Posted on 06/29/2006 7:22:34 AM PDT by rob777
George W. Bush is an inside-the-box guy fated to grapple with an outside-the-box world. That, in a nutshell, is the source of all the political problems that have hobbled his presidency.
President Bush isn’t likely to change enough to execute a dramatic turnaround. But Republicans will soon begin in earnest the process of selecting their next leader. They should make a concerted effort to understand and learn from his mistakes. Above all, the Bush experience should teach Republicans and conservatives to shun the conventional.
Conventional wisdom these days is rotten to the core. Every one of its articles of faith is at loggerheads with reality. It is grounded in the failed ideology of the left, which can neither solve a problem nor win an election but which still dominates the Democrat Party and most of our cultural, journalistic and political elites.
Conservative talk radio hosts commonly poke fun at the left for its pre-9/11 world view. The problem with conventional leftism is actually much worse than this ridicule suggests. The left has yet to assimilate the collapse of communism. People who didn’t learn anything when the Berlin wall came down aren’t likely to learn much from the destruction of the twin towers.
The left continues to stand for statist collectivism at home and soft-headed internationalism abroad even though this toxic brew is as outmoded as the divine right of kings. It is relentlessly hostile to American power because it is relentlessly hostile to America. The left loathes Christianity and individualism, which are defining elements of American culture.
Conservative Republicans can only succeed in government if they transcend the conventional wisdom of the left. They either stand apart from the left or they share in its futility. Ronald Reagan understood this; that was his genius. George W. Bush has always been the captive of conventional wisdom and it has cost him dearly.
A political pedigree going back two generations and degrees from Yale and Harvard Business School are hardly credentials to look for when you are in the market for someone who can think outside the conventional box. Nor, for that matter, is the surname Bush.
It isn’t surprising that President Bush can’t transcend the conventional. It is, however tragic. His inability to part company with conventional wisdom limits both his action and his rhetoric and undercuts his popularity.
The most important example of this problem has to do with the ongoing war in Iraq which is responsible for most of the President’s political difficulties. Iraq poses a problem for the President only because conventional wisdom is holding his presidency hostage.
Iraq is not a political liability because there is or has ever been any realistic prospect of failure there. The “insurgency” has been a deadly nuisance, but it has never mounted a real challenge to us or to the government we are sponsoring. The mass hysteria of the left notwithstanding, the terrorists and dead-enders have never been poised to take over Iraq any more than ants have ever been poised to take over my kitchen.
People aren’t frustrated with Iraq because they accept the hysterical prophesies about doom and disaster there. They are frustrated because President Bush has failed to establish any clear link between what is happening in Iraq and our strategic goals in the absurdly misnamed Global War on Terror. (Try to imagine Franklin Roosevelt proclaiming a Global War on Naval Aviation after Pearl Harbor.)
The violence in Iraq seems pointless because George W. Bush hasn’t explained the point of it convincingly. He cannot do so because plain talk about what we are doing and why would be heretical enough to earn him excommunication from the church of conventional wisdom. President Bush has been caught in this bind ever since September 11, 2001.
The day Islamic terrorism finally came home we needed a leader to tell us that we were at war and to lay out a clear strategy for victory. The President’s job was to identify our enemies and inspire us to defeat them and eliminate their threat to our homeland.
President Bush never managed to do that job because conventional wisdom made him incapable of understanding what happened on September 11. He has never grasped the ugly truth that we are fighting a religious war with roots in the Dark Ages. That war is entirely outside his conventional frame of reference. He doesn’t have the vocabulary for defining and defending it.
The conventional understanding of how history unfolds is still fundamentally Marxist. Conventional wisdom views every human conflict as pitting oppressors against the oppressed. The oppressed struggle to throw off the oppressor’s yoke; the oppressors fight to keep that yoke firmly in place. Cultural factors such as religion are invisible. Religion is the opiate of the masses, mere cultural superstructure obscuring the material realities that shape societies and individuals. International law and the institutions that administer it are vital because they provide principled restraints on the oppressors.
This view of history makes both September 11 and the war that followed it utterly incomprehensible. The scum that turned passenger jets into cruise missiles and screamed about Allah as they crashed into their targets weren’t poor or oppressed. They weren’t protesting against neo-colonial exploitation of Middle Eastern oil wealth or globalization or anything else the conventional mind might understand.
They were self-consciously opening a new offensive in the 1370 year old war between Islam and the unbelievers, those in the dar al harb (house of war). They didn’t do this out of desperation. They did it because they believed, with considerable justification, that the West is no longer Christian enough or tough enough to resist Islamic competition.
