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

by Glenn Greenwald

  The president’s most loyal electoral base would likely have stood behind him even had he exclusively emphasized the “Destroy Evil” side of the Manichean equation. But the towering, transpartisan approval ratings the president enjoyed were the result of a balanced rather than bloodthirsty approach to the threat of terrorism. President Bush attracted widespread support by delivering convincing assurances that our nation’s principles would preclude our descending to the lawless and barbaric level of the terrorists in order to defeat them.

  Although initial speeches confined the Good-Evil dichotomy to the choice that America posed to the other nations of the world—either cooperate with the United States in its battle or be deemed to be on the side of Evil—application of this dichotomy would soon come to include domestic political debates as well. The simple, binary rhetoric of Good vs. Evil was increasingly invoked in order to depict Americans who opposed the president’s policies—particularly in the areas of national security, war, and terrorism—as opponents not merely of the president’s policies but of the United States itself, as enemies of the Good.

  SADDAM OSAMA ADOLF HUSSEIN

  By mid-2002, it had become increasingly apparent that President Bush was intent upon forcing a conflict with Iraq, using as his principal rhetorical tactic the assertion that confronting that nation was a critical component of fighting terrorism and combating Evil. Once the White House unveiled its “Iraq marketing project” with full force, the effort to equate an attack on Iraq with defense against terrorism intensified. In virtually every speech the president delivered, and in nearly all interviews he gave, Bush repeatedly linked Iraq with terrorism.

  As a result of that refrain, those who merely raised concerns about invading Iraq—let alone those who emphatically opposed it—were accused by the president’s supporters, first implicitly and then overtly, of opposing efforts to stop terrorism and even of siding with the terrorists and acting as their allies. And though the war with Afghanistan was on the president’s immediate agenda when he first enunciated this dualistic framework, he made crystal clear that the choice all were called upon to make was by no means applicable only to that war, but also to the “broader battle”: “Today we focus on Afghanistan. But the battle is broader…. In this conflict there is no neutral ground.”

  The president and his allies devoted considerable efforts to not only detailing the threat posed by Saddam Hussein but also depicting him as pure Evil, thus justifying any and all attacks on him regardless of what actual threat he posed to the United States. Central to this depiction was the administration’s repeatedly equating Saddam Hussein with the Ultimate Historical Evil, Adolf Hitler. Dr. Rafael Medoff, director of the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, published a 2003 article documenting the increasingly common reliance of Bush officials on comparisons between Saddam Hussein and Adolf Hitler and/or Iraq and Nazi Germany:

  Appearing on “Meet the Press” on February 23, Bush administration official Richard Perle compared the charade of visits by United Nations weapons inspectors to Iraq with the infamous 1944 visit by Red Cross officials to the Nazis’ Theresienstadt ghetto, where the performance of the prisoners’ orchestra helped lull the visitors into believing that Nazi treatment of the Jews was not so terrible after all. Perle was referring to Saddam Hussein’s systematic effort to hide Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction….

  Perle’s remark was the latest in a series of statements by U.S. officials drawing analogies between current events and those of the Nazi era. President Bush, in his speech after the September 11 attacks, said that Muslim terrorists “follow in the path of Nazism.” Other U.S. officials have compared European reluctance to confront Saddam with Europe’s reluctance to confront Hitler in the 1930s.

  In the public dialogue, the notion of “Pure Evil”—which most Americans agreed was applicable to the 9/11 attackers and to the Taliban radicals who harbored them—quickly and dramatically expanded. Suddenly that designation included a whole range of leaders and countries that had not attacked the U.S. and had almost nothing in common with the Sunni religious extremists of Al Qaeda—most prominently Saddam Hussein. In February 2003, one of the president’s most influential supporters, evangelical leader James Dobson, appeared on CNN, where Larry King engaged him in respectful and solemn dialogue about the Evil posed by Saddam:

  KING: What do you make of going into Iraq? Does any part of that question your Christian values about going to war?

  DOBSON: No, not at all. It doesn’t. No, I—you know Saddam Hussein is a tyrant, and he is out of the mold of Hitler and Stalin and others. And you can’t negotiate with a tyrant. One who is bloodthirsty, one who’s willing to kill innocent people. You can’t do that. And he’ll take your shorts if you try. And I think there’s only one thing to do, and that’s go in there and confront him. I just can’t imagine Adolf Hitler negotiating in good faith or Stalin or Pol Pot or any of the other tyrants.

  KING: And if the world had moved against them, but there was no U.N.

  DOBSON: There was no U.N. and the British tried appeasement, which never works. It just never works. It just encourages a tyrant to be more bloody. And so, I think that we really do need to do what we need to do there.

  For Dobson, the impact of 9/11 on America was primarily spiritual: “We had this resurgence of patriotism and this renewed religious faith, belief in God,” he said in the interview, and it was that “renewed religious faith” that drove him to urge that the U.S. wage war on the Evil tyrant.

