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

by Glenn Greenwald

  The U.S. “has been Iran’s very best friend,” a diplomat from a predominantly Sunni nation told me recently. “You have eliminated its enemies, the Taliban and Saddam Hussein. You have even reduced yourselves as a threat to Iran because you have spent so much blood and treasure in Iraq.”

  Moreover, the Shiite Iraqi government that our military has fought to install and then protect has developed, as one would expect, extremely close ties with the Iranian government. Thus, we are essentially fighting for Iran. And the longer we stay and the more we fight and drain all of our resources in order to stabilize the Iraqi government, the more we promote the interests of the country that the administration now says is the greatest threat to American interests. Every time the administration or its supporters talk about the dangers posed by Iran, it ought to be immediately pointed out that nothing has strengthened Iran more than our invasion of Iraq.

  It may not be entirely accurate to say that Iran is the sole beneficiary of our invasion of Iraq, since there may be one other. As Thomas Ricks reported in the Washington Post in September 2006:

  The chief of intelligence for the Marine Corps in Iraq [Peter Devlin] recently filed an unusual secret report concluding that the prospects for securing that country’s western Anbar province are dim and that there is almost nothing the U.S. military can do to improve the political and social situation there, said several military officers and intelligence officials familiar with its contents….

  One Army officer summarized it as arguing that in Anbar province, “We haven’t been defeated militarily but we have been defeated politically—and that’s where wars are won and lost.”…

  Devlin reports that there are no functioning Iraqi government institutions in Anbar, leaving a vacuum that has been filled by the insurgent group al-Qaeda in Iraq, which has become the province’s most significant political force, said the Army officer, who has read the report.

  Al Qaeda thrives in anarchy. By throwing Iraq into chaos—about which our own military says: “there is almost nothing the U.S. military can do to improve the political and social situation there”—we have transformed Iraq from a place where Al Qaeda could not operate into territory plagued by the very anarchy in which it thrives. Put another way, the two largest beneficiaries of this war—likely the only two—are Iran and Al Qaeda.

  So, to recap the Iraq War: There were never any WMDs. The proliferation of government death squads and militias in Iraq means that, even compared to the Saddam era, human rights violations and torture have increased to record levels. Iranian influence has risen massively, as a result of a Shiite fundamentalist government loyal to Tehran replacing the former anti-Iranian regime. Iraq was a country in which Al Qaeda could never operate, but now it holds virtually free rein over large swaths of that country. We have squandered hundreds of billions of dollars and thousands of lives. At least tens of thousands, and more likely hundreds of thousands, of innocent Iraqis have died as a result of our invasion. And we have—according to the consensus of our own intelligence community—directly worsened the terrorist problem, and continue to exacerbate it with our ongoing occupation. But those who objected to the war plans on the ground that it would result in precisely these outcomes were demonized as weak-willed allies of Evil and thus ignored.

  BUSH’S MANICHEAN PRISON

  As the course the country has embarked upon in Iraq has yielded unmitigated disaster, the president’s response, as examined in the prior chapter, is to redouble his commitment to that failed course. Even as the American electorate, the Washington Establishment (in the form of the Baker-Hamilton Commission/the Iraq Study Group), and even members of his own party urge him to re-examine and abandon the mind-set that has led the United States into this debacle, Bush insists that he was right all along and that he is more certain than ever that this is so.

  Even as it became evident that our occupation of Iraq was a disaster, that that country was spiraling out of control and descending into uncontrollable chaos and civil war, the president continuously denied that reality, because it conflicted with his morally grounded convictions of the rightness of the invasion. Rather than accept facts that conflicted with his beliefs, he instead repeatedly blamed the media for distorting the situation in Iraq or even exaggerating the violence there. As early as October 2003, at a press appearance with the president of Kenya, President Bush began insisting that the situation in Iraq was better than it appeared from media reports:

  And, listen, we’re making good progress in Iraq. Sometimes it’s hard to tell it when you listen to the filter. We’re making good progress…. The situation is improving on a daily basis inside Iraq. People are freer, the security situation is getting better. The infrastructure is getting better—the schools are opening, the hospitals are being modernized.

  In one illustrative December 2005 press conference, Bush insisted, in the face of all evidence to the contrary, “This is quiet, steady progress. It doesn’t always make the headlines in the evening news. But it is real and it is important. And it is unmistakable to those who see it close up.”

  In March 2006, as the civil war was exploding in full force, Donald Rumsfeld, during a Pentagon press briefing, accused the media of exaggerating the situation in Iraq:

  From what I’ve seen thus far, much of the reporting in the U.S. and abroad has exaggerated the situation, according to General Casey…. The number of attacks on mosques, as he pointed out, had been exaggerated. The number of Iraqi deaths had been exaggerated.

