The Moral Cynicism of George Bush
by Byron Williams
Last week I posed the question: What is Patriotism? In response, I
received a number of emails that compared the Bush Administration to
the Nazi regime. This is a dangerous analogy.
The Nazis personified evil in the 20th century. Their systematic
commitment to the legalization and implementation of malevolence was
unprecedented. I associate the Nazis with gas chambers, incinerators,
and concentration camps. My profound disagreements with the president
do not elicit those particular feelings. Moreover, I fear such
comparisons are insensitive to those who actually endured the horrors
of Hitler’s Germany.
Perhaps a better analogy can be found within the political philosophy
of Nicolo Machiavelli’s The Prince.
The Prince is an amoral critique suggesting that one knows no law
beyond his or her own will and power. For Machiavelli, The Prince is a
morally cynical examination of political power, how it is obtained,
maintained and expanded.
According to a Newsweek poll, just prior to 9/11 the president enjoyed
a respectable 54 percent approval, but the week following 9/11 it
skyrocketed to 86 percent. With his extraordinary popularity, the
president was able to get through legislation that gave him
unprecedented power.
Weeks after the 9/11 tragedy, with the president’s 88 percent approval
rating staring Congress in the face, the Patriot Act passed by a 98-1
margin in the Senate. In October 2002 the president’s approval still
hovered in the mid to high 60’s, and the Senate voted 77-23 to
authorize the president to attack Iraq -- if Saddam refused to give up
weapons of mass destruction as required by U.N. resolutions.
Slightly over a year after 9/11, Congress had given the president war
power exceeding that of Franklin Roosevelt after Pearl Harbor.
Machiavelli would have been proud. But now, with the president’s
approval rating back to a mortal 50 percent, there appears to be
chinks in the once self-assured armor.
January has not been a good month for the president. The Carnegie
Endowment for International Peace issued a report that the
administration exaggerated the evidence to go to war, Kenneth Pollack
of the Brookings Institution made similar claims in the most recent
Atlantic Monthly, and the former head of the US weapons inspection
team, David Kay, very bluntly stated during a congressional hearing,
“we were almost all wrong.”
In lieu of the evidence, the administration was slow to appoint an
independent counsel. Conservative pundits dutifully opine from Kay’s
testimony that fault lies solely with the intelligence community. The
president’s loyal surrogates march in locked step, armed with
revisionist history reminding us that the Clinton Administration
reached similar conclusions about Saddam. How quickly they forget that
Vietnam and the Bay of Pigs were children of the Eisenhower
Administration, but Ike’s face is not the one we associate with either
of those events. Harry Truman was on to something when he said, “The
buck stops here!”
Assuming that one buys the theory that fault lies with the
intelligence community, how is it possible the bright minds that serve
this president failed to question the likelihood of an alliance
between Saddam and bin Laden, allowing the president to publicly make
false claims? It is amazing to think that no one within the
administration remembered that it was bin Laden who first approached
the Saudi royal family in 1990 offering protection against the
“infidel” Saddam, who at the time was making advances against
bordering Kuwait.
What is most curious and Machiavellian is this president’s failure to
show any moral outrage knowing that he sold a war using bad
intelligence. Since the war began, 3,000 troops have been wounded,
disabled, or returned home by way of Dover AFB because of defective
intelligence. The White House has provided no response beyond “the
world is better off without Saddam.” The president’s silence belies
the moral prism he claims as his worldview.
Tragedy, popularity, and bad intelligence combined to allow this
president to consolidate his amoral agenda of power, selling it to the
American people with overtly pious language. It is classic
Machiavelli, utilizing moral language to validate an administration
immersed in moral cynicism.
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