  Cast in those terms—the invasion of Iraq as a necessary prong in the defeat of Evil, Saddam Hussein as Adolf Hitler, Iraq as Nazi Germany—whether the United States should invade Iraq and change its government was a simple choice, both politically and morally. With those premises in place, it became true, by logical necessity, that those who favored the invasion were devoted to the defense of Good against Evil. Those who opposed the invasion wanted to do nothing in the face of Evil, sided with terrorism, and perhaps were even in confederation with Evil itself.

  By itself, the Good vs. Evil paradigm persuaded many, if not most, Americans to support the invasion. The demonization of Saddam as pure Evil was so effective in precluding rational debate that, according to a USA Today poll in September 2003 (a full six months after the U.S. invaded Iraq), almost 70 percent of the country—a truly astonishing number—embraced the false belief that Saddam personally participated in the planning of the 9/11 attacks. While Americans continue through today to debate whether the administration and its followers deliberately “misled” the nation with respect to WMDs, there can be no reasonable debate that the president’s all-consuming Manichean rhetoric planted a falsehood in the minds of most Americans—namely, that Iraq was connected to the 9/11 attacks.

  Indeed, inducing a belief that Saddam had WMDs was probably less important than deploying a rhetorical strategem that caused the overwhelming majority of Americans to assume that Saddam played an active role in planning the 9/11 attacks. As but one of countless examples where top administration officials coyly suggested a link between 9/11 and Saddam, the following CBS News report from September 2002 (exactly the time when Congress was preparing to vote on the Authorization to Use Military Force [AUMF], and long after it was established that Saddam had no role whatsoever in 9/11) highlights just how culpable the administration was in disseminating that total fiction:

  Condoleezza Rice’s statements, aired Wednesday in a broadcast interview, are the strongest yet alleging contacts between Al Qaeda and the Iraqi government….

  “There clearly are contacts between al Qaeda and Iraq that can be documented; there clearly is testimony that some of the contacts have been important contacts and that there’s a relationship here,” Rice said.

  “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,” Rice said. “We know too that several of the [al Qaeda] detainees, in particular some high-ranking de
tainees, have said that Iraq provided some training to al Qaeda in chemical weapons development.”…

  “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,” Rice said [emphasis added].

  No top administration official ever came out and expressly said they could prove that Saddam planned 9/11. But such definitive claims were unnecessary. The implied meaning of Rice’s statements is manifest. The Saddam-9/11 connection “is getting clearer, and we’re learning more,” she said—as if there was a mountain of evidence that was just missing one or two tiny pieces to seal the deal. And all the momentum was moving toward that inevitable conclusion.

  THE DOCILE “WATCHDOGS”

  The uncompromisingly moralistic framing of the Iraqi conflict caused a substantial portion of Americans and, worse, the national media, to relinquish their critical faculties and—in the case of journalists—to abdicate their defining role as an adversarial watchdog over claims and actions by the government. Fearful of being cast as an ally of Evil, and subscribing to the president’s worldview that U.S. security required bold preemptive military attacks in the Middle East, the media not only passively accepted but aggressively promoted the president’s claims with regard to the threats posed by Saddam.

  The front pages of the nation’s major newspapers and lead stories on its network news programs touted Saddam’s purported weapons programs and fueled the image of Saddam as Evil. With virtually unswerving fidelity to the administration’s narrative, the American media depicted the proposed invasion as necessary in order to defend America from the forces of Evil.

  And whatever else may be true, the media indisputably failed to disabuse the vast majority of Americans of the myth that Saddam had planned the 9/11 attacks. It is difficult to imagine a more potent indictment of the dysfunction of the American press than the fact that journalists, cowed by the president’s dualistic rhetoric, all but stood by while the government convinced Americans of a “fact” that, as was well known even at the time, lacked a shred of evidence, then led the country to war based on that patent falsehood.

  Even though it is more than four years old now, President Bush’s infamous October 2002 pre–Iraq War speech, delivered in Cincinnati, Ohio, is a staggering read. That oration contained virtually every false assertion that was used to convince Americans to support the invasion of Iraq.

  For it was in that Cincinnati speech that President Bush told the country:

  • that Iraq “possesses and produces chemical and biological weapons”

  • that—like the 9/11 terrorists—Iraq “could bring sudden terror and suffering to America” and it “is seeking nuclear weapons”

  • that “the Iraqi dictator must not be permitted to threaten America and the world with horrible poisons and diseases and gases and atomic weapons”

  • that “we know Saddam Hussein has dangerous weapons today”

  • that “Iraq has trained al Qaeda members in bomb-making and poisons and deadly gases”

  • that “Saddam Hussein is harboring terrorists and the instruments of terror, the instruments of mass death and destruction”

  • that the United States had “urgent concern about Saddam Hussein’s links to international terrorist groups”

  • that “despite his public promises, Saddam Hussein had ordered his nuclear program to continue”

  • that we must ask ourselves: “If we know Saddam Hussein has dangerous weapons today—and we do—does it make any sense for the world to wait to confront him as he grows even stronger and develops even more dangerous weapons?”

