Charges of "incompetence" hold him to a superhuman standard.
BY MICHAEL NOVAK
Wednesday, March 14, 2007 12:01 a.m. EDT
Shortly after President Bush's State of the Union Address this January, I attended a conservative summit in Washington, where I heard a raft of criticism about the president's falling away from conservative principles. There was hope and energy, of course, but also more demoralization than I expected--a demoralization Joseph Bottum clearly shares.
I am considerably more supportive of President Bush's stewardship. Mr. Bottum's judgments--many of which have force, I admit--require two general remarks. The first involves his claim that the war in Iraq is "already lost" (which he qualifies by adding "in perception"). The second is the criterion of "competence," lack of which in several major areas is Bottum's single most serious charge against President Bush.
As far as perception of the war in Iraq goes, it's worth remembering that perceptions are changeable. As the war began in 2003, the New York Times required less than three weeks before it ran a front-page report by a star correspondent of the last generation, R.W. Apple, which hauled out the heavy word of the Vietnam generation, quagmire--as in the quagmire in which, Apple wrote, U.S. troops were already bogged down. Three weeks later, those same quagmired troops had sped into Baghdad, watching as jubilant crowds pulled down the great statue of Saddam Hussein in the center of the city and organizing a systematic search for the suddenly deposed butcher of Mesopotamia.
Of course, changeable or not, what counts as perception in this country is still defined by the disproportionately liberal media, particularly the New York Times, the Washington Post and the major television networks. But Ronald Reagan taught us that the perceptions promoted by the liberal media do not, in fact, control the way Americans think. As Clare Boothe Luce once explained, from his experience as a B-movie actor Reagan learned the difference between the box office and the critics. If you win over the first, you can be awfully sweet-tempered to the second. He showed that the hostility of all the liberal media could not, finally, drown out commonsense reality.
I agree with Mr. Bottum that in the view of the media, the war has been lost. But we may also expect this perception to reverse itself if events in the coming six months unmistakably change direction. Consider three positive possibilities. None of these may turn out to be true, of course, but for one moment assume that they do, just to imagine how perceptions would shift.
Suppose, first, Muqtada Al-Sadr orders his Mahdi followers to keep their arms out of sight, to tear down their checkpoints in the streets, and to cooperate with the Iraqi army and the new American battalions. Al-Sadr may, of course, opt to fight a bloody winner-take-all contest. Yet the record of American soldiers directly engaging Iraqi forces is not likely to tempt him overmuch in that direction. He may wish to save his army to defend Shiites in future years.
Suppose, second, that al Qaeda, which is steadily sweeping all other dissident groups under its wing, abandons Baghdad to take up bases in more remote locations north of Anbar province. It might do so for the same reason that persuaded Al-Sadr: to avoid confrontation with the modern arms, extraordinary skill and well-demonstrated fearlessness of the American battalions. Al Qaeda's way is no longer face-to-face encounters with superior force; its preferred style is sneaky terror by a few. And if they do mass in open battle, all the better for an Iraqi national victory, supported by U.S. firepower.
Suppose, third, that the Sunni tribal leaders and other local authorities in Anbar province come to recognize two realities: that the goal of reclaiming rule in Iraq is so futile that the goal of the Sunnis must be survival (for which American protection is vitally necessary); and that the empty bravado and overweening ambitions of al Qaeda foreigners, Sunni anti-American insurgents, and former Baathists are a curse, having brought down on the Sunnis little but bloodshed, pain and lost hope. With that recognition, the Sunnis could begin to fight back, slowly but with building momentum, turning against the rump insurgency in their midst and also against al Qaeda terror. The people of Anbar province might drive out their own tormentors and begin to feel secure.
With these conditions met, Iraq would come to seem reasonably tranquil. Many countries have experienced steady bombings by dissidents, without losing civil control.
In retrospect, it seems clear that President Bush made a serious mistake in not taking up the Democrats on their insistence in 2006 that he must both enlarge the forces in Baghdad and change leadership at the Pentagon and among the generals in the field. The Democrats were in favor of the surge before they were against it. Mr. Bush ought to have abandoned "sweep and clear and leave." He ought to have changed the mission from "turning it over to the Iraqis as soon as we can." He should have seen, in warfare, the crucial importance of one key goal: victory.
That goal can be achieved, in an insurgency war, only by bringing security to the people, beginning in Baghdad. (Most of the rest of Iraq, from the Kurdish north to the Shiite south, is already reasonably secure, if more sparsely settled.) In any case, the president has now changed strategy, as well as the generals charged with pursuing it. He now has commanders who believe in victory and who, in fact, designed the way to get to it. In war there is no substitute for victory. The ethic of the just war--by requiring "a reasonable hope of success"--also demands it.
Mr. Bottum's charge of incompetence is more troubling, although he may expect from government more than government can deliver. A long-established lesson is that even in the best of times, government is mightily incompetent--and the bigger government gets, the more incompetent it becomes. Think of how much time it takes to obtain a building permit, to go through vehicle registration, to correct a government mistake on tax forms or on public utility bills, etc. Recall how few government offices in the same building communicate with the others, and how often you are shuttled back and forth.
