Bush steps out of a Graham Greene novel

IN THE closing days of the campaign, President Bush has been telling Americans that "freedom is on the march." Despite the overwhelming evidence that the US position in Iraq is worsening almost hourly, he remains cheerful and optimistic not only about Iraq, but about America's mission to spread democracy to those unfortunate races who have not yet seen the light.

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The security situation in Baghdad is worse that it ever was in Saigon, except for a few days during the Tet offensive of 1968. during this country's last open-ended venture in spreading democracy. Yet Bush denies the unfolding tragedy, and his role in it.

But watching the American president in his sunny, upbeat mode, assuring everybody that basically all is well, that America's civilizing mission is on track, I kept wondering where had I heard that naive but sincere language before?

Then it came to me. Bush had begun to sound, and in my mind's eye, like a character in one of my favorite and oft-read novels: Graham Greene's "The Quiet American."

The novel takes place in Vietnam during the French war, before the Americans took over. The hero is a cynical and world- weary European journalist named Fowler. His rival in love is a friendly, fresh-faced and likable young American named Alden Pyle, who is attached to the American mission.

Pyle is nothing if not idealistic. He is a man of vision, and believes, as Bush puts it, in "the transformational power of liberty." He speaks incessantly of bringing true democracy to benighted natives. He despises old Europe, and thinks they have nothing to offer in the new American dream of world enlightenment. He has fallen under the spell of an intellectual American writer whose books about America's role in the world might today have been excerpted into conservative journals.

Pyle believes in a charismatic Vietnamese general who promises him a better Vietnam, not unlike the way the president's men fell for Ahmed Chalabi in those heady days when the administration's plans for Iraq were hatching.

Fowler tires of Pyle's prattle. "I had suffered from his lectures," says the older and more experienced Fowler. "Democracy was another subject of his -- he had pronounced and aggravating views on what the United States was doing in the world." Fowler is deeply suspicious of Pyle's plans to bring a "national democracy" to the country.

Fowler also grows tired of Pyle's running down of old Europe, and says: "We are the old colonial peoples, Pyle, but we've learned a bit of reality. We have learned not to play with matches."

But Pyle cannot resist playing with matches in order to promote his vision of American-style democracy, and he gets mixed up with real bombs that hurt real people in the cause of his Chalabi-like hero.

Of course, in Greene's book the Americans get involved with only small bombs that kill a few people in cafes. In Bush's case American bombs and shells continue to wipe out whole sections of Iraqi cities. And although we are told we are fighting in Iraq to prevent terrorism, it now appears that the Americans have lost 380 tons of one of the world's most powerful conventional explosives that were once being monitored by United Nations weapons inspectors.

The International Atomic Energy Agency warned the United States last year that terrorists might be helping themselves to "the greatest explosives bonanza in history."

As Pyle's innocence and naivety brought tragedy to the streets of Saigon in the novel, so has Bush's equally naive -- and incompetent -- handling of Iraq brought tragedy on a scale that Greene could not have imagined, damaging the security of the United States.

Fowler famously admonishes Pyle for his certainty, and for always thinking he knows best what people want. "They want enough rice. They don't want to be shot at," Fowler says. "They want one day to be much the same as another. They don't want our white skins telling them what they want."

H.D.S. Greenway's column appears regularly in the Globe.