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

by Glenn Greenwald

  That offer was sent to the U.S. by the Swiss ambassador, who has been acting as the mediator for all U.S.-Iran communications ever since formal diplomatic relations ended during the 1979 seizure of the U.S. embassy in Tehran. When he conveyed the letter, the Swiss ambassador vouched that it “was an authoritative initiative that had the support of then-President Mohammad Khatami and supreme religious leader Ali Khamenei.”

  In the document, the Iranian government signaled a broad and flexible willingness to negotiate, and reach agreement on, the full panoply of issues to which the Bush administration had objected:

  The document lists a series of Iranian aims for the talks, such as ending sanctions, full access to peaceful nuclear technology and a recognition of its “legitimate security interests.” Iran agreed to put a series of U.S. aims on the agenda, including full cooperation on nuclear safeguards, “decisive action” against terrorists, coordination in Iraq, ending “material support” for Palestinian militias and accepting the Saudi initiative for a two-state solution in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

  The document also laid out an agenda for negotiations, with possible steps to be achieved at a first meeting and the development of negotiating road maps on disarmament, terrorism and economic cooperation.

  Trita Parsi, a Middle East expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told Kessler that Iranian flexibility included even their posture toward Israel: “Iranians were ready to dramatically soften their stance on Israel, essentially taking the position of other Islamic countries such as Malaysia.” (The official Malaysian policy toward Israel, shared by many Middle Eastern countries, is that it does not recognize Israel’s right to exist but would consider relations with Israel once an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement is reached.)

  The Bush administration not only failed to respond to the Iranian overture but actually dismissed it out of hand. Worse, they went out of their way to belittle the offer and insult the Iranians for making it by formally complaining to the Swiss ambassador, telling him it was inappropriate even to convey such an offer on behalf of the Iranians.

  In the midst of cooperating with the United States on critical matters, the Iranians came—hat in hand—to negotiate every issue generating U.S.-Iranian conflict, including Israel and the Iranian nuclear program, and the Bush administration refused even to come to the table. It is thus true that, at least over the last five years, one party to the U.S.-Iran conflict has been beyond reason and negotiation, but it is clearly not the Iranians.

  The Bush administration’s categorical refusal to speak with Iran back in 2003 is especially baffling given that prompting conciliatory gestures of this sort from hostile Middle Eastern governments was ostensibly one of the key objectives in invading Iraq. War advocates endlessly contended that once other Middle Eastern countries saw how strong and resolute the United States was in the post-9/11 world—once we overthrew the Iraqi tyrant and showed that we were willing to get our hands dirty in a real fight—other countries in that region would realize that they had no choice but to become more conciliatory and cooperative with the U.S., driven by the fear that they could be the next Iraq.

  The 2003 accord between the United States and Libya was held up as the classic model for this theory. Repeatedly, the conciliations made by Libyan leader Muammar al-Gadhafi were pointed to by Bush officials as an illustrative, successful example of this “Show of Force” strategy. On December 19, 2003, President Bush convened the media at the White House to announce what he excitedly called “a development of great importance”:

  Today in Tripoli, the leader of Libya, Colonel Moammar al-Ghadafi, publicly confirmed his commitment to disclose and dismantle all weapons-of-mass-destruction programs in his country. He has agreed immediately and unconditionally to allow inspectors from international organizations to enter Libya.

  As the president himself explained, this agreement “came about through quiet diplomacy,” specifically “nine months” of “talks” between the Libyan government and representatives of the United States and England. The commencement of the negotiations, then, was more or less simultaneous with the U.S. invasion of Iraq, exactly when Iran was making similar overtures. President Bush explicitly claimed a connection between the invasion of Iraq and the fear that, the president asserted, drove Libya to accept key concessions:

  We obtained an additional United Nations Security Council Resolution requiring Saddam Hussein to prove that he had disarmed, and when that resolution was defied, we led a coalition to enforce it. All of these actions by the United States and our allies have sent an unmistakable message to regimes that seek or possess weapons of mass destruction. Those weapons do not bring influence or prestige. They bring isolation and otherwise unwelcome consequences.

  The president and his supporters repeatedly cited Libya as an example of the benefits of the fear-inducing aspects of using military force. During his September 30, 2004, debate with John Kerry, President Bush again explicitly touted this connection:

  I would hope to never have to use force.

  But by speaking clearly and sending messages that we mean what we say, we’ve affected the world in a positive way.

  Look at Libya. Libya was a threat. Libya is now peacefully dismantling its weapons programs.

  Libya understood that America and others will enforce doctrine

  [sic] and that the world is better for it.

  This was precisely the dynamic that seemingly drove the Iranians to strike such a conciliatory pose with their April 2003 offer to negotiate with the United States. Parsi explained the Iranians’ motivations this way: “The U.S. victory in Iraq frightened the Iranians because U.S. forces had routed in three weeks an army that Iran had failed to defeat during a bloody eight-year war.”