If we cannot convince the Islamic world that they grossly underestimated us, the offensive they began may very well lead to the destruction of our civilization. As long as the Islamic world sees no reason to fear us Muslims will attack us and, when they acquire the means to do so, they will destroy us.
A president with a clear view of our situation would have told us some hard truths. We needed to hear that our enemies include nation states but are not limited by national boundaries. We also needed to hear that not all Muslims are our enemies, but all our active enemies are Muslim and the principal goal of our war effort is to force profound change on Islam.
A president who understood what happened on September 11 would have been addressing the nation on September 12 to say that we can no longer tolerate the Islamic status quo, particularly in Arabia and Persia. We can’t tolerate Saudi wealth promoting the poisonous Wahabbi sect. We can’t tolerate Arab and Persian support for Islamic terrorism. Above all we can’t tolerate any Muslim enemies with access to the resources of an oil producing state.
A president with vision would have told us when our anger was still white hot that Saddam Hussein, Bashir Assad and the Iranian Mullahs all have to go, sooner rather than later and at the point of a gun if necessary. He would have gone to Congress while it was still desperately trying to assess public opinion in the wake of an unprecedented shock and asked for broad authority to take action against Islamic terrorists, their sponsors and their supporters. He would have explained that every vote to deny him that authority was a vote for national suicide. When he got that authority he would have used it.
George W. Bush isn’t that sort of president.
Instead of bold clear statements about whom we needed to fight and why, we got mush. Islam, we were repeatedly told, is a religion of peace. Instead of seeking authority to deal with the problem that erupted on September 11, President Bush initially asked only for authority to deal with one small manifestation of that problem in Afghanistan. He talked about using military force to bring terrorists “to justice” as if justice had anything to do with our struggle to survive.
After our triumph in Afghanistan we put off dealing with the next logical target of opportunity in Iraq while the Bush administration painstakingly argued the legal case for deposing Saddam Hussein in front of the hopelessly corrupt U.N. Security Council. Our urgent need to eliminate a dangerous Muslim enemy like Saddam got buried in a slag heap of pettifogging legalism. While we exhaustively demonstrated our conventional commitment to international institutions, Saddam and his terrorist allies prepared to make our occupation of Iraq costly and difficult.
Once we were in Iraq, the President stopped even trying to argue that eliminating Saddam was necessary to our war effort. His rhetoric instead began to suggest that our real war aim was to rebuild Iraq as a democratic demonstration project. Throughout the 2004 election campaign he hammered the theme that the example of a prosperous, democratic Iraq would transform the Middle East from a hot bed of implacable enemies into a place that poses no special threat to the United States. This is what he meant to convey when he talked about the “forward strategy of freedom.”
The idea that we can turn enemies into friends by introducing them to the joy of free elections and backyard barbeques is dangerously naïve. The foundation of that idea is pure conventional idiocy. It assumes that our difficulty with Islam arose because Middle Eastern Muslims see us cooperating with their autocratic governments to oppress them. It supposes that we can solve that difficulty by rejecting the oppressors and bringing relief to the oppressed.
Unfortunately, none of this has even a remote connection to reality. Our enemies in the Middle East don’t hate us because their politics are autocratic and they don’t hate us because they are poor. The roots of their hatred are invisible to conventional eyes because they are theological.
Christendom and Islam have been bitter enemies since the Battle of Yarmuk in 636 A.D. In all that time, hardly a century has gone by without some major bloodletting between Christians and Muslims. Equally bloody conflict has been been the experience of other neighbors of the dar al Islam, Hindus, Buddhists, Jains, animists, and others. Expansionist Islam has battered the borders of Christendom whenever it has had the means to do so. In our own time, oil revenue has given it the means.
Muslims attack us because they can.
That won’t change anytime soon, regardless of what happens in Iraq over the course of the next few decades. Doing what we can to help Iraq become freer, more prosperous and more peaceful is noble and probably worthwhile. Claiming that renovating Iraq is a sufficient answer to the challenge of September 11 is delusional.
In sum, we started our involvement in Iraq by catering to the ridiculous conventional view that international legal institutions are worthy of great respect. Now we are catering to the even more ridiculous conventional view that all conflict is grounded in oppression and can be resolved by propagating freedom and prosperity. None of this catering made the war palatable to conventional observers. No matter what we do, they can only see wealthy, fair-skinned oppressors and the impoverished, dark-skinned people they oppress.
