The cracks showing in Vulcans' vision
KARL ROVE, George Bush's senior political adviser, has a PowerPoint display of the personal characteristics that should get Bush reelected. Among them: "strong leader, bold action, big ideas, leads a strong team."
I could have bought that in the days following 9/11 when the president rallied a fearful nation. I could have bought that when he made the right decision to go into Afghanistan and root out Al Qaeda. And I was prepared to accept the proposition that on the whole, Republicans had fielded better foreign policy and national security teams than had the Democrats in recent decades.
But although "The Rise of the Vulcans," as author James Mann calls the emergence of Bush's war Cabinet, seemed impressive on paper, they introduced an arterial weakness into the heart of the presidency that has lessened the strength of the United States of America. It was the fatal obsession of at least some of them with Iraq.
"The Vulcans" was a name they called themselves, after a statue of the Roman god that stood on a hillside outside Birmingham, Ala., Condoleezza Rice's home town. Their vision, as Mann describes it, "was that of an unchallengeable America," a military power of such magnitude that it no longer needed to make compromises or accommodations with any other nations. Although Mann concentrates on only six -- Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Armitage, and Condoleezza Rice -- there are supporting actors in this drama such as Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, John Bolton, Lewis (Scooter) Libby and others who shared the same vision with cultlike devotion. They took their inspiration from the Reagan years and his willingness to challenge the Soviets' "evil empire," not just accommodate it with detente. The emergence of Eastern Europe out from under the dead hand of communism and the collapse of the Soviet Union itself were examples of the power and truth that free markets, democracy, and a forward strategy could bring.
Some of the Vulcanites had close relations with Israel's Likud Party. They dreamed of transforming Iraq into an Israel-friendly democracy in the heart of the Middle East that could lead the entire region away from the dictators and kings with whom the United States had for too long made a devil's bargain in the name of stability. That mission fitted into the hearts of Dick Cheney, who regretted his acceptance of ending the first Gulf War too soon, and of President Bush, who perceived that his father had made a mistake in stopping short of Baghdad -- a decision that is looking better and better today.
We know now, from Bob Woodward and Richard Clarke, that the Vulcans brought their grand illusion with them into power and that the president bought the package. On the very day that the Pentagon and the Twin Towers were hit, Clarke writes, "I realized with almost a sharp pain that Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz were going to try to take advantage of this national tragedy to promote their agenda about Iraq."
The reluctant Vulcans, Powell and Armitage, tried to warn the president that the complexities of war and the Middle East might combine to defeat such grandiose schemes. But in the end, as Woodward writes, they became "the enablers, providing cover and an appearance of reasonableness so Cheney and Rumsfeld worked their will." It is disillusioning to me, who had written that Powell's UN speech on the dangers of Iraq was utterly convincing, to hear Powell say now that much of it was nonsense.
It took personal courage for Rumsfeld, on the day that most of our leaders had fled Washington, to stay in the burning Pentagon and say he was too old to go to an undisclosed location. But he doomed the Iraq operation when he told Colin Powell that postwar planning could only be done by those who were truly committed to invading Iraq and supporters of change, not the 75 Middle East experts whom the State Department had assembled. As always, ideology trumped expertise.
And so it went. When the looting started because of bad planning, Rumsfeld's comment was that "stuff happens" and "freedom is untidy," never mind that historians will one day write that this was the moment that lost the war. When torture by Americans was revealed, Rumsfeld preferred to call it abuse -- not quite Rush Limbaugh's claim that it was little more than a fraternity hazing, but close enough.
Bush libeled his critics by saying that those who doubted that the Middle East was ready for democracy were racists. It was never that Arabs couldn't be democrats. It was rather that democracy couldn't be imposed by American military might in a region unready.
Today, however, the Vulcans have so diminished America's prestige and power by their imperial overreach and their bungling of the war that the United States is less able to influence other countries than before Iraq, less of an engine for democratic change. George Bush as the "strong leader," of "bold action, big ideas" distracted the nation from the war on terror and made us more vulnerable. As for the "strong team," the Vulcans and their Iraq obsession have made us weaker, not stronger. And by the way, Mann tells us the Vulcan statue has been taken down to repair its structural faults.
H.D.S. Greenway's column appears regularly in the Globe. 