  Indeed, the Iranians sent the negotiation letter after the fall of Baghdad but before the beginning of any real insurgency against the American military—i.e., at the time when American power in Iraq was at its peak and before the Americans had any reason to believe that the Iranians were fueling an anti-American insurgency. Yet even with the Iranians in precisely the position of weakness and fear that Bush officials claimed they would have to be in before behavioral change would occur—and when the U.S. had its strongest hand in the Middle East—the administration categorically refused even to acknowledge the Iranian overture.

  With the U.S. having conveyed to the Iranians that a cooperative framework was not even a possibility to be considered, what ensued was not difficult to predict: The Iranians had only one option, namely, to pursue a more hostile and aggressive course in order to be acknowledged, and perhaps to prepare for what seemed to be the Bush administration’s affirmative desire for escalated conflict.

  When the administration rejected the 2003 Iranian request to negotiate, the Iranians’ nuclear program was close to dormant. At that time, Flynt Leverett was a senior director on the Bush National Security Council staff. He described the Iranian letter as “a serious effort, a respectable effort to lay out a comprehensive agenda for U.S.-Iranian rapprochement,” and told the Post’s Kessler, “At the time, the Iranians were not spinning centrifuges, they were not enriching uranium.”

  By rejecting and outrightly scorning the Iranian offer, the Bush administration unmistakably signaled to the Iranians that offers of conciliation and compromise would not be respected. Carnegie’s Parsi explained that in the wake of the humiliating U.S. rejection of their overture, “Iranian officials decided that the United States cared not about Iranian policies but about Iranian power.” Worse, the incident “strengthened the hands of those in Iran who believe the only way to compel the United States to talk or deal with Iran is not by sending peace offers but by being a nuisance,” Parsi said.

  With the U.S. refusing meaningful diplomatic engagement with the Iranians, and with the president adopting increasingly bellicose and threatening rhetoric about them, U.S.-Iranian relations became more hostile than they had been since the 1979 revolution.

  A CONFEDE
RATION OF WAR-SEEKING FACTIONS

  Why would the president, in the midst of substantial and growing cooperation with the Iranians, suddenly decree Iran in 2002 to be part of an axis of evil, and all but declare Iran an enemy on whom war must inevitably be waged? Numerous and disparate factions surrounding the president each desired, albeit for different reasons and with different motives, hostility and conflict with Iran. Those factions perceive that belligerence toward Iran, rather than a negotiated peace, would promote their respective agendas. And each was able to depict Iran in the Manichean terms that would ensure that the president would see Iran as an implacable foe he was duty-bound to defeat.

  Numerous ideologies and belief systems have played prominent roles in shaping the president’s Manichean militarism toward Iran. Initially, the president surrounded himself with traditional, garden-variety hawks—those who are driven by a central belief in the virtue and justification of America’s use of its superior military force to impose its will on other nations. Such hawkishness is embodied by both Vice President Cheney and former Defense Secretary Rumsfeld and exists independent of any specific geopolitical reasons for seeking Middle East hegemony. Hawks of this sort have cheered on every warmongering step taken by the president. A highly influential strain in the Bush administration seeks war because it believes in the use of war as a principal tool for securing America’s interests and dealing with other nations that refuse to submit to America’s will.

  And then there is the related set of concerns: the emerging prospect that the world’s demand for oil will outstrip supply, and that with Saudi oil production potentially peaking, the largest strategic reserves will be in Iran, where U.S. access can be ensured only with a pro-American government in place. Oil is a critical resource for a nation’s strength, prosperity, and security. It is also finite and becoming scarce. Those who insist that such considerations are irrelevant to foreign policy decisions regarding the most oil-rich region on the planet, and the most oil-rich nations in that region, are advancing claims too frivolous to merit serious consideration. Access to and control over the Middle East’s oil supply pervades, to one degree or another, virtually all power struggles within that region.

  Such oil-related objectives would likely motivate most mainstream American political leaders, let alone ones such as George Bush and Dick Cheney, who share a background in the oil industry and who retain substantial ties of every type to that industry. There are multiple reasons why the United States continues to sacrifice so much of its resources, its attention, and many of its lives to continued influence and even domination of the Middle East (versus other regions of the world where we appear more or less indifferent). Those who seek to deny that ensuring our influence over the oil supply is a significant factor in why we have made the Middle East our predominant national priority are either incredibly naïve or indescribably dishonest.

  Regarding the most important issues of the Bush presidency—the invasion of Iraq, the treatment of Iran, and enhanced and unprecedented domestic police powers—traditional hawkishness and concern over the Middle Eastern oil supply have worked in perfect tandem with one another. And that agenda has also converged with two other critically influential factions of the Bush presidency—namely, the president’s base of Christian evangelicals who view political power as a means for promoting their theological objectives, and independently, the Israel-centric strain of neoconservatives. The agendas of all of those factions have been promoted by the same policies—the invasion of Iraq, expanded police powers at home, and the treatment of anti-American regimes in the Middle East as mortal enemies to be shunned, demonized, and attacked.

