The Son Also Sets

In its declaration of victory at the U.N. on Thursday, the Bush administration finally reached that point in every Behind the Music episode, about 45 minutes in, when the narrator tells us that the feckless hero “finally hit rock bottom.” Only then is the downtrodden divus, bereft of dignity and confidence, ready to rediscover his sense of proportion and take pleasure in the company of friends who do not revere him as a colossus bestriding mortals.

Bush finally traded Pangloss for a panhandle last week, recognizing that humility is the only way to solicit enough money and troops to quash a quagmire at least as intractable as Vietnam. U.N. help in the colonization—ahem, rebuilding—of Iraq is an unambiguous improvement over the status quo, of course, especially given the haphazard and under-funded efforts until now. Bush’s coalition of the hoping-for-favors-later is no substitute for friends with real benefits to give. International troops and money, together with a timeline for an Iraqi constitution and elections, are as valuable today as those snotty Europeans said they would be before the war.

But it reeks of revisionism, to borrow Bush’s word, to call U.N. involvement a victory for the administration. It’s a beautiful thing to convince an alcoholic that he needs treatment, or religion—or both in Bush’s case—but it’s only a victory insofar as admitting defeat and ending denial are the first steps to starting over. Just as when Congress approved $87 billion for reconstruction on Friday, the U.N.’s unanimous vote was more about resignation than confidence.

After three years of Bush II’s recklessness, at least one law has emerged that he and his nefarious strategists cannot ignore, subvert or otherwise rewrite—Murphy’s Law. With Bush’s reelection hanging in the balance, almost everything that could go wrong has.

Reality has repudiated nearly all of Bush’s pre-war assumptions about Iraq. Bush’s own David Kay, head of the Iraq Survey Group that scoured Iraq for WMD, told Congress on Oct. 2 that his group has found no direct evidence of weapons or weapons programs. Bush finally admitted last month that “we’ve had no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with September the 11th,” even though White House rhetoric was responsible for convincing 70 percent of Americans otherwise.

Pre-emptive disarmament was never more than a pretense for going after Saddam, and if anyone took it seriously as a doctrine, Bush’s flagrant abuse of incomplete intelligence robbed it of all legitimacy. Likewise, the presumption that life without Saddam could only get better, for Iraqis and Americans alike, exploded with the terrorism of the occupation. Many Iraqis still lack needs more basic than the lofty freedoms in our Bill of Rights, and U.S. security interests at home and abroad are now seriously compromised, with hatred compounding everyday throughout much of the Arab world.

It has taken some time for Americans to realize that Bush’s adventure in Iraq, for all of the bluster about an easy war and steady progress toward peace, will have devastating long-term consequences for U.S. foreign policy. Bush traded a war to prevent terror for a war that invites it, and the teachings of Iraqi terrorists will not be lost on malcontents worldwide, who now know that undermining U.S. presence is as easy as TNT.

The occupation, with no end in sight, has undermined U.S. potential to pressure nations that really pose a threat to U.S. security——nations like North Korea, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Syria—that have known WMD programs or undoubtedly support terrorism. Our military is stretched too thinly to leverage those very leaders who accelerated their weapons programs when Bush first brandished the “axis of evil” rhetoric and insinuated that regime change would not stop with Iraq.

Whether or not Bush’s malignant misdeeds cost him the White House next November, his administration has already stained American faith in the presidency. Crooks, liars and cheats are nothing new to the White House, but Bush has exceeded all presidential precedents of subterfuge. Never before has a White House been so crass about doling out the spoils of war to its corporate cronies—Halliburton, Bechtel et al—while using the afterglow of victory to cow those who might object. The same administration that used patriotism as a gag on dissent is responsible for a treasonous leak that, if it had happened under a Democrat’s watch, would have Republicans calling for capital punishment for the perpetrators.

Where Clinton’s doublespeak was confined mostly to his own adultery, Bush has extended the practice to all other aspects of his radical agenda. He has defiled the presidency with rare Nixonian gusto, in domestic as well as foreign policy. The damage caused by devastating deficits, a laissez-faire Environmental Protection Agency and an energy policy secretly crafted by energy executives will require decades of truly compassionate leadership to overcome.

Few have understood the vulnerabilities of American democracy better than Alexis de Tocqueville, the 19thcentury French social theorist who coined the phrase “tyranny of the majority.” Although he distrusted democracies to get things right the first time, he was optimistic that they could learn from their excesses. “Let time do its work; a sense of the evil will enlighten the people and show them what they need,” he said. “The great privilege of the Americans is to be able to make retrievable mistakes.”

The mistakes are mounting, Alexis, and we’re running out of time.

Blake Jennelle ’04 is a social studies concentrator in Adams House. His column appears on alternate Mondays.