A Tragic Legacy: How a Good vs. Evil Mentality Destroyed the Bush Presidency

by Glenn Greenwald

  The driving philosophy and ultimate goal of the administration has been a virtually limitless expansion of its own power. For that reason, the weaker and more besieged the administration feels, the more compelled it will be to make a showing of its power.

  Lashing out in response to feelings of weakness is a temptation most human beings have, but for George Bush, it is a primary dynamic driving his behavior. His party suffered historic losses in the 2006 midterm elections as a result of profound dissatisfaction with his presidency and with his war, and his reaction was to escalate the war, despite (really, because of) the extreme unpopularity of that option. And as Iraq rapidly unraveled, he even issued orders, as discussed at length in chapter 4, that pose a high risk of expanding the war to include Iran. When Bush feels weak and restrained, that is when he acts most extremely.

  Bush officials and their followers talk incessantly about things like power, weakness, domination, and humiliation. Their objectives—both foreign and domestic—are always to show their enemies that they are stronger and more powerful and the enemies are weaker and thus must submit (“shock and awe”). It is a twisted worldview but it dominates their thinking. As John Dean, in reliance on extensive social science, demonstrated in Conservatives Without Conscience, a perception of one’s weakness and the resulting fears it inspires are almost always what drive people to create or embrace empowering Manichean movements and the group-based comforts of moral certitude that such movements provide.

  The most dangerous George Bush is one who feels weak, impotent, and under attack. Those perceptions are intolerable for him and it is doubtful if there are many limits, if any, on what he would be willing to do in order to restore a feeling of potency and to rid himself of the sensations of his own weakness and defeat. As he has made repeatedly and unambiguously clear, he is an instrument of the Good and is faced with true Evil. His mission is just and necessary, and he will therefore pursue it without constraints. That is the Manichean mind, and it—more than anything else—is what has propelled America along a radical, tumultuous path throughout the Bush presidency.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The Manichean Road to Baghdad

  We clearly know that there were in the past and have been contacts between senior Iraqi officials and members of al Qaeda going back for actually quite a long time…. No one is trying to make an argument at this point that Saddam Hussein somehow had operational control of what happened on September 11, so we don’t want to push this too far, but this is a story that is unfolding, and it is getting clearer, and we’re learning more[emphasis added].

  —CONDOLEEZZA RICE, then national security adviser, September 25, 2002

  (shortly before Congress voted to authorize military force against Iraq)

  In September 2002, Bush White House Chief of Staff Andy Card infamously told the New York Times that the Bush administration had waited until September to advocate an attack on Iraq because “[f]rom a marketing point of view, you don’t introduce new products in August.” But in point of fact, the groundwork for the arguments that ultimately persuaded Americans to support the invasion was laid well before that September. Almost immediately after the 9/11 attacks, as the World Trade Center lay in rubble, President Bush introduced the principles, rhetoric, and themes that ultimately enabled him to lead the country in waging war against Iraq.

  Though the country has since debated extensively whether any rational connection exists between the 9/11 attacks and the invasion of Iraq, the president, as early as September of 2001, floated the argument those two events are not only connected, but that the latter flows directly and proximately from—and is even compelled by—the former. The premises underpinning the president’s decision to invade Iraq are not uniquely applicable to that nation, and cannot meaningfully be examined standing alone. Instead, it was the president’s general moralistic principles he enunciated almost immediately after 9/11 that led directly to the invasion.

  From the outset, the president depicted the 9/11 attacks not merely as an act of Evil perpetrated by Evil men but rather as evidence of a much more consequential and all-consuming phenomenon. He immediately depicted a broader, overarching battle between the forces of Good and the forces of Evil. The day after September 11, Bush addressed the nation and articulated a very clear and simple worldview, one which would guide his entire presidency: “This will be a monumental struggle of good versus evil, but good will prevail.”

  Cast in theological terms, the president’s belief that America had embarked upon a binary struggle of Good vs. Evil came to be the predominant theme of his presidency. The president and his administration invoked this starkly dualistic theme repeatedly to defend and justify a whole host of controversial actions. On September 20, 2001, the president addressed a Joint Session of Congress and made clear that not only was the conflict America faced one between pure Good and pure Evil, but further, everyone was compelled to choose one side or the other: “Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.”

  President Bush underscored the rigidly binary nature of the challenge facing America and the world again in his October 7, 2001, televised address to the nation: “Today we focus on Afghanistan. But the battle is broader. Every nation has a choice to make. In this conflict there is no neutral ground.”

  And in his January 29, 2002, State of the Union speech, the president expressly extended this Good-Evil dichotomy beyond Afghanistan and Al Qaeda, and thus announced to the world that henceforth, U.S. foreign policy would be devoted principally to combating the threats posed by an “axis of evil” threatening the world:

  North Korea is a regime arming with missiles and weapons of mass destruction, while starving its citizens. Iran aggressively pursues these weapons and exports terror, while an unelected few repress the Iranian people’s hope for freedom.

