacked three years ago, without warning or predicate event. The attack was not a gesture of heroic resistance nor the offshoot of some bright utopian resolve, but the very flower of a movement that delights in the potential for martyrdom expressed in the squalls of the newly born. It is a movement that is about death—that honors death, that loves death, that fetishizes death, that worships death, that seeks to accomplish death wherever it can, on a scale both intimate and global—and if it does not warrant the expenditure of what the self-important have taken to calling “blood and treasure,” then what does? Slavery? Fascism? Genocide? Let’s not flatter ourselves. If we do not find it within ourselves to identify the terrorism inspired by radical Islam as an unequivocal evil—and to pronounce ourselves morally superior to it—then we have lost the ability to identify any evil at all, and our democracy is not only diminished, it dissolves into the meaninglessness of privilege.
Yeah, yeah, I know: Nobody who opposes Bush thinks that terrorism is a good thing. The issue is not whether the United States should be involved in a war on terrorism, but rather whether the war on terrorism is best served by war in Iraq. And now that the war has defied the optimism of its advocates, the issue is no longer Bush’s moral intention but rather his simple competence. He got us in when he had no idea how to get us out. He allowed himself to be blinded by ideology and blindsided by ideologues. His arrogance led him to offend the very allies whose participation would have enabled us to win not just the war but the peace. His obsession with Saddam Hussein led him to rush into a way that was unnecessary. Sure, Saddam was a bad guy. Sure, the world is a better place without him. But …
And there it is: the inevitable but. Trailed by its uncomfortable ellipsis, it sits squirming at the end of the argument against George Bush for very good reason: It can’t possibly sit at the beginning. Bush haters have to back into it because there’s nothing beyond it. The world is a better place without Saddam Hussein, but . . . but what? But he wasn’t so bad that we had to do anything about him? But he wasn’t so bad that he was worth the shedding of American blood? But there are other dictators just as bad whom we leave in place? But he provided Bush the opportunity to establish the doctrine of preemptive war, in which case the cure is worse than the disease? But we should have secured Afghanistan before invading Iraq? But we should have secured the cooperation of allies who were no more inclined to depose Saddam that they—or we, as head of an international coalition of the unwilling—were to stop the genocide in Rwanda ten years before? Sure, genocide is bad, but . . .
We might as well credit the president for his one great accomplishment: replacing but with and as a basis for foreign policy. The world is a better place without Saddam Huessin, and we got rid of him.
What Junod says here is exactly the same thing that’s always haunted me about Reagan: he was right about the Soviet Union. No, I don’t believe he killed the evil empire. Nor do I believe Star Wars or the defense build-up did that. Frankly, I think Deng Xiaoping did more to kill socialism than Reagan ever could pretend to have done—in either his movies or his real-life presidency. But the man was right. And I was wrong to base my opposition to him in my youth solely out of my personal antipathy for who he was as an individual (basically, I found the man to be a huge hypocrite on many levels—his ditching his first wife being a key one in my mind). But the man was right.
The same understanding that I now have for Reagan and for Bush is something the Far Right has never learned with Clinton. Yes, he sucked big time as an individual (pun intended), but damn it! He was right about the most important issues of his day—especially his headlong support for the spread of the global economy, which really secured the victory afforded by the end of the Cold War: the absorption of the “second world” into an expanded Functioning Core of globalization.
Bush is right on the big issue of this day: bin Laden and his types are just the latest resistance to the spread of the global economy and all it entails—both good and bad but overwhelmingly positive in the long run. To fight the bin Ladens of today is like fighting the Soviets of the Cold War: those who would keep entire societies deprived, isolated, and imprisoned with hate-filled ideologies. The Soviets were evil, and radical Islamic terrorists are evil.
Bush sees and understands this, but Kerry is too often given to parsing things out to absurd levels of ambiguity. Frankly, I’d rather be blunt and right than nuanced and wrong, and Kerry won’t win this election by being nuanced. He’ll win by painting a better happy ending and positing a quicker path to achieving it. The same bad guys will be standing in the way, and their names won’t end in Bush and Cheney.
Junod gets this, and so do I. My hats off to Tom for writing an amazing piece—one that really reminds me of who I am and what I believe in like few articles do today.
thomaspmbarnett.com |