Meanwhile, over in Iran, our most powerful enemies are busy building nuclear weapons. President Bush says we won’t let them succeed, but he never explains either why we can’t let Iran join the nuclear club or how we are going to exclude it.
The Iranians apparently believe that their proxies in Iraq have us fully occupied and that we lack the will to shift our focus eastward. Why wouldn’t they? They have goaded us by openly sponsoring and supplying the “insurgency” that has murdered so many Iraqis and Americans. So far our leaders haven’t even mustered the courage to issue a strongly worded protest.
On the home front, our most influential newspapers are acting as Al Qaeda’s intelligence service and the Bush administration is too flaccid to stop them or even punish them. Prominent Democrats agitate for a “redeployment” that would prevent our troops from killing terrorists at the same time it would encourage terrorists to kill us. Nobody in the Bush administration is willing to point out that this is either treasonous or drooling stupid.
Nearly five years into the Global War on Terror we have destroyed one terrorist hideout in Afghanistan and conquered one major terror sponsoring country. George W. Bush seems content to stop there. Not even the imminent prospect of mad Mullahs with nukes seems capable of shaking him out of his strategic torpor. He has lost the initiative both at home and abroad.
We are stalled, our enemies are gearing up and the American people have noticed. This is the most important reason President Bush has been caught in the political doldrums lately.
Even the dramatic success of eliminating Abu Musab al Zarqawi and rolling up his network won’t address the President’s problem. In fact, as our success in Iraq gets more obvious, our paralysis on every other front will get more embarrassing. Hard slogging in Iraq is a convenient excuse for our lack of ambition elsewhere. That excuse won’t work for the President much longer.
George W. Bush tried to fight a war that even the conventional left could love. Predictably, he satisfied almost nobody. The next time Republicans go to the well to select a leader for the nation they need to find somebody with the independence of mind, and the courage, to give the editorial page of the New York Times precisely the attention it deserves. This is the essential prerequisite for both political success and successful policy.
The next Republican presidential nominee will probably have to craft our response to the next major Muslim strike on our homeland. For better or worse, Republicans are stuck with the burdens of power because the Democrats are stuck on stupid trying to win American elections as the anti-American party. This leaves Republican primary voters with a grave responsibility.
We should all pray that they choose wisely and well.
I agree, but in the interest of fairness, we should probably consider his strengths as well. While I have been a critic of the President since the 2000 GOP primaries, I see no reason why we should throw the baby out with the bath water. Bush's weakpoints are idological, his strong points are character related. We need a leader in 2008 that is strong in both aspects.
That has to be one of the more moronic introductory sentences I've ever seen. This president has faced more unconventional challenges and crises than any since at least Roosevelt.
every notice that republican leaders are branded as intellectually deficient? First he was just plain "stupid", then he was cheney's puppet, now he is unimaginative.
Bush's weakpoints are idological, his strong points are character related. We need a leader in 2008 that is strong in both aspects.
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Exactly! And there is NO PLACE in the White House for ideological or personal elitist agendas. The job is running the United States of America based on its laws and the will of its people.
Our next CONSERVATIVE leader must recognize and respect that. No President has '007' powers to carry out personal agendas at the expense of America.
That is bass-acwards.
This president has faced more unconventional challenges and crises than any since at least Roosevelt.
That is the whole point. The challenges are unconventional, so the method of dealing with them should be as well.
Iraq is working brilliantly, THIS is what Iraq is about. Killing Terrorist THERE so we do not have to kill them HERE.
American Voters should beware of Do Nothing reactionaries who would have American DO nothing about Terrorism but hide under their beds. Iraq is the war on terror. Anyone tells you different is lying.
For the Neo-isolationists, HERE is what we are up to in Iraq.
Counter Insurgency is a strange bastard style of war. It is not total war but it is also more then the Leftist" Police matter". The other thing most old Cast Iron Conservatives forget is the political aspect. Iraq was doable. We had the political consensus to do it. So since we needed a kill zone we could suck the terrorists into and we needed to get the American people to support the cost, there was no other choice BUT Iraq.