  An influential faction of Christian evangelicals has loyally supported the Bush foreign policy in the Middle East (except to complain periodically that it is insufficiently aggressive). That faction is driven by the general theological belief that God’s will is for Jews to occupy all of “Greater Israel,” which will occur only once the enemies of Israel are defeated. There is no question—because many of their key leaders have said so themselves—that evangelicals, who compose a substantial part of President Bush’s most loyal following, have become fanatically “pro-Israel” in their foreign policy views because they believe that strengthening Israel is a necessary prerequisite for Rapture to occur—for the world to be ruled by Christianity upon Jesus’ apocalyptic return to Earth—and they believe that can occur only once “Greater Israel” is unified under Jewish control.

  For obvious reasons, those theological yearnings have led evangelicals to be almost perfect allies of both the Israel-centric neoconservatives and the more traditional warmongers. All three groups—with different premises and different motives—have an interest in depicting multiple Middle East countries as Evil and urging the need to wage war on them.

  Related to the specific evangelical drive to bring about Rapture by strengthening Israel is a more general belief among some evangelical Christians that wars against Muslims are justified and necessary because Muslims are an enemy of Christianity. The extent to which this belief is held is difficult to quantify, but various incidents have left no doubt that, at least in some discrete Bush-supporting circles, the “War on Terrorism”—and specifically more wars on more Islamic states such as Iran—is supported because they are seen as religious wars to be waged in defense of Christianity.

  The president himself was forced to apologize after he described the U.S. War on Terrorism as a “new crusade,” evoking the historic wars of invasion waged by Christians against Muslims. Further Muslim-Christian sectarian flames were fueled by the statements of U.S. General William G. Boykin, the Bush administration’s deputy undersecretary of defense for intelligence, who specifically described the war against Islamic extremists as a war of righteousness against the forces of Satan and claimed Muslims are not protected by God because they worship a mere “idol.”

  In a November 2006 New York Review of Books article, Garry Wills detailed another incident involving General Boykin. After President Bush’s 2000 election but before his 2004 re-election, General Boykin appeared in full military uniform before evangelical congregations and insisted that President Bush was installed in the White House by God:

  Ask yourself this: why is this man in the White House? The majority of Americans did not vote for him. Why is he there?…I tell you this morning he’s in the White House because God put him there for such a time as this. God put him there to lead not only this nation but to lead the world, in such a time as this.

  As Wills reports, Boykin, in part of his stump speech in churches, would typically present a slide show with photographs of individuals such as Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, and various Taliban leaders while asking if each was “the enemy.” He “gave a resounding no to each question,” and then explained:

  The battle this nation is in is a spiritual battle, it’s a battle for our soul. And the enemy is a guy called Satan….Satan wants to destroy this nation. He wants to destroy us as a nation, and he wants to destroy us as a Christian army.

  Though President Bush distanced himself from those remarks, claiming that they do not “reflect my point of view or the point of view of this administration,” then-Secretary Rumsfeld defended General Boykin. And though a Pentagon review found that Boykin had violated several military regulations by failing to make clear that his comments were not made in his official capacity as a general, no action was taken against him and he continued to serve in critical Pentagon posts, involved at the highest levels of America’s Middle Eastern wars.

  Devout evangelicals are among the most steadfast supporters of his aggressive and militaristic policies toward the Islamic world, and many expressly defend those policies on theological and moral grounds. That the president finds some of his most loyal support for his War on Terrorism among such theologically driven groups lends further support to the connection between religious beliefs and President Bush’s militaristic, Manichean foreign policy in the Middle East.

  Of course, it has l
ong been clear that Islamic extremists in the mold of Osama bin Laden also see the war they are waging as primarily religious in nature. Religious invocations to the Islamic duty to wage jihad against infidels are rhetorical staples for Muslim extremists. Most Muslim terrorists who engage in suicide missions or who devote their lives to violent attacks against the West are engaged in what they perceive as religious warfare on behalf of Islam. Beyond this Manichean fervor, some are motivated by more traditional political agendas, such as anti-imperialistic sentiments against U.S. influence in their region, the American alliance with Israel, or, in the case of Iraq and Afghanistan, garden-variety nationalistic opposition to an invading and occupying foreign military. But there is also clearly a similar theological component driving some of the support for increasingly warlike policies in the United States.

  Evangelical leader James Dobson told Larry King in a November 2002 interview: “I feel very strongly about Israel. You know it is surrounded by its enemies. And it exists primarily because God has willed it to exist, I think, according to scripture.” Dobson is an almost completely reliable supporter of the neoconservative line, condemning the Baker-Hamilton report’s recommendation that the United States negotiate with Iran by predictably equating the recommendation to appeasement of the Nazis: “That has the same kind of feel to it as the British negotiating with Germany, Italy and Japan in the run-up to World War II.”

  And evangelical minister John Hagee of Texas addressed the first annual conference of his new group, Christians United for Israel, during the Israel-Hezbollah War in July-August 2006. He declared that war to be “a battle between good and evil” and insisted support for Israel was “God’s foreign policy.” The following day, Hagee went to the White House to meet with President Bush’s top Middle East adviser, neoconservative Elliot Abrams, and he delivered the same message, adding that “appeasement has never helped the Jewish people.” Hagee advised the New York Times that Abrams largely agreed with his views.