The NYT’s David Brooks was one of a handful of conservative journalists who were offered some quality time with the president late last week, and in his column today, Brooks describes his interaction with Bush as “like entering a different universe.” He apparently means that as a compliment.
Far from being beleaguered, Bush was assertive and good-humored. While some in his administration may be looking for exit strategies, he is unshakably committed to stabilizing Iraq…. I left the 110-minute session thinking that far from being worn down by the past few years, Bush seems empowered. His self-confidence is the most remarkable feature of his presidency.
All this will be taken as evidence by many that Bush is delusional. He’s living in a cocoon. He doesn’t see or can’t face how badly the war is going and how awfully he has performed.
But Bush is not blind to the realities in Iraq…. Rather, his self-confidence survives because it flows from two sources. The first is his unconquerable faith in the rightness of his Big Idea. Bush is convinced that history is moving in the direction of democracy, or as he said Friday: “It’s more of a theological perspective. I do believe there is an Almighty, and I believe a gift of that Almighty to all is freedom. And I will tell you that is a principle that no one can convince me that doesn’t exist.”
Brooks seems to have been moved by the president’s words, and his column comes across as unusually sycophantic. Brooks seems to believe, genuinely, that the president will get the results he wants out of Iraq, not through policy measures, but through force of will. Brooks’ evidence? The force of Bush’s personality.
This isn’t an argument. It’s barely even an opinion piece. It’s more a love letter than anything else.
For that matter, I’d hoped that Brooks would know better than to accept the president’s “theological” perspective on democracy promotion on faith. Bringing God’s gift of freedom to the world has always been a sloppy, post-hoc rationalization — the White House has never taken democracy promotion seriously, neither before the Iraqi invasion (when the plan was to give Iraq over to Chalabi) nor after it.
Funny, Brooks didn’t mention any of this.
Conservatives are supposed to distrust government, but Bush clearly loves the presidency. Or to be more precise, he loves leadership. He’s convinced leaders have the power to change societies. Even in a place as chaotic as Iraq, good leadership makes all the difference.
I have no idea what Brooks is talking about. For one thing, conservatives haven’t really distrusted government in a practical sense in generations. For another, Bush has tolerated, and at times celebrated, a leadership vacuum in Iraq for years.
When Bush talks about world affairs more generally, he talks about national leaders. When he is asked to analyze Iraq, he talks about Maliki. With Russia, it’s Putin. With Europe, it’s Merkel, Sarkozy, Brown and the rest.
I don’t know Bush personally, but given his public comments, he mentions world leaders as a substitute for knowing anything about what’s going on in other countries. This isn’t indicative of a fascination with leadership, it’s more a note-card version of the president’s understanding of foreign policy (“Russia = Putin, Germany = Merkel”).
Tolstoy had a very different theory of history. Tolstoy believed great leaders are puffed-up popinjays. They think their public decisions shape history, but really it is the everyday experiences of millions of people which organically and chaotically shape the destiny of nations — from the bottom up.
According to this view, societies are infinitely complex. They can’t be understood or directed by a group of politicians in the White House or the Green Zone. Societies move and breathe on their own, through the jostling of mentalities and habits. Politics is a thin crust on the surface of culture. Political leaders can only play a tiny role in transforming a people, especially when the integral fabric of society has dissolved.
If Bush’s theory of history is correct, the right security plan can lead to safety, the right political compromises to stability. But if Tolstoy is right, then the future of Iraq is beyond the reach of global summits, political benchmarks and the understanding of any chief executive.
Sullivan’s response took case of this one rather easily.
[Brooks’ Tolstoy argument] implies that Bush’s ideological and theological flim-flam is, at worst, an irrelevance. But conservatives have always argued that such delusions are far, far more dangerous than they are irrelevant. This was Burke’s deepest point. Such delusions actually destroy lives, liberties, societies, civilizations. And what has this messianic maniac in the White House done? He has set loose a fantastically murderous war in Iraq, he has sacrificed thousands of young Americans with the result not of restraining but empowering our enemies, he has done incalculable long-term damage to the country’s fiscal standing, he has indirectly caused the massacre of tens of thousands of innocents, he has come close to wrecking the military of the United States, and he has robbed the United States of its long and hard-won record of humane and decent warfare.
This is not the work of a conservative statesman; it’s the mark of a delusional fanatic.
I don’t know what they were serving at the White House during Brooks’ two-hour visit, but I have a hunch it was Kool Aid.