  Iraq continues to flaunt its hostility toward America and to support terror. The Iraqi regime has plotted to develop anthrax, and nerve gas, and nuclear weapons for over a decade. This is a regime that has already used poison gas to murder thousands of its own citizens—leaving the bodies of mothers huddled over their dead children. This is a regime that agreed to international inspections—then kicked out the inspectors. This is a regime that has something to hide from the civilized world.

  States like these, and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world….

  We’ll be deliberate, yet time is not on our side. I will not wait on events, while dangers gather. I will not stand by, as peril draws closer and closer. The

  United States of America will not permit the world’s most dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world’s most destructive weapons….

  History has called America and our allies to action, and it is both our responsibility and our privilege to fight freedom’s fight.

  In a nation still recovering from the trauma of the 9/11 attacks only four months prior; with anxiety-heightening, unsolved anthrax attacks via mail fresh in Americans’ minds; and with a trusting citizenry standing behind George Bush, the president’s accusations against Iraq, delivered in such a dramatic setting, were both potent and stirring. For Americans to hear from their president that Iraq “supports terror” and that it “plotted to develop anthrax” had the effect, surely by design, of powerfully linking the Saddam regime with the terrorists who flew the planes into American office buildings.

  To accuse Iraq of working with its “terrorist allies” and attempting to “threaten us with the world’s most destructive weapons” was, to understate the case, highly provocative rhetoric. Any American who had confidence in the president—and, in January 2002, the overwhelming majority of Americans did—was highly likely to come away from that speech with the distinct impression that Iraq was at least connected to, if not responsible for, the 9/11 attacks and even the recent anthrax attacks.

  By the conclusion of the president’s speech, he had made emphatic
ally clear that America’s enemies were not merely hostile to the United States and threatening to its interests but rather were pure Evil. They did not operate in isolation but as an “axis,” the historically familiar term designating Hitler’s Germany and its allies. Our enemies were intent on our total destruction—by nuclear weapons if possible—and they were all part of one undifferentiated mass. Above all, America was to be governed by an absolute truth: “We’ve come to know truths that we will never question: Evil is real, and it must be opposed.” That proclamation came near the end of the president’s speech, and it provided the framework for all the statements preceding it. That “evil is real” and “must be opposed” is a truth—the president avowed—“that we will never question.”

  That the administration attempted almost immediately to connect the 9/11 attacks to Iraq is hardly surprising. Former Bush treasury secretary Paul O’Neill reported that finding a way to invade Iraq was high on the Bush agenda long before 9/11. O’Neill said in a 2004 interview with 60 Minutes: “From the very beginning, there was a conviction that Saddam Hussein was a bad person and that he needed to go.” In Ron Suskind’s book, The Price of Loyalty, Suskind quotes O’Neill as describing a pre-9/11 National Security Council meeting where the invasion of Iraq was discussed with virtually no dissent. Said O’Neill: “It was all about finding a way to do it. That was the tone of it. The president saying ‘Go find me a way to do this.’”

  Moreover, numerous key Bush officials—including the top three Pentagon officials (Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and Douglas Feith) and the national security adviser for Middle East policy (Elliot Abrams)—were advocating an invasion of Iraq in order to depose Saddam for years prior to 9/11, and they simply seized on the terrorist attack as the principal justification for a war they had long desired. Additionally, Bush’s top terrorism official, Richard Clarke, disclosed that on the day after 9/11, Rumsfeld was expressly urging a military attack on Iraq. On the same day, Bush himself instructed Clarke to search for links between Iraq and Al Qaeda: “Iraq! Saddam! Find out if there’s a connection,” Clarke quotes Bush as ordering.

  In light of those facts, there is little doubt that many of the speeches delivered in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 were crafted with Iraq in mind. In retrospect, those early speeches were plainly preparing the American citizenry to view Iraq as a grave threat that was part and parcel of the threat posed by Al Qaeda.

  The day following his State of the Union address, the president delivered a thirty-minute speech to a boisterous and cheering crowd in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. He employed the word evil ten times to describe the enemies of the United States—vowing, for instance, that “the evil won’t stand,” proclaiming that “the people we fight are evil people,” and declaring that a principal cause for the 9/11 attacks was that “the evil ones thought that we were weak.” The president appeared deliberately to highlight the crowd-pleasing simplicity and uncomplicated purity of his down-home approach: “We haven’t forgot [sic] our other objective, and that’s bad news for Al Qaeda. Our other objective is to run them down wherever they hide and bring them to justice. Or, as I like to say, get ’em.”

  The president’s speech that day was filled with folksy platitudes and repeated invocations of the all-encompassing battle between Good vs. Evil. But his rhetoric was also breezy, at times even joking, setting a tone that masked the deadly serious nature of his threats:

  We’re making good progress. We put together a great coalition of nations around the world, with this message: Either you’re with us or you’re against us. Either you’re on the side of freedom and justice, or you aren’t.

  And the good news is most people are beginning to see the wisdom of being on the side of freedom and justice. (Laughter and applause.)

