Truth is for Traitors

The New Bush Strategy: 
When All Else Fails, Rewrite History

Following his reelection a year ago, President George W. Bush brazenly declared that “he earned capital in the campaign, political capital, and now I intend to spend it. It is my style.” Twelve months later, Republicans were whipped in elections for the governorships of Virginia and New Jersey; in St. Paul, Minnesota, the Democratic mayor who endorsed Bush for reelection a year ago was defeated by another Democrat by a margin of 70 to 30 percent. Then Republicans in Congress split into vengeful splinter groups, failing to pass Bush’s budget; that defeat resulted in the Senate’s rebuff of Bush’s torture and detainee policy — along with the passage of a resolution stating that Bush must submit a strategy on withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq. 

The turn in public opinion against Bush has been well thought-out and firm: a majority of his once blindly allegiant constituency thinks his administration manipulated pre-war intelligence to lead the country into the Iraq war — and nearly two-thirds of those now disapprove of how he has handled the war. It would seem that Bush has blown through his political capital with more than three years left in his term; now he has recoiled from the ruins of his flamboyant agenda into a defense of his past. 

In the immediate aftermath of the fall of Baghdad, Bush was man of action who never looked back — openly indifferent to history. But the Senate’s resolution to open an investigation into the administration’s role in pre-war disinformation — after the Democrats forced the issue in a rare secret session — has provoked a livid reaction from the Oval Office. 

On Veterans Day, Bush addressed troops at an Army base: “It is deeply irresponsible to rewrite the history of how that war began,” charging that “some Democrats and anti-war critics are now claiming we manipulated the intelligence and misled the American people” — even though they knew “a bi-partisan Senate investigation found no evidence of political pressure to change the intelligence community’s judgments related to Iraq’s weapons programs.”

Actually, the Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction wasn’t authorized to look into that question, but only whether the intelligence community was correct in its analysis. Additionally, the Senate Intelligence Committee under Republican leadership schemed with the White House to prevent a promised investigation into the administration’s involvement in pre-war intelligence; its revival by Democrats is precisely the immediate cause that has triggered Bush’s outburst of revenge. 

Several days later, Bush spoke before troops at Elmendorf Air Force Base in Alaska, stating that “some Democrats who voted to authorize the use of force are now rewriting the past” and are “sending mixed signals to our troops and the enemy.” U.S. soldiers “deserve to know that their elected leaders who voted to send them into war continue to stand behind them.” His basic push was that as “a ruthless enemy determined to destroy our way of life” besieges us from without, the most insidious undermining comes from within. With this maneuver, Bush simply updated the theory of betrayal first expressed in 1919 by General Erich Ludendorff, who stated that “the political leadership disarmed the unconquered army and delivered over Germany to the destructive will of the enemy.”

Bush’s adoption of the Ludendorff strategy of blaming weak politicians for military failure and exalting “will” sets him at odds with a free democracy; his misunderstanding of history also clashes with the conservative tradition that acknowledges human fallibility and respects the past. Bush’s presidency is an effort to defy history, not only in America, writing on the world as a blank slate. The New Deal can be abolished without consequences, Arab states can be transformed into democracies if only they will it.

Now he wants to erase memory of his actual record on the war, substituting a counterfactual history. “Fellow citizens,” said Abraham Lincoln, “we cannot escape history” — not even George W. Bush.

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