  Once the president’s party was voted out of the majority in Congress in 2006 due largely to the chaos in Iraq, the White House still persisted in this bizarre reality-denying exercise, even sending out Laura Bush to make the same claim on television: “I do know that there are a lot of good things that are happening that aren’t covered. And I think that the drumbeat in the country from the media, from the only way people know what is happening is discouraging.”

  In fact, reports about Iraq were not excessively gloomy and pessimistic. The exact opposite was true. It was the administration which routinely distorted what was occurring in Iraq in order to prevent a recognition—on the part of the American public, the media, and perhaps even the president himself—of just how dire the situation there was. As the Iraq Study Group (ISG) documented in 2006:

  In addition, there is significant underreporting of the violence in Iraq. The standard for recording attacks acts as a filter to keep events out of reports and databases…. For example, on one day in July 2006 there were 93 attacks or significant acts of violence reported. Yet a careful review of the reports for that single day brought to light 1,100 acts of violence. Good policy is difficult to make when information is systematically collected in a way that minimizes its discrepancy with policy goals.

  In an October 2006 interview with Fox’s Sean Hannity, the president expressly stated that, for him, the war in Iraq is not mere policy, and is not a matter confined to geopolitical considerations. Instead, it is the centerpiece of the Manichean battle to which he has devoted himself:

  BUSH: But, Sean, this is an ideological standoff between those of us who like liberty and freedom and have, you know, support a hopeful philosophy versus extremists and radicals who, you know, hate everything we stand for. And this is going to be a long struggle….

  HANNITY: Is this a struggle literally between good and evil?

  BUSH: I think it is.

  HANNITY: This is what it is? Do you think most people understand that? I mean, when you see the vacillating poll numbers, does it discourage you in that sense?

  BUSH: Well, first of all, you can’t make decisions on polls, Sean. You’ve got to do what you think is right. The reason I say it’s good versus evil is that evil people kill innocent life to achieve political objectives. And that’s what Al Qaeda and people like Al Qaeda do.

  In the September 2006 interview he sat for with various right-wing pundits, the president, according to National Review’s Rich Lowry and Kate O’Beirne, emphasized: “A lot of
people in America see this as a confrontation between good and evil, including me.” As Lowry wrote subsequent to that interview:

  Bush’s faith in the rightness of his strategy in the broader war is deep-seated—it is, indeed, a product of faith. “Freedom is universal,” Bush says. “And I recognize there’s a debate around the world about the kind of—whether that principle is real. I call it moral relativism, if people do not believe that certain people can be free. I mean, I just cannot subscribe to that. People—I know it upsets people when I ascribe that to my belief in an Almighty, and that I believe a gift from that Almighty is universal freedom. That’s what I believe.”

  For the president, the war in Iraq specifically, and the war to install democracy generally, is not a strategy subject to re-examination because it is grounded in, and compelled by, the inerrant will of God and by the mission that both Bush and the nation have been “called” to fulfill. As he said in his 2004 State of the Union address:

  God has planted in every human heart the desire to live in freedom. And even when that desire is crushed by tyranny for decades, it will rise again. (Applause.)…America is a nation with a mission, and that mission comes from our most basic beliefs.

  The president has repeatedly described the commitment to wage war in order to bring democracy to the world not merely in terms of a strategy to make America safe but also as a “calling”—the evangelical term for God’s planned purpose for an individual or a country. In his 2004 speech at the Republican National Convention, the president stated his views as follows:

  I believe that America is called to lead the cause of freedom in a new century. I believe that millions in the Middle East plead in silence for their liberty. I believe that given the chance, they will embrace the most honorable form of government ever devised by man. I believe all these things because freedom is not America’s gift to the world, it is the almighty God’s gift to every man and woman in this world. (Applause.)

  It is simply extraordinary that the president is committed to the continuation of a war not merely because it is purportedly in America’s national interest, but more so, because the war and the goals he is pursuing are compelled by God’s will, because Bush is, in essence, a warrior delivering God’s gift of freedom to the world. The role of the U.S. president, traditionally and properly, is to use the force of the U.S. government to advance American interests in the world, not to follow a perceived “calling” from God to do Good in the world. That foundational principle led to this 2004 exchange between Mike Wallace and Bob Woodward on 60 Minutes:

  WOODWARD: The president still believes, with some conviction, that this was absolutely the right thing, that he has the duty to free people, to liberate people, and this was his moment.

  WALLACE: Who gave George Bush the duty to free people around the world?

  WOODWARD: That’s a really good question. The Constitution doesn’t say that’s part of the commander-in-chief ’s duties.

  WALLACE: The president of the United States, without a great deal of background in foreign policy, makes up his mind and believes he was sent by somebody to free the people, not just in Iraq, but around the world?

  WOODWARD: That’s his stated purpose.

  WALLACE: Right.

  WOODWARD: It is far-reaching and ambitious, and I think will cause many people to tremble.

