[Mb-civic] The Bush fantasies that are guiding history

[Michael Butler]

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The Bush fantasies that are guiding history
>By Stephen Graubard
>Published: February 2 2005 20:02 | Last updated: February 2 2005 20:02
>>

To visit Washington in the fortnight after George II's inauguration is to
know that the chasm separating the US from Europe is vast. Here in the
imperial capital, there is talk only of Iraq; Europe, Asia and Africa
scarcely exist.

Those who supported the president's decision to invade Iraq on the basis of
taking out Saddam Hussein's supposed weapons of mass destruction, now defend
it by dwelling on the destruction of Saddam's regime and the happy outcome
of Iraq's elections. Two former Republican secretaries of state, George
Shultz and Henry Kissinger, warn that the American forces must be kept
there; to leave precipitously would be to court catastrophe in the Middle
East - shades of arguments once used to explain why a rapid retreat from
Vietnam would lead to disaster throughout south-east Asia.

Because the White House fortress is closed to all who doubt the wisdom of
its policies, rumours fly of what at least some in the Pentagon believe is
now required: an early retreat from a "war" that cannot be won. These are
words no one dares utter in the presence of the true believers, courtiers
and pseudo-warriors, who insist that the pledges made by the "elected
monarch" - Theodore Roosevelt's description of the presidential office -
must be taken seriously.

George W. Bush, more than Franklin Roosevelt or Ronald Reagan - all
presidents who tried to reshape the international order - insists there is
no time more perilous than the present, no period more propitious for making
fundamental change throughout the world. In the president's skewed version
of history, the dangers posed by Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin fade beside
the far greater hazards created by terrorists. The military policies that
led to the defeat of the Nazis and the diplomatic strategies that brought
down the Soviet Union are never alluded to by a monarch intent on creating a
"new world order" - a phrase Mr Bush avoids, recalling its use by his
ill-starred father.

Many in Washington know there is no strategy for realising the objectives
set forth by the president on January 20. The knowledge of radical Islam in
the US remains primitive and rhetorical. The Bush administration has
undertaken nothing analogous to the efforts made to understand the Soviet
Union in the time of Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy, Lyndon
Johnson, Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. The federal government has yet to
engage the leading independent think-tanks or universities to encourage them
to discuss the context of foreign policy as it has been transformed by
recent events. America once prided itself on helping instruct the world
about arms control, and on how that knowledge helped contain the Soviet
Union. There is no comparable command of the problems represented by
terrorism.

For those who can recall a time when foreign leaders were able to contribute
to US foreign policy, it is obvious that no such statesmen exist today. The
efforts of Tony Blair, the prime minister, to influence the president have
had little effect. Similarly, the opinions of leaders in France, Germany,
Russia, China and Japan do not weigh heavily with those who serve Mr Bush,
and the country's traditional alliances are at risk. None of these
conditions is significantly altered by America's success in enabling so many
Iraqis to troop to the polls on January 30.

The administration has a habit of prophesying difficulty and disaster and
then claiming to have averted it by its firm resolve. Still, when a scholar
as distinguished as John Lewis Gaddis argues in Foreign Affairs journal that
the challenge to the president is to prove himself a latter-day Bismarck,
exchanging his "shock and awe" policies for ones based on "attention to
detail", it is clear that the tolerance of Mr Bush registered in the
November elections is not extinct, even among academics.

The myths about the current president are of a greater order than those of
other recent presidents whose talents were sometimes exaggerated. The king's
courtiers, experts in spin, remain in full control.

Nonetheless, in the imperial capital, no less than abroad, doubts exist
about Mr Bush's first-term accomplishments. The auguries for his second
term, given the record of most 20th-century presidencies, are scarcely more
favourable. Mr Bush may in time choose to take roads different from those in
the past but the indications are that he will simply persist with his
utopian fantasies.

The writer is emeritus professor of history at Brown University and author
of The Presidents: The Presidency from Theodore Roosevelt to George W. Bush
(Allen Lane)
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