A Pilgrim’s Digression

In N.Y., GOP Hails Its Chief (washingtonpost.com)

Perhaps I should not have been surprised, but Bush’s comment that the war on terror cannot be won has generated criticism from the right and the left. Last night on Special Report with Brit Hume, the conservative-leaning Fred Barnes and Mort Kondrake both assailed Bush’s comments as inept and inexplicable. Meanwhile, the President’s Democrat challengers are declaring that Bush now has a defeatist attitude.

Personally, I think the President’s comments are the most honest words he has ever spoken about the war on terror. For liberal critics to suddenly puff up like Churchill delivering his “never surrender” speech is disingenuous. Liberals have been saying from the beginning that the war on terror is unwinnable, as victory is traditionally defined. We cannot kill all the terrorists; there is no country to which they belong which can sign surrender papers on the deck of the U.S.S. Missouri. As for the conservative critics, there is nothing inexplicable or inept about admitting the truth. What is inexplicable is maintaining a belief despite reason and (to use a phrase from the Iraq war) “facts on the ground.” It would be inexplicable if President Bush actually believed that the war on terror could be won through violent means alone. Actually, that would be perfectly explicable: I would say that the man is a blind fool. The President is not blind, nor a moron, despite the popular caricature of him, and he apparently realizes that violence is only one means to the end, which is a world largely inhospitable to terrorist ideology.

President Bush believes that the invasion and occupation of Iraq is a means to that end. A peaceful, democratic Iraq will spread peace and democracy throughout the Middle East, so the formula goes. If so, President Bush has greater foresight than just about anyone else alive today. I do not expect to see such results any time within the next twenty or thirty years. Perhaps he will be acclaimed by history as the first great President of the 21st century. Right now, it is difficult to see that far ahead, and the Iraq war still seems to me a miscalculation—and not just the planning for the occupation, as the President has admitted, but the war itself was a miscalculation. When thinking of the horrors of life under Saddam Hussein, it is shameful to think in such terms as “calculation” or “miscalculation,” profit and loss, yet pragmatic considerations have always divided the political world from the world of pure ethics. Have moral people ever been able to fully reconcile the seemingly simple dictates of the Golden Rule with rule by human government?

I was not particularly impressed by the speeches given last night by Giuliani and McCain. The keywords of both speeches are “strong” and “resolute.” Some call it “stubbornness,” Giuliani said at one point. In some ways, I think President Bush is a prisoner in a cell of his own devising, in this regard. As is now apparent to me, at least, from his comments about the war on terror and the Iraq war in the past few days, he is a more complex character than most people believe. In some ways, he has to be a stubborn, never-look-back kind of guy, because that is what is expected of him, now. But perhaps these really are inborn traits only occasionally leavened by real reflection.

The only other thing I would note about Giuliani’s speech is that he really unloaded on Kerry, and he did so fairly early in the speech, as well. The Democrats probably made a mistake by not going after the President more strenuously in their convention speeches. The Republicans are not going to reciprocate. I liked Giuliani’s humorous story about the day George Bush came to New York, shortly after the terrorist attacks. The story serves to remind the listener of Bush’s response to 9/11—his real response, not this phony “he read The Pet Goat for seven minutes” nonsense of Michael Moore and John Kerry. It also serves to portray Bush as in touch with the common man; in fact, he is just a common man himself. Who would you rather have a beer with, John Kerry or George Bush? And such like irrelevancies. And irrelevent it is, except that it is effective and most people won’t bother to see through it. This kind of humorous anecdote is exactly the kind of tactic which is most effective in highlighting Bush as personable and non-elitist.

McCain’s speech was not particularly memorable. The highlight came when he invoked the name of the conservatives’ most demonized enemy, Michael Moore. A “disingenuous filmmaker,” McCain called him. Moore was supposedly in the convention center at the time, though if true, he is a man of greater courage than I believed previously. I have not yet seen Moore’s film, so I cannot comment on the veracity of McCain’s charge that Moore depicts a pre-invasion Iraq that was an oasis of peace. Other than that, McCain simply reiterated the standard junk about Bush’s strength and resoluteness. McCain’s comment that the war in Iraq was a choice not “between a benign status quo and the bloodshed of war; it was between war and a graver threat” has been reprinted in all the highlights of McCain’s speech, but I don’t find it convincing. What was the graver threat? As Pat Buchanan, of all people, said on Bill O’Reilly last night, we had lived with this “graver threat” for twelve years—longer, if one counts the eighties in which Saddam actually possessed and used chemical weapons. Like most of us, of whom (thankfully) the media does not require complete cradle to grave consistency, Buchanan has been all over the place in terms of what he has believed and said over the years. He was not exactly profound on O’Reilly last night, but he got it right on that one point.

In conclusion, I think the kick-off to the Republican Convention has been a great success. The critics have all been harping on the same point, that the convention is front-loaded with moderates while the platform is staunchly conservative. I don’t particularly fault the Republicans for this. The Republican stars, like Rudy and Arnold, are mostly moderates. If the Republicans had showcased people like Rush Limbaugh or Pat Robertson, the critics would just as strenuously denounce the convention as front-loaded with hate-filled and intolerant far-right conservatives (as they did in ‘92 when Bush père invited Pat Buchanan to speak). The convention so far has been a great success, and I think unless something goes terribly wrong, the President might even get a nice bounce out of this.