  We’re after them. But the good news to report for our side, and the bad news for the evil, is that we’re patient, and we’re determined, and we will not stop until we achieve all our objectives.

  After articulating a stark framework in which there were two sides and only two in the conflicts America faced—one Good, the other Evil—the president summarized his presidential mission as follows: “You know, you’ve heard me talk about this probably, but I really, truly view this as a conflict between good and evil. And there really isn’t much middle ground—like none. (Laughter.) The people we fight are evil people.

  “Either you’re with us or you’re against us. Either you’re on the side of freedom and justice or you aren’t.”

  Despite the seemingly grave subject matter and threatening nature of the president’s remarks, a good time was apparently had by all, or at least many, who attended his address. The official White House transcript proudly indicates sixteen different instances in which the president’s speech was interrupted by “Laughter” or “Laughter and applause”—including when an audience member interrupted the president’s statement that the terrorists in caves “better not think they can hide forever” by yelling: “Give ’em what-for, G!” (Laughter.)

  The president’s rhetoric was suffused with swaggering informalisms of this sort, plainly designed to invoke the image of a brave and macho cowboy, or a borderline lawless (when necessary to fight Evil) nineteenth-century sheriff. At a press briefing less than a week after the 9/11 attacks, the president was proudly issuing threats in the language of the Old West: “I want justice…And there’s an old poster out West I recall, that said, ‘Wanted, Dead or Alive.’”

  Thus was conveyed a man driven at his core by Goodness, by a resulting resolute commitment to protect those who are Good from the menace of terrorist Evil, a commitment so overarching and absolute that every other consideration—from the formalities of language to the formalities of law—was subordinate to the imperative of his mission. Like the American iconic film hero who breaks rules, steals cars, and defies every stifling convention when necessary to apprehend the bad guys, the president continuously evoked the language and struck the pose of the crusading cowboy on a mission. And that image resonated deeply with a nation full of angry, violated citizens who were hungry for aggressive retaliation.

  But as was typically the case for that time period, there was much decency and even noble sentiments included in the president’s speech to temper the Manichean chest-beating. With images of their fellow citizens leaping from the ninety-second floor of a collapsing office building in Manhattan still fresh in Americans’ minds, it was easy and simple for the president to depict America’s enemies as Evil. The Evil reflected by the attacks of 9/11 spoke for itself.

  But exactly why America was the personification of Good was not a lesson one could infer from the terrorist attacks. More conceptual reasoning was required to support that conclusion. In his speeches, the president balanced his threatening and Manichean posturing with an often eloquent appeal to America’s ideals. As noted in the first chapter, President Bush aggressively distinguished Muslims, including American Muslims, from the terrorist fanatics who exploit their religion, and sternly warned of the severe consequences for anyone attacking or otherwise harassing Muslim Americans. In his North Carolina speech, the president closed on this note:

  And, obviously, if you want to fight evil, we’ve figured out a way to do so militarily. That’s one way. But at home, you fight evil with acts of goodness. You overcome the evil in society by doing something to help somebody….

  Not only will our country be better, but we’ll show the world—we will show the world that values, universal values must be respected, and must be adhered to. And as a result, the world will be more peaceful. History has called us to action, and action we will take. (Applause.)

  Back in those early post-9/11 days, according to the president, America was Good not merely because it opposed nations and attacked groups designated as Evil, nor merely because it was attacked by Evil. America was Good for reasons wholly independent of the violent actions and depraved values of its enemies. America was Good in its own right—not inherently, but because of the values and princ
iples to which it aspired, for which it stood in the world, and which it sought to inspire.

  At least as the president typically expressed it in the post-9/11 months, America would demonstrate itself to be a force for Good, standing in contrast to the Evil of the terrorists, not principally with the potency of its bombs and invading armies (which few doubted), but instead—as the president said in North Carolina—by “show[ing] the world that values, universal values must be respected, and must be adhered to. And as a result, the world will be more peaceful.” While the president’s aggressive rhetoric in the wake of the 9/11 attacks was assuredly a primary cause for much of his popularity during that period, he did not single-mindedly tout an unrestrained or indiscriminate warpath.

  Many Americans supported him in reliance upon his accompanying commitments that whatever aggression might be necessary, America would never abandon the values defining the country, nor would he degrade America’s standing. The president vowed repeatedly that the nation would adhere to its political values and principles even when battling enemies who did not embrace those principles—both because doing so was the morally superior course, and because adherence to those values would enhance America’s strength and security by maintaining its influence and prestige in the world. The initial post-9/11 George Bush was one who claimed to recognize that long-standing American values were what made the country not only better than the enemies that had attacked us but also a stronger and more secure nation.

  Certainly in the hours and days following the shocking events of 9/11, many Americans—perhaps most—were understandably fueled by pure, unbridled fury and by a war-hungry desire to avenge the attacks. But as the weeks passed, that rage simmered down to a more focused and restrained anger. Many Americans were resolute about the need to pursue Al Qaeda aggressively but were not seeking maniacal, reckless warmongering.