Want to really blow the Leftists minds? Tell them this. Even if Al Gore won in 2000 and 9-11 happened the USA would STILL be doing the same thing now in Iraq. Iraq was doable militarily and politically. There was no other place for the US to go. Iraq is basically the same deal as the invasions of Italy was in 1943
Here in a nutshell, is the military reason for Iraq. The War on Terrorism is different sort of war. In the war on Terrorism, we have a hidden foe, spread out across a geographically diverse area, with covert sources of supply. Since we cannot go everywhere they hide out, in fact often cannot even locate them until the engage us, we need to draw them out of hiding into a kill zone. Iraq is that kill zone. That is the true brilliance of the Iraq strategy. We draw the terrorists out of their world wide hiding places onto a battlefield they have to fight on for political reasons (The "Holy" soil of the Arabian peninsula) where they have to pit their weakest ability (Conventional Military combat power) against our greatest strength (ability to call down unbelievable amounts of firepower) where they will primarily have to fight other forces (the Iraqi Security forces) in a battlefield that is hostile to guerrilla warfare. (Iraqi-mostly open terrain as opposed to guerrilla friendly areas like the mountains of Afghanistan or the jungles of SE Asia).
There are other reasons to do Iraq but that is the MILITARY reason we are in Iraq. We have taken, an maintain the initiative from the Terrorists. They are playing OUR game on ground of OUR choosing.
Problem is Counter Insurgency is SLOW and painful. Often a case of 3 steps forward, two steps back. I often worry that the American people have neither the maturity, nor the intellect" to understand. It's so much easier to spew made for TV slogans like "No Blood for Oil" or "We support the Troops, bring them home" then to actually THINK. Problem is these people have NO desire to co-exist with us. They see all this PC posturing by the Hysteric Left as a sign that we are weak. Since they want us dead, weakness encourages them. They think their "god" will bless them for killing Westerners.
So we can covert to Islam, die or kill them. Iraq is about killing enough of them to make the rest realize we are serious. See in the Arab world the USA is considered a big wimp. We have run away so many times. Lebanon, the Kurds, the Iraqis in 1991, the Iranians, Somalia, Clinton all thru the 1990s etc etc etc. The Jihadists think we will run again. In fact they are counting on it. That way they can run around screaming "We beat the American just like the Russians, come join us in Jihad" and recruit the next round of "holy warriors". Iraq is also a show place where we show the Muslim world that there are a lines they cannot cross. On 9-11 they crossed that line and we can, and will, destroy them for it.
Which exactly what Bush had done and this idiot is bitching about. He wants a Clinton style President. Throw a few missiles into an empty Terrorist camp, declare victory and run away until they hit us again. More utter nonsense from the Do Nothings who simply are too arrogant to admit THEY let this Terrorism problem spin out of control.
The trouble with pundits is that they can think outside of the box and have none of the responsibility of the consequences of doing so.
The Presidency is very much an inside-the-box kind of job. Presidents that get too creative with their job tend to get into much more serious trouble when they get caught. Clinton was an out-of-the-box thinker. He saw nothing wrong with accepting money from foreign agents, pardoning criminals for benefits, and blackmailing the opposition.
Well, at least two of us agree!!!!!
Formally declaring the next world war is something no President would have been likely to do - I'm not sure Ronald Reagan would have gone that far. Since it seems all too evident that the line between Islamist terrorists and the average Muslim is a very fine one indeed, such a statement would have been tantamount to telling over a billion people that the US is declaring war on them.
The mistake was in trying to rebuild Iraq and Afghanistan, instead of simply punishing them for 9/11 by totally destroying their military capabilities. As the author points out, their hatred is religious, and the only way to blunt it is to make them suffer to the point that they begin to question the power of Allah. We could have finished off Syria and Iran by now if we weren't tied up with nation-building.
And they are.
Moronic, indeed, and thanks for the response. I read that first sentence and just thot, 'Who is this guy, so smug in his Monday-morning analysis of Bush's tremendous challenges?' Moronic is exactly right.
War meaning fighting and fighting means killing. GW Bush has been the best terrorist killing President we have ever had or will have. The 100%er merely scream bile at Bush rather then change their Neo-Isolationist doctrine of "Hide under the bed and wish the monsters go away".
The article makes some good points, undeniable points. So do the posters. I like Bush, but sometimes wonder if he is focused. I think he is, but he often doesn't do a good enough job of making it clear to us where that focus is and why.
The author's ideas about what is inside and outside the box are very "conventional".
The Presidency is an inside-the-box job. The President acts within the box as much as possible, using precedents as much as possible. Bush tries to use as much precedent as possible when making his decisions, and this ties his hands - but he's not adverse to setting precedents. It is just that most problems have an inside-the-box solution set, and going outside the box for a solution would be an exercise in wasted energy.
To be clear, what the author probably wants is for Bush to step out of the box far enough to expose him to impeachment.
Clinton was a great out of the box thinker. He didn't care about precedents or what he was leaving behind for his successors. He went and did what he wanted, and let the country hang. God spare us another out of the box thinker like Clinton, and perhaps our country will make it another 100 years intact.
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