A tarnished image as a war president
AN ARTICULATE insider, blowing the whistle on the most important thing George Bush has to peddle to the electorate this fall, is the stuff of nightmare for the president. Bush is banking on voters choosing him and his team to take care of the daddy of all issues, national security. Yet that hoped-for image of competence has been under heavy assault during this administration's fortnight from hell.
My local bookstore ran out of Richard Clarke's "J'accuse" book a week ago. My newspapers have not let the former antiterrorism chief or his detractors off the front page, and any time you turn on the television or the radio there is another administration official either rebutting Clarke's charges or trying to blacken his reputation. When Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was on he referred to Clarke as "that individual" as if he had forgotten his name, sounding for all the world like Bill Clinton talking about "that woman." And clinging to an untenable executive privilege in the case of Condoleezza Rice's testimony, only to abandon it later, made the administration seem uncertain and undaddy-like.
Impugning the witness, trying to put Clarke on trial instead of the administration, is an old defense attorney's trick. Although some of the administration's arguments and rebuttals have been reasonable and measured, too many have slipped into character assassination that discredits the administration more than Clarke.
Still, you have to feel a little sorry for President Bush. It's like being outdoors on a pre-9/11 spring morning with the air filled with bird song. Then later, someone you think a self-aggrandizing ornithologist nerd says: "Didn't you hear that shrike? You know, the butcher bird that impales his victims on thorns. Didn't you hear him sneaking into your garden?"
Well, in retrospect, when so many of the birds in your garden have been killed, the shrike's song was definitely there to be heard. But back then when there were so many birds in the air? And those were supposed to be the days of ever-lengthening light after the Cold War winter.
Bush came into office hoping to enjoy America's holiday from history just the way his predecessor had. I heard Bush speak, rather plaintively, that Clinton had had eight years, but he had only had eight months before 9/11. Oh yes, the Bush team was going to get serious about terrorism, outdo the feckless Clintonites, but terrorism on the scale of 9/11 was as far away from Bush's mind as most everybody else's. If the Bush administration nodded off a bit, didn't most of us in that warm, pre-9/11 sunshine? "I didn't feel that sense of urgency," Bush told author Bob Woodward. "I was not on point."
Yet national leaders are supposed to be accountable. There was plenty to blame on the Clinton administration, but 9/11 didn't happen on Clinton's watch. Bush came to office deeply inexperienced, but he tried to pick some of his father's team, elder statesmen, who could make up for this deficiency.
Colin Powell did his best, but Bush allowed the others to undercut Powell, and he lacked the coalition-building skills that Bush senior and James Baker had. Vice President Dick Cheney and Rumsfeld egged Bush on to use the cover of 9/11 to invade Iraq quickly, before he had a UN mandate, before there was any progress on the Israeli-Palestinian front, before the war was truly won in Afghanistan. Some advised him to invade Iraq before going after Al Qaeda. And even if they weren't actually lying to the public about weapons of mass destruction and links to Al Qaeda in Iraq, the kindest thing you can say was that all the president's men, and the president, were deceiving themselves, something we saw previous administrations do in Vietnam.
Then Rumsfeld botched the job in Iraq. The one moment when US troops might have been seen as liberators instead of occupiers vanished in a paroxysm of looting and anarchy when US troops entered Baghdad because the Pentagon had no coherent postwar plan and not enough troops. Mistakes followed mistakes, and today the administration is still in denial about the extent to which resistance to the Americans is becoming a popular uprising rather than the work of leftover Saddamists and foreign terrorists.
Bush was hoping that his handling of 9/11 would bond Americans to him, but his goals in Iraq and in the Middle East are receding before his eyes. Afghanistan is not where it should be either, partly because of the drain of resources for Iraq. Polls show more people in the world hating the United States more than they did pre-9/11. The war on terrorism is in trouble, and now, to top it all, Richard Clarke, the insider who worked in the last four administrations, is alleging that the president was asleep in the garden when the butcher birds came to call. CORRECTION: In a recent column I misnamed AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobbying group. It is American Israel Public Affairs Committee. H.D.S. Greenway's column appears regularly in the Globe.
