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week was a strange one. The commander in chief, the president of the United
States, took refuge behind a military field commander to achieve credibility
with the American people. Through constant repetition of his name, almost an
invocation, George Bush built up Gen. David Petraeus as the man who finally
found a strategy that would work in Iraq. Because he said it would work,
therefore, it had worked.
Robert Draper's Dead Certain, a sympathetic portrait of the Bush presidency, reports that the president had insisted to his chief of staff Andrew Card up to the time of Card's resignation in April 2006 that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The president does not give up easily on something of which he is dead certain. He can't give up on it. Therefore, the atmosphere and rhetoric last week were the same as they had been through the whole war. Victory in Iraq, Iraqi democracy, progress, fighting terrorism, brave troops, stability in the Middle East -- with Petraeus' name thrown in almost every other sentence. |
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Draper effectively dismisses the notion that the president is just plain dumb and that Cheney or Rove were running the presidency. Yet, he adds, the questions that some who served on Bush's staff had were whether "a man [could be] all that secure with himself if he felt compelled to assert over and over that he never wavered, never lost a wink of sleep and harbored no regrets? What bespoke his compulsive optimism, and was it, in the end, worth the loss of credibility?" It is a question about which many Americans wonder. Why can't he change his mind? Draper takes readers through many of the triumphs of the Bush years, starting with the destruction of John McCain in the South Carolina primary in 2000. Bush was absolutely certain he had won because he never lost his confidence. A reader might think he won because his staff played vicious mind games with McCain's temper. |
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Draper also details the Katrina fiasco and the failure of the administration to bestir itself from Crawford, Texas, while New Orleans was under water. The hurricane had changed course, Bush had told his aides while the levees were breaking. The president is still confident, it seems, that they did a "great job" in New Orleans despite the failures, as his staff argues, of the local governments. Whence this sunny confidence that brought the nation into the Big Muddy and refuses to wade out of it? That forces him to assert that he made no mistakes in any of the strategy shifts before this one? Some members of Alcoholics Anonymous will tell you that such behavior is not atypical in men who beat drunkenness by sheer willpower. They no longer drink, but they have not gone through the humility and the transformation of the self that the AA requires of its members. The president proved he could beat alcoholism without sitting around and talking about it (except with Billy Graham). I'm not saying this is the explanation of the president's sunny confidence about Iraq. I am saying, however, that it is a model that fits the data. Those who are not troubled by the illusions that have marked this presidency won't need such a model. Those who wonder how he can possibly believe that at last we are going to win this war we should never have begun might try another model. In fact, however, the president's endless optimism and refusal to admit errors are, to put it quite bluntly, abnormal behavior. Many Americans wonder: Why can't he change his mind?.
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