  • that “the lives of Iraqi citizens would improve dramatically if Saddam Hussein were no longer in power”

  • that “surveillance photos reveal that the regime is rebuilding facilities that it had used to produce chemical and biological weapons”

  • that “Saddam Hussein has held numerous meetings with Iraqi nuclear scientists, a group he calls his nuclear mujahideen—his nuclear holy warriors”

  • that Iraq “could have a nuclear weapon in less than a year” and

  • that “we cannot wait for the final proof—the smoking gun—that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.”

  Dismissing the fundamental differences between the secular Hussein and the Muslim fanatic bin Laden, the president contended that they were merely “different faces of the same evil.” In sum, the president said the central objective of his speech was to document “a grave threat to peace”—“the threat comes from Iraq.”

  A mere one week after the president made these dramatic claims in Cincinnati, the Congress overwhelmingly enacted the Authorization to Use Military Force in Iraq. Almost all Republicans and roughly half of the Democrats in the Senate voted in favor of the authorization, and with it, the invasion of Iraq became a fait accompli.

  In the climate of heightened urgency which the administration worked very hard to maintain, most national journalists were petrified of aggressively challenging the “commander in chief” during this “time of war.” They feared they would be pelted with all sorts of accusations from the president’s followers that they were allies of Evil. Independently, many media stars, living largely in New York and Washington, had themselves been swept up by the fear of terrorism and, finding comfort in promises of “protection,” they were accordingly marching in lockstep with the president’s worldview.

  Literally on a daily basis, the administration’s highly dubious and even disputed assertions proffered to justify an attack on Iraq were published on the front pages of American newspapers as though they were uncontested facts. Further, the substantial bulk of the reporting on Iraq relied primarily, often exclusively, on anonymous “administration officials” or their designated intelligence “sources.” In a national climate where the decision to go to war was cast as a moral imperative first, and as a policy decision a distant second, our country’s most influential media outlets turned into little more than glorified megaphones for amplifying government claims, uncritically reciting them as though they were the by-product of diligent investigative journalism.

  Many of those false government claims were amplified most loudly and influentially by the New York Times, often (though by no means only) in articles by plainly prowar (or at least war-enabling) reporters such as Judith Miller and Michael Gordon. That the Times bestowed credence on the Bush administration’s rhetoric about the threats posed by Saddam played an influential role in persuading many Americans of the need to attack Iraq. The central role of newspapers is to examine the government’s claims critically and skeptically, not to merely recite them as fact. But in the run-up to the war, the Times demonstrated all the critical spirit of Pravda rather than that of a trusted American newspaper, and thus convinced its readers of one false government claim after the next concerning the “Iraqi threat.”

  In May 2004—long after it was apparent that the “facts” continuously reported on its front page were false—the Times published a so-called Editor’s Note that was part acknowledgment but also part justification of its errors. That mea culpa, though extraordinary for a large media outlet on such a significant matter, was woefully incomplete. The abdication of journalism’s core function—not just by the Times but by the national media as a whole—was hardly confined to the issue of whether Saddam had WMDs; nor was it (as the Editor’s Note suggested) purely the by-product of some narrow failure to examine the credibility of certain Iraqi exiles. The failure was broad, systemic, and decidedly ignoble.

  At the heart of all of this was an arguably understandable—though still incomparably harmful—cowardice. The country was led by a powerful, popular War President, and the Times capitulated to him as cravenly and completely as did numerous other American institutions and political figures.

  Despite Democratic control of the Senate, th
e president cowed the Congress into unprecedented submission, as it handed him every new power he requested and eagerly endorsed every decision he made, with little or no scrutiny. Despite the overwhelming capitulation of Congressional Democrats to the president’s will, in the lead-up to the 2002 election many of the president’s supporters still mocked even prowar Democrats as weak appeasers of the terrorists who were too spineless to fight Evil, and even as tainted with questionable and suspect loyalty to the United States. Wounded Vietnam veteran and Georgia senator Max Cleland voted in favor of the 2002 Authorization to Use Military Force against Iraq, yet was still defeated for re-election after the president’s party ran commercials featuring photographs of Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein and accusing Cleland of being soft on terrorism. And with those effective tactics of mockery and demonization rolling over the submissive Democrats, the president rode his burgeoning popularity and Manichean warrior pose to a historic victory into those elections, resulting in the full-scale control of the Congress by the loyal supporters in his party.

  The administration created a powerful framework that drove the nation. One could stand loyally behind the president and thus be powerful and strong and on the side of Good. Or one could oppose him, and thereby reveal oneself to be weak, spineless, and of questionable morality and loyalties—even subversive and on the side of Evil. Like most Americans, national journalists heard from the president that everyone was compelled to choose sides—Good or Evil—and one cannot overstate the impact of journalists’ fear of being perceived as, and accused of, being on the wrong side.