This is why President Kennedy used to joke that he would send out executive orders and they would sit in offices, and be pondered and discussed, until no action could be taken. He learned quickly how powerless a president is every time he must go through a bureaucracy. And I seem to recall how incompetent Lincoln's first series of generals were--together with the Department of War, the Department of Justice, and practically everything else. Lincoln himself was frequently charged with incompetence, bumbling and simplemindedness.
By no means should President Bush get a pass for his errors and misperceptions, or his slowness in correcting them. Still, one ought to use standards that are cut to the cloth of human nature. In politics, Aristotle wrote, we must expect "a tincture of virtue." Expectations too high for anyone in the presidential office are no proper criterion for evaluation. Besides, despite enormous blows to our banking, investment and transportation systems, the decisive steps President Bush took allowed our economy not only to recoup the dreadful financial losses of September 11 but also to climb unparalleled heights.
You could see much of this come together in the State of the Union Address this January. All day before his address, the press was picturing a president disrespected, unloved, a helpless failure, one of the worst presidents ever. So it was startling when Bush, from his gracious compliment to the new speaker of the House, faced a suddenly attentive--and frequently applauding--audience. Some, it is true, hated to be applauding him. But the way the president put his points made it very costly for them not to rise.
Two-thirds of the viewing audience, the networks reported, were either Democrats or Independents (probably because of the new speaker). Startling, then, were the polls showing that an astonishing majority--78%--had a positive reaction to the speech. In another surprising turn, those approving the president's decision to increase troop levels in Iraq jumped from 43% to 52%. The president hit on a rhetorical style that he has not quite used before, which suits him very well--a much more plainspoken, direct, unvarnished way of speaking, considerably less poetic than his most famous speeches.
More, he used half his speech to occupy what some think of as Democratic territory: the environment, energy policy, a comprehensive immigration policy and health insurance. True enough, given the new majority in both houses, he seemed to go too far in the statist direction on the first three (although, reading between the lines, one could see his reliance on private enterprise). On the fourth, he did take a large step toward individualizing a more competitive health-insurance system.
The single most dominant issue we face remains the threat from jihadism. The ugly words broadcast by the jihadists may seem mad, but they are matched by steady actions upon a world-wide front. Their stated aim is to convert us forcibly to Islam or to exterminate us until the caliphate stretches around the world: one religion, one polity. President Bush addressed this threat with the greatest simplicity and power he has ever brought to the subject. A great many do not see the danger as President Bush does. They certainly do not recognize what bin Laden and his lieutenants have often declared--that Iraq is today the frontline in that jihad.
Some in America seem ready to withdraw U.S. troops. They seem willing to prove bin Laden's maxim that in any protracted fight, the United States is the weak horse, and the jihadists are the strong horse, which is the only one that people respect.
I admit that I nearly always love the nuances of political rhetoric, even when delivered by politicians whose policies I oppose. For instance, I was grabbed by this year's response to Mr. Bush's speech by Jim Webb, even though I despise many of his arguments. So I am probably the least exigent of critics of political discourse. Still, I don't remember many addresses in which a president faced such a high mountain of opposition. And I will never forget the scenes afterward, in which even the most intense public opponents of the president lined the exit aisle, holding out their programs for him to sign. For nearly 10 minutes the banter flowed, backs were warmly slapped, and geniality appeared to reign.
Of course, Washington is a city in which (as the old joke goes) no one takes friendship personally. Yet it is also a city in which widely scorned bravery, such as Harry S. Truman's, has appeared in the most modest of persons and years later come to be cherished. Often enough, the nation's public leaders have been burned in effigy on the spots where their gleaming statues are later paid respect. If the reputation of President Bush meets such a fate, his 2007 State of the Union address just might be seen as one of the modest pivots on which that turn began slowly to revolve.
Joseph Bottum's criticisms are to be taken seriously, even if they set criteria for angels, not flawed humans, and seem to overlook some stirring initiatives by this much-attacked president--such as his work on AIDS, for the poor in Africa, and against human trafficking. However deficient you think his judgment may have been about what was possible, no president has ever been more openly pro-life.
At the very least, in the face of passionate hostility at home and abroad, George Bush has proved himself a brave and determined man who has staked his presidency on getting democratic momentum underway in the Middle East. Even if in the short run he fails--which many of us are not yet ready to concede--some Muslims in the future will be able to remember that in a difficult time an American president, at heavy cost, cared about their sufferings, their natural rights, and the better angels beckoning in their dreams. He held before them a democratic standard by which they will forever measure other political movements and other leaders.
These are not inconsiderable accomplishments.
Mr. Novak, who holds the George Frederick Jewett Chair in Religion and Public Policy at the American Enterprise Institute, is a member of the editorial board of First Things, in whose March issue this article appeared. Yesterday: Joseph Bottum made the case against President Bush.
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