A Pilgrim’s Digression

President Bush caught a break yesterday. One of his favorite authors, Natan Sharansky, wrote an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal in which he not only defended the President, but aggrandized him as “the dissident President.”

On a typical day, the President Bush I see on TV is difficult to recognize in the pages of the Journal; even the pencil drawing of him that accompanies Journal articles is based on the official portrait of Bush made in 2001, in which the President still looks like a smirky young man who has just pulled the biggest fast one ever devised by a frat boy. Hardly the beaten-down, saggy-eyed President we know today.

Sharansky’s portrait of President Bush as dissident is even more unrecognizable, like one of those murals of Saddam that leave off the pot belly, the blood-soaked hands, and the malignantly beady black eyes. Needless to say, I think Sharansky presents us with a hagiography of President Bush, thus overestimating the President’s commitment to “the universal appeal of freedom [and] its transformative power.”

Sharansky says that the dissident is “fired by ideas,” and he or she remains true to those ideas and ideals even after everyone else has decided the cost is too great. Also, the dissident sees the world “in Manichaean terms,” as black and white, good and evil.

While intractable loyalty to preconceived ideas and an insistence on a world of counterposed binaries, good versus evil, are certainly hallmarks of Bush’s character, to call him a dissident is to ignore qualities of a dissident which Bush does not possess.

The greatest dissidents have promoted non-violence as a solution to tyranny, for example. Ghandi and Martin Luther King, Jr., come to mind, in that respect. Even Margaret Thatcher remarked that Ronald Reagan won the Cold War without firing a shot.

Oh, and don’t forget the greatest dissident of them all, Jesus Christ. I recall that Bush once said that Jesus was his favorite philosopher. Would that he had read his New Testament a little more carefully!

Dissidents also are consistently loyal to their ideals, despite the consequences. Sharansky recognizes this point, but sees consistency in Bush where I see inconsistency. Sharansky wrote his article barely one day after the President apologized to the tyrant ruler of Communist China because a protester interrupted the Chinese President’s speech on the White House lawn.

When the President stands idle while Iran and North Korea arm themselves with Nuclear Weapons, oppress their own people and, in the case of Iran, spout hateful rhetoric reminiscent of Nazi Germany, how can Sharansky say that the President “stands his ideological ground?”

At this point in time, it seems likely that the President will leave office in 2008 with two members of the Axis of Evil more dangerous than when he took office, and Bin Laden still uncaught, issuing his audio manifestos against the U.S. from some unknown location.

This is the “dissident” President so dedicated to spreading freedom and democracy? While Bush’s rhetoric may be consistent, some would say foolishly consistent, his actions sometimes contradict his rhetoric. How does it look to the world that a dictator like the President of Pakistan, who took power in a military coup, is one of Bush’s most trusted allies? Does that alliance not smack of the same kind of pre-9/11 “coddling of friendly dictators” that Mr. Sharansky abhors? And how does it look to the world that Bush eagerly seeks war with a weak enemy like Saddam, while practicing restraint in dealing with Iran and North Korea and China?

It says to other nations that if you are weak, America will not hesitate to attack you when it is perceived to be in our interest. But if you are strong enough, America will not dare confront you. This is a lesson not lost on Iran and North Korea. Thus their determination to obtain nuclear weapons can at least be understood, if not countenanced.

President Bush’s noble ideas outstrip his abilities. Even Peggy Noonan recognizes as much. In a recent op-ed for the Journal, she writes, in apparent frustration, that the Bush Presidency is totally “uncalibrated,” that it doesn’t know the limits of its power: “It’s not enough they commit themselves, they must commit future presidencies…It’s not enough they hit Afghanistan, they must hit Iraq; it’s not enough they improve, they must remake. It’s not enough they must fight a war, they must reform America’s most important social welfare program at the same time.”

First Pat Buchanan, then George Will, then William F. Buckley, then Francis Fukuyama. And now Peggy Noonan? The President is probably going to feel so grateful for Natan Sharansky’s loyalty, he may appoint him to some cabinet post. Maybe he could take Karl Rove’s place.

Sharansky is a good man, a noble man on par with other true dissidents who have suffered for their beliefs, such as his heroes Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov. But he has Bush all wrong.

A political leader cannot be a dissident because, by definition, a dissident’s power lies in his status as outsider and rebel. A dissident defies the status quo; a political leader creates the status quo merely by holding office. On the day a President takes office, a new order is established and by his every action, down to the most mundane of trivialities such as the suit he wears, the President defines the times in which he lives and holds power.

The President is completely implicated in the power struggles that play out across the geopolitical realm, and this leads to the kinds of contradictions between beliefs and actions that true dissidents do not have to worry about.

When you are breaking rocks in a Soviet Gulag, by your very presence there, tortured but unbroken, you are an inspiringly consistent example of the triumph of freedom over despotism. When you sit in the comfort of an office and order young men onto a battle field, no matter how deeply you may feel the emotion of the moment there is nothing extraordinarily “dissident” about your actions.

Leaders have been doing as much for thousands of years. The fact that they have such power is what separates them from true dissidents whose “weakness” is their strength.

“Blessed are the meek,” Jesus said. Undoubtedly, Christ had in mind someone like Wenyi Wang, the woman whom President Bush’s security detail removed from the White House lawn for daring to confront the Chinese President with his persecution of the Falun Gong.

President Bush, if he were truly a “dissident” President, should have honored her. The fact that instead, he apologized for her outburst proves that this President is merely another in a long line of political leaders whose brave ideas are handicapped by power.