  The president received a stinging rebuke in the form of the 2006 election disaster for the Republican Party. And the isolation he suffered became even more pronounced when the ISG shortly thereafter strongly repudiated the president’s approach in Iraq. In the aftermath of those humiliations, many seemed to expect the president humbly to acknowledge error, or at least to concede that the United States must gradually search for a way to extricate itself from Iraq. But for the president, re-examination of his Manichean premises is, by definition, not an option, and he thus reacted wholly opposite to normal expectations—he reemphasized his commitment to his war and even committed to escalation. That the president would never change course was placed further beyond doubt when Vice President Cheney appeared on Fox News on January 14, 2007, and proclaimed about Iraq, “We’ve made enormous progress.”

  And thus the president stands, widely repudiated across the political spectrum, yet more convinced than ever of the rightness of his actions and entirely steadfast in his rejection of change. On January 14, 2007, the Associated Press described the president’s rigid commitment to his failed policies as follows:

  President Bush once said he was determined to stick with the Iraq war even if his wife and his dog were the only ones left at his side.

  It’s moving in that direction.

  “He is as isolated as a president can be,” said Julian Zelizer, a political historian at Boston University.

  When a president makes foreign policy decisions based not upon strategic calculations or prudential considerations, but instead upon Manichean, moral imperatives, then he is precluded from re-examination and change. With two years left in office, the president is an isolated and intensely unpopular president. Yet the war in Iraq rages on, and will continue to do so, at least until he leaves office, because the president’s core convictions allow no other course.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Iran: The Next War?

  President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said on Friday Iran should not show weakness over its nuclear program, a day after Tehran ignored a United Nations deadline to stop nuclear work which the West says could be used for making bombs.

  “If we show weakness in front of the enemy the expectations will increase but if we stand against them, because of this resistance, they will retreat.”

  —REUTERS, February 23, 2007

  “Today, it should be clear that not only is weakness provocative,” Mr. Rumsfeld said, standing at a lectern with President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney at his side, “but the perception of weakness on our part can be provocative as well….

  “A conclusion by our enemies that the United States lacks the will or the resolve to carry out missions that demand sacrifice and demand patience is every bit as dangerous as an imbalance of conventional military power,” Mr. Rumsfeld said in a buoyant but sometimes emotional speech.

  —NEW YORK TIMES, on former secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld’s farewell speech to the Pentagon, December 15, 2006

  The simplistic and moralistic Bush mind-set—by which even the most vexing problems and complex conflicts are reduced to a contest of “strength” in the face of Evil—can perhaps be seen most clearly in the president’s treatment of Iran. Throughout 2006, the president’s Iran policy became mindlessly antagonistic, and was reduced eventually to the point where it was shaped by a handful of absolutist and moralistic premises which bordered on the cartoonish. Bush’s perspective amounts to this:

  Iran is governed by Evil leaders. They are the moral and practical equivalent of Hitler’s Nazis. They are intent on regional, perhaps even world, domination. They are so insane and so Evil that they will attack other countries with nuclear weapons even if it means that they would then be annihilated. Particularly if they acquire nuclear weapons, they would pose a grave, imminent, and undeterrable threat to the United States. Their leaders do not fear death, and in fact crave it as a result of their religious extremism. They cannot be negotiated with because they are both Evil and deranged. The only feasible course of action with Iran is to treat it as a Nazi-like enemy, refuse to negotiate, and stop it by any means necessary, which—due to its leaders’ inability to be reasoned with—inevitably requires “regime change,” by military confrontation if necessary.

  With those premises bolted into place, the Bush administration has transformed what was—especially after the 9/11 attacks—a rapidly improving and cooperative relationship with the Iranians into a bellicose chest-beating exercise whereby the likelihood of military confrontation of some sort becomes increasingly likely every day. The two-dimensional Good vs. Evil framework that the president has applied to a complex and diverse Iran leaves vi
rtually no other alternative.

  Throughout 2006, it was unclear whether the president’s increasingly antagonistic rhetoric toward Iran was a political ploy to satiate his warmongering political base or whether, notwithstanding our incapacitating occupation of Iraq, the president himself really believed that war with Iran might be inevitable. But the 2006 midterm elections did not put an end to the president’s militarism toward the Iranians. Quite the contrary, once the elections were over—and even with a clear antiwar message delivered by voters—the president began sending signals that he would not only escalate America’s military commitment to the war in Iraq but also intensify our hostile posture toward the Iranians.

  Thus, by the end of the year, the only options presented to the Iranians were (a) submit to the president’s demands by freezing their nuclear energy program as a precondition to any negotiations, or (b) accept the inevitability of some type of military strike by the United States and to prepare accordingly.

  The mentality underlying the president’s view of Iran has long been evident. In Bush’s October 2002 Cincinnati speech discussed in the prior chapter, the president expressly denied the fundamental differences between competing factions in the Middle East and instead insisted that they were all “different faces of the same evil.”