A Perfect Storm of Illusions

It’s amazing, seemingly providential (or would be under the aegis of a trickster god), how neatly the illusions of the Bush team worked together to create such a perfect storm of disaster in Iraq.

Defense Secretary Rumsfeld set out to make a lean army, to slash the military bureaucracy and fashion a 21st century American fighting force, light, mobile and technology-laden, ready to move swiftly and win battles with overwhelming equipment and few soldiers. He got away with success using this strategy in Afghanistan; in Iraq, not so much. In theory, adapting a nation’s basic military posture and strategy to a new era using current technology to advantage is a good idea. But it has been truly bizarre how blind to facts and wedded to doctrine the secretary was after events in Iraq presented problems not soluble with that approach. Even beforehand, voices were predicting bad results from the projected dismantling of a government and military without planning for reconstruction. What a willful lack of foresight was there!

The neoconservative advisers to Secretary Rumsfeld were deluded in thinking that in Iraq the populace would rise up in gratitude and that democracy would fall nimbly into place like smooth lock tumblers under the caresses of a master safecracker. They sought to reach over the heads of the American public, casting the smoke of WMD and terrorism in its eyes, in order to reform by imposition the Middle East. Their plan to spread democracy at bayonet point is profoundly hypocritical as well as profoundly deluded. Cooking data, lying to the public, these reputed wise men, these self-conceived philosopher-kings, have been astonishingly oblivious to the reality of the world.

And then, what about Mr. Bush? His compatible illusion continues to be that the proper approach to our conflict with the extremist Islamists is to frame the situation as a “war on terror,” and that it just a matter of killing a certain number of bad guys. And in terms of illusions, that is the mildest indictment to be leveled, reaching short of the personal and theological ones.

This perfect storm of illusions is bad enough, and grave difficulties attend extrication from it. But lo and behold, the commander in chief has no intention to extricate us and, as they say in television commercials, wait, there’s more . . .

Now President Bush wants to “surge” more troops into the theater. It is sad to think that, while in some deluded neoconservative way there may be some kind of a coherent, if wrong-headed, rationale for this strategy, the more proximate and deeper motive is a politician’s concern for his legacy. With every rhetorical shift, one sniffs trailing wisps of egoism that suffocate statesmanship, the drive for political advantage and justification. After the initial plan, which was to result in the warm embrace of their liberators by a liberated people yearning to be free, dissolved in an abysmal failure of fractionalism and chaos (but a predictable one, given the shortage of troops and of planning), all the vaunted firmness and resolve of George W. Bush, initially to disarm a terrorist-friendly dictator with weapons of mass destruction and keep our nation secure, then to free an oppressed people from a despot, then to spread democracy in the Middle East, appears cumulatively at every turn as pigheadedness, as pollster-driven, marketing-trusting stubbornness supporting misguided, zealous self-righteousness and lust for reputation. How Mr. Bush and his administration will be judged by history—that lies closer to the core of the “surge” than does statesmanship.

Mr. Bush, abetted by evangelical supporters with a pinched view of American history and destiny, postures as a servant of God, of the Prince of Peace yet. He believes he has a pipeline of communication, of resonant intention in shared purpose, with the Almighty. On his gut feeling that our providential nation and cause must prevail, he condemns more, and yet more, and yet more sons and daughters of the republic to perish in futility in the sands of Iraq. Surely a sane God is not smiling on his plans any more than the wised-up public is. Does he think to lead us where we would not go, for our own good? For whose good? What sort of Moses does he pretend to be? What littleness of soul, what frat boy conceit, wheedling, at the expense of lives and treasure and national standing, for reputation when given the opportunity to act on the stage of history. What presumption upon us and upon the tolerance of liberal democratic institutions!

Our Constitution makes ours a government of laws, not men. This cuts both ways, tolerating dismal failure as well as stifling overweaning ambition. We cannot simply dismiss Mr. Bush as a monarch would a failed minister. Our sovereignty works more slowly and deliberately. But with due respect for the office and the officeholder, I am ashamed at what the city on the hill has become under the leadership of this president and this administration.