I liked Josh Marshall’s summary of the opera-bouffe-like character of the slow-motion Beltway meltdown underway, in his commentary on the Tenet resignation:
…Beside the possibility that the White House’s favored Iraqi exile was an Iranian agent, that the spy chief just got canned, that the OSD is wired to polygraphs, and that the president has had to retain outside counsel in the investigation into which members of his staff burned one of the country’s own spies, I’d say the place is being run like a pretty well-oiled machine. |
It does seem as though one of George Bush’s chief legacies may be the complete implosion of the C.I.A. — at a time when the nation desperately needs its services. (Bush’s father served as director of the C.I.A. for many years. Is there some sort of Oedipal lunacy at work?)
So now Bush will be running on a platform of — competence? Effectiveness in the war on terror? Isn’t a war on terror first and foremost a war dependent on good intelligence? At what point can we declare this charade of Republican knowhow at an end?
If you’re a pragmatist, you should be running from Bush as fast as you can, out of sheer desire to see the nation’s business restored to good management. If you think in moral terms, of course, it’s even worse.
My friend Charlie Varon recently e-mailed me with a pointer to a diary Wallace Shawn published in The Nation on the eve of the invasion of Iraq over a year ago — a piece of writing I missed at the time of its publication. It’s a typical slice of Shawn’s brand of self-lacerating thought, which will infuriate those on the right who disagree with him, trouble those on the left who might be thought to be in his camp, and cause any reader to think hard.
Shawn has always tried, in works like “The Fever” as in this diary, to unearth the connection between the comfortable lives of Americans — Red and Blue staters — and the privation and suffering in other parts of the world that seems to make our comfort possible. The position is beyond bleeding-heart — it’s spurting-arteries-of-guilt liberalism. However you feel about that, it has the singular virtue of cutting through abstract cant and partisan rhetoric and talking about the particulars of real human suffering.
All of which is a roundabout way of introducing this observation by Shawn:
Why are we being so ridiculously polite? It’s as if there were some sort of gentlemen’s agreement that prevents people from stating the obvious truth that Bush and his colleagues are exhilarated and thrilled by the thought of war, by the thought of the incredible power they will have over so many other people, by the thought of the immensity of what they will do, by the scale, the massiveness of the bombing they’re planning, the violence, the killing, the blood, the deaths, the horror. |
Now, I’m sure this sounded over the top when Shawn published it in March 2003. And it may still sound over the top to you today. What a thing to say about a president! Or about any human being!
Still, it’s always seemed critically important, in trying to understand the Bush administration’s march of folly, to remember that its entire top leadership (with the exception of its one half-hearted multilaterist at the State Department, who nobody listens to) consists of men (Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld) who never served in combat. The next level down of leadership — the architects of the Iraq policy, men like Wolfowitz and Feith and Perle (and let’s not forget Rove) — have no record at all of any military service. For such leaders, I can’t help thinking, “the violence, the killing, the blood, the deaths, the horror” must necessarily remain abstractions — at best, matters that one can turn one’s gaze away from (as the government has literally done with the taboo photos of returning military coffins), and at worst, as Shawn argued, bearers of vague quasi-sexual excitement (as we saw with the pumped-up macho display of the “Mission Accomplished” tableau, now so painfully embarrassing).
The experience of combat service doesn’t inoculate a leader against making mistakes, nor does it turn more than a few people into pacifists. But surely in most cases it burns into the brain an awareness of the essential seriousness of war. And that, finally, seems to have been Bush’s failure with Iraq, one that even conservative supporters of the president — like the historian Paul Johnson in today’s Wall Street Journal — are beginning to admit.
Bush drove the nation to war and threw an army into the field without taking the enterprise seriously enough. He didn’t plan, he didn’t study, he didn’t question, because these are things he does not do. He has told us as much. And the people he trusted to do these things for him were equally unwilling to treat the situation with the gravity it deserved, instead using it as an opportunity to settle political scores or put into motion long-hatching schemes and delusional geopolitical chess moves.
I can’t help thinking that, had more people in the White House ever been on the receiving end of a bombing raid or taken barrages of enemy fire, this administration might have proceeded with somewhat less criminal a level of recklessness and incompetence.
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